Some weeks feel less like producing new work and more like returning to the unresolved center of everything I have been trying to understand. This was one of those weeks.
I found myself moving between two worlds: looking back at the religious system I once defended and looking forward to the practitioners who will soon begin learning how to accompany people through the questions such systems often leave behind. One part of the week required reckoning. The other required building. Beneath both was the same concern: what helps a human being recover authority over their own life?
This week, I returned to another part of my work: religious deconstruction.
I have never understood deconstruction as an intellectual exercise in disproving beliefs. It is what happens when inherited explanations can no longer contain the truth of our experience. It is the slow and often painful recognition that the structures that once gave us meaning may also have distorted our humanity, diminished our authority, or taught us to betray what we knew within ourselves.
The articles this week move through that reckoning. They examine what must be built after religion, the moral accountability Christianity cannot evade, the human consequences of systems that claim the power to define a life, the theological convictions I could no longer defend, and the voices of those harmed by teachings presented as the will of God. They also turn the scrutiny inward, toward the things I could not admit while I was a pastor and the fear, power, and self-deception that made those admissions impossible.
The final piece widens the frame. It gathers twenty articles that move beyond religious deconstruction into questions of consciousness, civilization, identity, meaning, and what it takes to inhabit reality without retreating into easy answers. Deconstruction may clear the ground, but it cannot tell us how to live upon it. Eventually, the work must become larger than what we have left. It must become the work of learning how to be alive.
Existential Health and the Work of Building a Life Beyond Religion
Leaving religion is not the same as becoming free of its architecture. Beliefs may fall away while the structures they supported—identity, belonging, moral orientation, certainty, and trust in one’s own perceptions—collapse beneath them.
This article explores the work that begins when deconstruction is no longer enough: tolerating uncertainty, recovering self-trust, creating meaning without absolute guarantees, and finding belonging without conformity. The question is no longer only, What do I no longer believe? It is, How will I inhabit my life now?
Bertrand Russell and the Moral Reckoning After Christianity
Bertrand Russell refused to grant religion immunity simply because its claims were considered sacred. Christianity, like every institution that exercises power, must be judged not only by its highest ideals but by what it has produced in human lives.
Religious traditions cannot claim every act of compassion committed in their name while dismissing cruelty, domination, and psychological harm as unrelated distortions. If a system claims authority over truth, morality, identity, and eternal destiny, it must also accept responsibility for the consequences of that authority.
Incarceration as an Existential Health Crisis
This week, conversations with people providing spiritual care inside prisons and supporting those rebuilding their lives after release returned me to a question that has followed me through years of prison ministry: What happens when a sentence imposed upon someone’s actions becomes a permanent judgment upon their identity?
Incarceration often extends beyond its stated punishment, taking possession of a person’s relationships, future, and place in the human community. Even after release, the sentence continues through stigma, exclusion, surveillance, and economic restriction.
This article names incarceration as an existential health crisis—a form of institutional authorship in which the state acquires the power to define whose life a person may have. The question is whether consequences must become an irreversible human identity—or whether we will permit the sentence truly to end.
Ten Problems with Traditional Christian Theism
Some beliefs do not disappear because we have become rebellious or unwilling to believe. They disappear because defending them would require us to violate our moral and intellectual integrity.
These ten problems trace the unraveling of the God I was taught to proclaim: a God of selective intervention, eternal punishment, sacrificial violence, surveillance, conditional belonging, and transactional love. This is not an argument against mystery, transcendence, or every conception of the divine. It is an account of why the God I once defended became morally, intellectually, and existentially impossible for me to believe in.
“I learned at church that women are lesser beings than men.”
The harm of religious patriarchy is not confined to doctrine or debates over leadership. It enters the body as shame, silence, fear, self-distrust, and the conviction that one’s full humanity violates the divine order.
Built around a woman’s account of what church taught her to believe about herself, this article confronts the lived consequences of theology—how sacred teachings shaped her worth, voice, relationships, and right to exist without apology. Her story asks us to reckon with what happens when inequality is not merely practiced by religion but sanctified in the name of God.
What leaving evangelical ministry taught me about fear, power, and the harm done in God’s name
There were truths I could not acknowledge inside evangelical ministry—not because I had never glimpsed them, but because admitting them would have threatened the world that made my life coherent.
These fourteen admissions concern the Bible, salvation, hell, certainty, power, religious performance, and the harm concealed beneath the language of faithfulness. They are also confessions about what I defended, what I feared, and what my role required me not to know. Leaving ministry did not make honesty painless. It made honesty possible.
Writing on religion, consciousness, civilization, and the difficult work of inhabiting reality
The week concludes by moving beyond deconstruction into the larger terrain my work has entered. These twenty articles explore religion, consciousness, human evolution, mortality, authority, civilization, and the predicament of being creatures capable of asking what any of this means.
This is not a collection of the easiest or most popular pieces. These articles ask something of the reader: patience, discomfort, self-examination, and a willingness to remain with questions that resist resolution. They invite us to consider not only what we believe, but the kind of beings we are becoming and the civilization our ways of seeing are creating.
Easy answers offer temporary shelter. Sooner or later, we must decide whether we want to be protected from reality or become capable of inhabiting it.
These articles and the practitioner training may appear to be different parts of my work, but I understand them as inseparable. The writing names what happens when institutions, doctrines, and professionals acquire too much authority over a human life. The training asks how we accompany people without repeating that dispossession in a new form.
For further exploration on religious deconstruction:
📄 What Comes After Deconstruction? Existential Health and the Work of Building a Life Beyond Religion
Alongside this week’s writing, much of my attention has been devoted to preparing for the beginning of the next Existential Health Practitioner Training and Certification Course.
I met throughout the week with faculty members and trainers to clarify roles, strengthen the training structure, and ensure that the different parts of the program form one coherent experience. These conversations were about more than schedules and responsibilities. We considered the kind of learning environment we want to create, the ethical posture of the practitioner, and the responsibility involved in preparing people to accompany others through the consequential questions and realities of being alive.
The new cohort will gather for the first time at our Meet & Greet on September 3 at 6:00 p.m. Central. It will be the beginning of a year devoted not simply to learning about existential health, but to becoming capable of practicing it.
The course is designed as an integrated ecosystem of learning, formation, and applied experience. Participants move through a month-by-month curriculum, written assignments, monthly group training, weekly Office Hours, individual training sessions, and collaborative cohort learning. Regular meetings with a spiritual director support the practitioner’s personal formation. Beginning in Month Three, structured role-play sessions translate concepts into practice, eventually leading into supervised practicum work with one-on-one supervision.
Each part serves a different purpose. Curriculum develops understanding. Formation cultivates self-awareness. Cohort dialogue exposes participants to perspectives beyond their own. Role-play develops practical capacity. Practicum brings the work into actual human relationships. Supervision teaches practitioners to examine their presence, judgment, ethical boundaries, blind spots, and use of power.
No single component can prepare someone for this work on its own. Existential health practice requires more than conceptual knowledge or a collection of techniques. It asks for presence, discernment, relational capacity, ethical grounding, and the ability to remain with uncertainty, suffering, complexity, and questions that cannot be fixed.
This is what the training is ultimately forming: practitioners who do not become the authority over another person’s life, but who can help people recover their own authority, deepen their capacity for reality, and participate more fully in the authorship of their lives.
Next week, that work begins again with a new group of people stepping into it.
Enrollment remains open for those who recognize themselves in this work and feel prepared to undertake the demanding formation it requires. You can read more about the training ** here** or visit the
This week also marked a significant moment in the long journey of bringing The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground into the world.
The manuscript is complete. The editing is finished. The foreword, endorsements, acknowledgments, and final revisions are all in place. The book is now moving into production and will be available in October.
**, **has written the foreword. Jessica is a natural philosopher and researcher whose work explores transformation, sustainability, consciousness, and the human relationship with reality. Her foreword does more than introduce the book; it situates its central questions within the larger human predicament we are living through and the need for new ways of inhabiting our lives and our world.
This book has occupied me for a long time. It began with a concern that has gradually become the center of my work: modern human beings have developed extraordinary capabilities without cultivating an equal capacity to inhabit reality. We know how to analyze, produce, control, and accelerate, but we are increasingly estranged from our bodies, one another, the living world, and the experience of being alive.
The Practice of Being Alive is my attempt to name that estrangement and offer a different way of understanding what it means to be human. It is not a book of answers or a program for self-improvement. It is an invitation to move from observing life to participating in it—and to discover forms of ground that do not depend upon certainty, mastery, or escape.
Everything that could be done in the writing of this book has now been done. It is leaving my hands and entering production. In October, it will finally enter yours.
I am ending this week aware that dismantling and building are not separate tasks. We have to tell the truth about the systems that diminished human beings. We also have to create forms of care, community, and practice that do not reproduce the same concentration of authority under different names.
That is the thread connecting everything I wrote this week and everything we are preparing to begin.
The work after religion is not simply to become free from what once governed us. It is to become capable of inhabiting our lives without surrendering them again.
Next week, a new cohort will begin learning how to accompany others in that work. I feel the weight of that responsibility. I also feel the possibility inside it.
If this writing helps you make sense of your life, I invite you to become a paid subscriber ($50 annually).
A paid subscription does more than support my writing. It includes membership in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality—a community for people deconstructing inherited religion, recovering trust in their own experience, and building a life beyond the systems that once defined them.
CNRS is also a living laboratory for existential health. It is where many of the ideas explored in these articles become shared practices, conversations, workshops, support groups, and forms of community. Together, we are exploring what human beings need to live with greater authority, meaning, belonging, and capacity for reality—without dogma, hierarchy, or predetermined answers.
This work cannot be built through writing alone. It requires people willing to inhabit the questions together and help create the forms of care, community, and spiritual life our time requires.
Your paid subscription helps sustain both the writing and the community where this emerging work is being lived. If you are deconstructing what no longer holds, searching for what comes next, or want to participate in building a more human way of being alive, there is a place for you here.
