This week, I’m doing something different for my Week in Review. Read at your own risk. Nothing sacred gets a free pass.
I spent yesterday looking through my archives, revisiting the people and questions that have shaped my work, and noticing connections between articles written at different times. Some return to the beliefs we inherit; others explore the lives we build, the authorities we trust, and the human experiences no belief system finally resolves.
I’ve gathered these writings into several categories that offer different ways into that conversation. You don’t need to read everything or follow a particular order; begin wherever something catches your attention or touches a question you’re already living.
My own thinking continues to evolve. Returning to an article sometimes reminds me why I wrote it; sometimes it reveals something I would now approach differently. I hope this edition gives you room for that same experience: discovering something you missed, reconsidering something familiar, or finding language for what has been difficult to name.
Revisiting this archive, I recognize the questions that ultimately led me to write . Across different subjects, I kept encountering the distance between understanding life and participating in it. The book develops that distinction: how we meet uncertainty, inhabit belonging, and exercise our judgment when no explanation can remove the vulnerability of being alive.
Some people make it harder to keep believing what has kept us comfortable. Their work exposes the assumptions we mistake for truth, and their lives force us to examine how much obedience we call wisdom, how much approval we call authenticity, and how much fear governs the freedom we claim.
The figures gathered here come from philosophy, theology, music, art, and the study of the living world. I approach them as conversation partners whose insights and limitations deserve attention. What interests me is how an encounter with their work changes what we notice and what it asks of us.
Peter Wessel Zapffe Was Right About the Problem. Wrong About the Conclusion
Consciousness lets us see the grave coming, and spend a lifetime trying not to look. Zapffe confronts the predicament with brutal clarity but his verdict on human existence deserves a confrontation of its own.
Simone de Beauvoir and the Hidden Architecture of Modern Identity
You call it your identity. How much of it was assigned before you had a say? De Beauvoir helps expose the expectations that become a self and the cost of refusing them.
Hannah Arendt, Conversations in Existential Health
Following the rules does not relieve you of responsibility for what they make possible. Arendt challenges the comfort of obedience and the habit of letting someone else do your thinking.
Alfred North Whitehead, Existential Health, and the Future of Spiritual Consciousness
A religion that cannot change must explain away everything that does. Whitehead puts pressure on spiritual certainty: how long will we defend a fixed picture of reality against the world unfolding before us?
James Cone, Liberation Theology, and the Collapse of Religious Innocence
A God who leaves racial domination undisturbed deserves suspicion. Cone forces white Christianity to face the question its declarations of innocence cannot settle: whose suffering has its theology made easier to ignore?
Kurt Cobain, The Un-Nirvana
We demand that our cultural heroes be real, then consume their anguish as proof. Cobain’s story puts the worship of authenticity under scrutiny, including our appetite for suffering we can turn into an anthem.
Banksy, Unmasking the Rebel of Existencilism
Banksy makes ordinary life look incriminating. His work interrupts the scenery of power, consumption, and conformity and leaves the viewer with fewer excuses for calling it all normal.
Karl Marx, Unmasking the Man People Love to Hate
Before dismissing Marx, examine the system you have learned to treat as inevitable. This essay turns scrutiny toward capitalism’s promises, its demands, and the human costs we accept in its name.
Jane Goodall, The Passing of a Voice That Taught Us How to Listen
Human beings have mistaken dominance for wisdom often enough to endanger the world that sustains us. Jane Goodall’s example challenges that arrogance and asks whether we are willing to listen when other lives disrupt our sense of importance.
Bertrand Russell and the Moral Reckoning After Christianity
Sacred status should intensify moral scrutiny. Russell challenges religion’s claim to authority and asks it to answer for the suffering its teachings and institutions have helped produce.
Some assumptions become so protected that questioning them is treated as an act of betrayal. Progress must be good. Healing must be the goal. Spiritual teachers must know something we don’t. Even after leaving religion, we often carry its habits of obedience into places that promise liberation.
Leaving religion does not guarantee freedom from its habits. Deconstruction, wellness, and contemporary spirituality have their own authorities and unquestioned beliefs. We can find ourselves following new rules, deferring to new teachers, and once again afraid to question the people whose acceptance we want.
Michel Foucault: Is the Idea of “Progress” a Farce?
Calling something progress does not settle who benefits or who pays. Foucault puts pressure on our reassuring stories of advancement and the forms of control they make harder to recognize.
Exploring the Legacy of Audre Lorde
Power has a talent for making resistance look unreasonable. Lorde challenges the demand that people soften their anger, silence their differences, and make themselves acceptable to the arrangements that diminish them.
How Wounding Replaced Sin and Recovery Replaced Salvation
You no longer need salvation. Now you need healing, and there is always another wound to uncover. This essay confronts a culture in which recovery becomes an endless obligation and being alive requires perpetual repair.
Deconstruction’s New Authorities—and the Case for Existential Health
Leaving the church does not make you immune to a charismatic authority. Deconstruction deserves scrutiny when its influencers, approved language, and demands for allegiance begin reproducing the obedience it promised to undo.
What to Do with Jesus in Religious Deconstruction
Christianity does not get the final word on Jesus simply because it speaks in his name. This essay challenges its claim to ownership and explores the possibility that taking Jesus seriously could lead someone beyond the religion built around him.
Unpacking the Complexities of Personal Agency
You experience your choices as your own, but you did not choose much of what shaped the person making them. This essay puts pressure on easy claims about freedom, responsibility, and how much control we actually exercise over our lives.
Why the Search for a Single Path Misses the Point Entirely
The promise of one true path gives enormous power to whoever claims to know the route. This essay challenges the spiritual arrangement that turns your life into a journey whose legitimacy someone else gets to judge.
How Spiritual Bypassing Became the New Religion
“Be present” becomes a convenient command when it discourages grief, anger, or confrontation. This essay challenges the use of spiritual language to make people more comfortable with conditions they have reason to resist.
The demand to choose between Darwin and Jesus gives inherited definitions too much authority. Before declaring them compatible or irreconcilable, we need to examine exactly what we are being asked to believe and who decided the terms.
Why Post-Religion Spirituality Requires a Different Foundation
Leaving religion while keeping its supernatural framework leaves a central assumption untouched. This essay challenges the idea that spiritual depth depends on an unseen realm and asks what could ground spirituality once that claim loses its authority.
A worldview gives you more than answers. It tells you which questions matter, whom to trust, and how to recognize a worthwhile life. When it stops holding, even ordinary decisions become unfamiliar. The freedom you wanted arrives with responsibilities you were never taught to exercise.
The temptation is to find another framework quickly enough to escape that exposure. These pieces press into the harder territory: the life that remains when certainty fails, the authorities we reach for, and the possibility that our search for answers has kept us from encountering what needs our attention.
Growth Eventually Outgrows the System That Shaped Your Faith
The system that helped form you might eventually require you to stop growing. This essay challenges the assumption that outgrowing your religion is a failure of faith—and asks how much of yourself you have been sacrificing to remain inside it.
What Thirty Years Taught Me About Deconstruction, Reconstruction, and Reality
I left Christianity, but leaving did not settle how to live. Thirty years later, I can see how much the word “deconstruction” left unnamed: the responsibility, vulnerability, and encounter with reality that no change of beliefs could remove.
A Guide to Meaning, Spiritual Crisis, and Existential Health
The collapse of your explanation for life does not erase the life before you. This essay confronts the leap from “the meaning I believed in has failed” to “nothing matters”—and attends to what that verdict overlooks.
Viktor Frankl in Conversation with Existential Health
Meaning carries its own burden when we require it to justify every suffering and secure every life. Bringing Frankl into conversation with existential health opens a difficult question: what happens when our demand for meaning exceeds what experience will give us?
5 Secrets for Living Through a Civilizational Collapse
A culture in crisis produces plenty of people selling certainty. This guide takes up the problem of living when the larger story breaks down and the promised rescue keeps failing to arrive.
An answer can be convincing and still leave the central difficulty untouched. This essay challenges the possibility that years spent resolving your beliefs have been organized around a question that could never give you the life you wanted.
Finding Our Way Back to Our Lives
Debating what is true can consume years while the question of how we are living goes unattended. This essay returns attention to the life passing through our hands while we work on our explanations.
The Dangerous Comfort of Someone Who Has the Answers
Admiring my work becomes dangerous when it makes your judgment less trustworthy to you. This essay turns scrutiny toward my own authority and the comfort of letting an author take responsibility for a life only you can live.
The Affirmative Givens of Human Existence
An account of existence built entirely around suffering, uncertainty, and death leaves something consequential out. This essay challenges the authority of that bleakness and brings the affirmative dimensions of being human back into view.
What If Being Alive Is Not a Problem You Are Supposed to Solve?
Making life into a problem turns every unresolved question into evidence that you are not ready. This essay confronts the demand to figure everything out—and the years of living we surrender to it.
Leaving religion does not erase the longing for depth, connection, wonder, or a way to meet suffering. It does leave us responsible for examining the promises offered in their name. A teaching should face scrutiny even when it feels profound, and a spiritual experience does not give anyone authority over another person’s life.
When inherited answers lose their hold, spiritual questions remain. The gods we have defended deserve another look, as do the forms of escape we have called transcendence. There is room here to explore a spiritual life grounded in the experience of being human.
The Case for Non-Religious Spirituality
Your longing for depth should not cost you your judgment. This essay makes the case for a spirituality that takes human experience seriously without requiring submission to a doctrine or the person selling it.
White Paper No. 8: Spirituality and Existential Health
Spirituality needs to explain what it contributes to a human life. This white paper brings it into conversation with existential health, asking how spiritual practice bears on our relationship to existence.
Roberto Unger and the Developmental Challenge of Modernity
Updating religion’s language leaves its deeper demands untouched. Unger opens a more disruptive question: how radically would religion have to change to support human development rather than prescribe its limits?
Ten Problems with Traditional Christian Theism
Calling a belief sacred does not resolve its contradictions. This essay names ten problems with traditional Christian theism and refuses to let reverence close an inquiry that honesty requires.
What the Druid Revival Reveals About the Human Search for Ground
The return to ancient traditions puts pressure on the story that modern life has outgrown spiritual need. The Druid revival becomes an occasion to examine what people are seeking—and what contemporary culture has failed to provide.
The Spiritual Practice of Inhabiting the Life Already Happening
A promised breakthrough can keep the life before you permanently beneath your attention. This essay challenges the spiritual habit of waiting for a more profound existence while the one you have goes uninhabited.
The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape
Be suspicious of any spirituality that promises to make you invulnerable. This essay confronts six realities of human existence and the cost of organizing a life around escaping them.
Making Sense of the World’s Most Perplexing Buddhist Truth
The self you spend your life defending might be less solid than you think. Buddhist no-self unsettles our investment in a fixed identity—and challenges a spiritual marketplace built around finding and perfecting the “true you.”
Why “Nothing Matters” Became a Creed and Why We Need to Move Beyond It
“Nothing matters” can become as unquestionable as the beliefs it displaced. This essay challenges nihilism when it hardens into a creed, asking what its certainty prevents us from noticing or participating in.
Bayo Akomolafe: Conversations in Existential Health
The urgency to fix everything deserves scrutiny of its own. An encounter with Akomolafe unsettles our preferred accounts of crisis, progress, and resolution—and asks how those accounts shape the responses we are able to imagine.
Some questions require us to reconsider the framework that made our answers seem inevitable. Religion, theology, systems thinking, and even our accounts of human progress carry assumptions about who we are and what we need. Those assumptions deserve examination, especially when they determine what futures we are willing to imagine.
These articles return to the foundations. They consider religion’s achievements alongside its limits, question what theology becomes without God, and confront the exclusions hidden inside supposedly universal accounts of being human. The risk is that we discover something worth preserving in what we rejected—and something we must relinquish in what we still defend.
Theology After God: A Post-Religious Framework for Being Alive
The promise of rescue shapes how we live, what we postpone, and whose responsibility we think the future is. This essay asks what becomes possible—and unavoidable—when we stop organizing human life around someone coming to save it.
Toward a Developmental Framework for the Twenty-First Century
Understanding a system does not establish our ability to live wisely within it. This essay challenges the ad…
