Yesterday ** I announced** that my new book,
I’ve ** published seven books**. Writing them has helped me work out what I think. Hearing that one helped someone understand their life keeps me going. I also know the feeling from the other side. I’ve read authors who seemed to know me better than I knew myself, and I’ve felt the relief of finding a sentence that finally gave shape to something I’d carried for years.
That relief is real. So is the temptation to let the person who wrote the sentence keep explaining your life long after you’ve closed the book. I’d love for you to read mine, including the new one. Underline passages, disagree with me, and take whatever proves useful. Then look up and give your own life the attention it deserves.
For a significant part of my life, I lived inside a book. I called it faithfulness. I believed I was living in accordance with reality because the book told me what reality was.
The Bible explained where the universe came from, what had gone wrong with humanity, what God wanted, why people suffered, which desires I could trust, what happened after death, and what my life was for. There was scarcely a human question it could not be asked to answer. When an answer was difficult to find, I assumed the difficulty lay with my understanding.
I went to seminary and learned to study it carefully. Later, ** as a pastor**, I stood before people week after week and explained what I believed it meant. I loved the Bible, and I still resist the easy account in which my religious life was simply a long period of ignorance.
The more difficult truth is that I had given a book authority over my encounter with life. Before I could trust what I saw, felt, or knew, it had to pass through an interpretation of what had already been written. I was learning to read with extraordinary care while becoming less willing to believe my own eyes.
Books are among the great achievements of human life. Someone can spend decades wrestling with mortality, justice, love, or freedom and leave behind a few hundred pages that allow a stranger to enter the struggle. A person dead for centuries can disturb your assumptions before breakfast.
Books have done that for me. They have named experiences I could feel but could not articulate. They have brought me into contact with lives and histories I would never otherwise have known. I would be a smaller person without them.
The trouble begins when a book acquires the power to settle what an experience means before the experience has been fully encountered. You notice something in yourself or in the world that challenges its account. Instead of staying with what you’ve noticed, you search for an interpretation that will leave the book undisturbed.
That was the arrangement I had with** the Bible**. If scripture and experience appeared to disagree, scripture had the presumption of innocence. Experience was the unreliable witness, especially when it unsettled a belief I had been taught to protect.
There were doctrines that justified this. I knew them, taught them, and could defend them. But beneath the theological argument was a human habit: I had learned to distrust my own contact with reality whenever it threatened an inherited explanation.
That habit has consequences. A person can recognize that something is wrong in a relationship, an institution, or their own life and still spend years trying to reconcile that recognition with what they have been told must be true. The interpretation survives by making the person doubt the evidence of living.
** Leaving conservative Christianity** made the arrangement visible. It did not instantly free me from it.
After religion, I read voraciously. Philosophy opened questions theology had closed. Psychology gave me ways to understand human behavior beyond sin and obedience. Eastern traditions introduced forms of spiritual inquiry that had little in common with the Christianity in which I had been formed. Science changed the scale of the human story.
I needed that education, and I remain grateful for it. But the books also presented a question I could not avoid: had I developed a different relationship with authority, or had I simply found more compelling authorities?
People can leave one canon and assemble another. A philosopher takes the place of an apostle. A theory of trauma explains every conflict. A spiritual teacher supplies the vocabulary for every experience. A political framework tells us in advance which observations deserve our attention.
The names on the spines change while the old posture survives. We still look for someone whose understanding will relieve us of the burden of forming our own.
This is one of the less comfortable truths about deconstruction. Rejecting an answer does not necessarily change the way we seek them. We can become highly articulate critics of religious authority while continuing to hand our judgment to anyone who sounds certain enough.
I understand the appeal. When your life feels confusing, the person who appears to understand it can be irresistible, ** including myself**.
A book names what happened in your childhood or why your marriage feels lonely. It gives you language for grief, shame, anger, or the strange disorientation that follows the loss of a worldview. You underline entire pages. You begin sending passages to friends because someone has finally put words to what you have lived.
That recognition is liberating. Some experiences remain difficult to examine until we find words for them. A good book brings an obscured part of our lives into view.
But recognition can quietly become surrender. The framework that illuminated one part of your life begins explaining the whole of it. You stop asking whether its account is adequate because, for a while, it made you feel seen.
Soon the language comes before the observation. You meet a person and diagnose their attachment style before listening to them. You notice a difficult feeling and immediately place it inside a theory. You acquire a vocabulary for your life that can be so complete there is little room left for life to surprise you.
Our culture has ** made an industry** of this hunger. There is always another book promising the missing key to trauma, purpose, intimacy, productivity, healing, or happiness. Much of this work contains real insight. Yet a person can become fluent in explanations of human flourishing while growing more distant from the unclassified details of their own existence.
Reading has been one of the primary ways I have tried to understand my life. I know its pleasures well: the sudden clarity, the widening horizon, the discovery that someone else has wrestled with a question I thought I carried alone.
I also know how easily reading becomes a respectable form of avoidance. I consult another thinker rather than decide what I believe. I test another theory rather than trust what I have observed. I finish another book while the conversation I need to have waits outside its pages.
The problem is rarely that the book is worthless. It is often excellent, which makes postponement easier to defend. You are learning, after all. You are doing the serious work of understanding yourself.
Sometimes you are. Sometimes you are preparing indefinitely for an act of living that will never feel adequately prepared for. No author can have the conversation for you, make the decision, grieve the loss, or discover what happens when you finally tell the truth.
I had spent years believing that the right interpretation would make me ready to live. Eventually I began to suspect that some understanding would come only through participation, with all the uncertainty and exposure participation requires.
I use the term in my work on
Self-authorship begins within those conditions. It is the developing ability to take part in the interpretation and direction of your life, including the freedom to question what you have inherited. You listen to a teacher without granting them permanent jurisdiction over your mind. You let a book correct you without surrendering your judgment to it.
That requires more than confidence. It asks you to recognize when you have been wrong and remain present when a cherished explanation fails. It also requires humility about your own experience, which deserves attention even when it is partial, mistaken, or shaped by fear.
A book contributes evidence, language, argument, and another person’s hard-won perception. You bring your history and judgment to the encounter, then carry what you have read into relationships and circumstances the author has never seen. The book becomes part of an ongoing inquiry.
You may find that it saw something you had missed. You may also find the point where its insight runs out. Both discoveries require you to remain an active reader.
One of the capacities I care about most is reality contact: the ability to remain available to what is happening, especially when it troubles an explanation you would prefer to keep.
No one encounters reality without interpretation. We bring memory, language, culture, desire, and fear to everything we see. I have no interest in pretending we can stand outside those conditions and achieve a pure, unmediated view.
Still, we can recognize when a framework has begun protecting itself. Every objection becomes proof that its critics do not understand it. Every exception receives an explanation that leaves the theory untouched. Every discomfort is taken as a reason to trust the framework more deeply.
I once participated in that kind of reasoning around scripture. When someone’s life contradicted what I believed the text required, I knew how to defend the interpretation. I was slower to ask what the person’s life might reveal about it.
That failure stays with me. Authority becomes dangerous when preserving an explanation matters more than meeting the person or circumstance in front of us. A text gives us language for reality, but it also offers a way to keep reality at a manageable distance.
The test is whether reading makes us more attentive and more willing to revise what we think. The world is larger than every account we have written of it, including the accounts that have helped us most.
I write this as someone who has written books and has another about to enter the world. I care about sentences, arguments, and the possibility that a reader might find language for something they have struggled to say.
I did not set out to become a published author. I wrote ** Divine Nobodies** because I was trying to understand what had happened to my life. When it became a bestseller, something changed. I was grateful that the book had reached people, but I also felt a new pressure to write another great book, to have something worth saying, and to sound more certain than I felt. I had gone to the page with questions and found myself being treated as someone with answers.
By the time I wrote ** Being Jesus in Nashville**, that pressure had acquired sharper edges. I was publicly branded a “heretic,” and the book contract vanished. The label spared people from reckoning with what I had written; my story became a warning about what happens when someone steps outside the approved lines. Losing the contract was brutal. Being turned into an example for others to fear was worse.
I have evolved with my writing. The Jim Palmer who wrote ** Wide Open Spaces** was still finding his way out of a world he had once called home. There was no pun intended in my book,
My beliefs have changed because my life has changed. People I have loved, losses I have endured, conversations I could not have predicted, and realities I could no longer explain away have all left their mark on my writing. I hope readers find something valuable in every book, but I also hope they let me be a person whose understanding remains unfinished. I owe them the same freedom.
Of course I hope people read my work. I hope an idea unsettles an assumption that needed unsettling. I hope a passage helps someone recognize a question they have been avoiding or an experience they have been taught to dismiss.
I am also aware that a reader could use my books in exactly the way I have described. Existential Health could become another comprehensive vocabulary laid over a life, another way to feel certain before paying attention. My own writing is subject to the same danger as the books that shaped me.
That is a difficult admission for a writer, because writers want their work to matter. But I would rather have someone argue with me from close contact with their life than repeat my language while drifting away from it.
A book has done its work when a reader can set it down and see more clearly. It should enlarge the conversation they are having with the world, including the parts of that conversation the author could never anticipate.
For years, I believed maturity meant learning to interpret life through the correct framework. If I could understand scripture properly and bring my experience into alignment with it, I would know where I stood.
I no longer think a comprehensive explanation can give us that kind of ground. Every account reaches a limit. People change. The world interrupts us. An experience arrives that the vocabulary we trusted cannot hold.
The question then is whether we remain in contact with what is happening. We have to acknowledge an experience before making it mean something familiar, revise an idea without treating its loss as the loss of ourselves, and participate in a life whose meaning will never be settled in advance.
Books can prepare us for those moments. They widen our attention, complicate our assumptions, and remind us how much we have yet to understand. They cannot undergo the moments on our behalf.
I still read the Bible, though no longer as the container of the world. I still find passages that move me and others that trouble me. I read many other books with the same hope: that they will show me something I could not yet see.
Then I have to close them. The person across the table is still there, with a life no theory can exhaust. My own life is waiting too, unfinished and resistant to summary. Whatever I have learned must answer to both.
About that marketing strategy: I’ve thought it through, and yes, I want you to read . I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t believe it could offer something deeply meaningful: a way to understand your experience, find ground amid uncertainty, and participate more fully in the life that is yours.
But even a book called The Practice of Being Alive cannot do the practicing for you. Whatever these pages offer has to meet the world through your choices, relationships, risks, and attention. Only you can live your life. The path is made by walking, and my hope is that the book earns its place in your life by helping you get on with living it.
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Either way, thank you for reading closely, thinking for yourself, and being part of the conversation. I mean that especially after an essay called “Stop Letting Authors Live Your Life.”
