What if the answers are the problem?
I have spent much of my life around answers. Religious answers. Theological answers. Philosophical answers. Psychological answers. Answers about who we are, why we are here, what gives life meaning, how we should live, and what we are supposed to do with suffering, uncertainty, and death. Some of those answers helped me. Some became too small for the realities they were meant to explain.
Something is changing in my work, though I cannot point to a single moment when the change began. I notice it most in what holds my attention now, and even more in what I no longer feel compelled to answer.
What took me longer to understand was that losing many of those answers did not mean losing the questions. If anything, the questions became more immediate once they were no longer sheltered by certainty. God, meaning, purpose, suffering, death, identity, and what makes a life worth living did not disappear when the explanations did. They were simply returned to me as questions I had to learn how to live with.
They followed me out of religion and into philosophy, spirituality, writing, and long conversations with people rebuilding their lives after the frameworks that once held them together had begun to fail. In time, those same questions became part of the work I now call Existential Health. Somewhere along the way, I became less interested in constructing another system capable of explaining human existence and more interested in what helps us remain present to existence itself.
That is the deeper problem with answers. They can illuminate, orient, and give us something to stand on, but they can also become ways of bringing uncertainty to an end before we have allowed it to change us. An explanation can become a substitute for encounter. A framework can help us see reality, but it can also begin determining what we are permitted to see. Even an answer that once liberated us can become another place to hide.
That distinction feels especially important to me now because Existential Health is beginning to move beyond ideas on a page. It is becoming a developing field of inquiry and practice, concerned not only with how we think about meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, uncertainty, grief, and significant life transition, but with how we accompany people who are actually living inside them. As the conversation reaches into different cultures and contexts, I am also having to consider more carefully what can truly be called human without quietly mistaking one culture’s language for the whole of human experience.
Much of what I wrote this week emerged from that widening territory. I returned to Jesus and the person Christianity needed him to become. I explored what might remain when religion ends but the human realities beneath it do not. I spent time with a philosopher whose integrity has been shaped by refusing certainty he cannot justify. I wondered whether meaning was ever something hidden inside us waiting to be discovered, and what happens when an emerging field crosses languages, histories, and ways of seeing the world.
I also confronted a much harder reality: millions of women are being asked to build meaningful lives in a world that still does not adequately protect their right to inhabit those lives safely. That altered the scale of the week for me. It reminded me that Existential Health cannot remain an elegant conversation about meaning and purpose while ignoring the material conditions that make flourishing possible or impossible.
Beneath all of this, something more fundamental kept returning: how do we meet an actual human being in the middle of an actual life, with all the history, uncertainty, contradiction, vulnerability, and unfinishedness that such a meeting contains?
That may be where my work is taking me now. I am less interested in finding a better explanation for being alive than I once was. I am more interested in learning how to meet life without reducing it too quickly, and in helping create forms of practice capable of staying with what is real before rushing to make it manageable.
Maybe the task is not to live without answers. Maybe it is to become more discerning about what we ask them to do for us.
One of the pieces I published this week referenced some of my earlier work and writing, and a previously published books, and
** The Jesus Christianity Had to Tame: An Earlier Piece of My Work That Still Matters** brought me back to a question I have carried for a very long time, one that began while I was still inside Christianity and continued long after I left. I wanted to understand what happens when a living human challenge becomes an institution, and what inevitably gets lost when something disruptive must be made stable enough to preserve.
My relationship with Jesus has changed almost beyond recognition over the course of my life. There was a time when Jesus existed for me inside a complete theological system. He was the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the fulfillment of prophecy, and the answer to humanity’s separation from God. Understanding Jesus meant understanding the doctrines Christianity had constructed around him, and following Jesus was difficult to distinguish from belonging faithfully to the religion that claimed him.
Leaving that theological world did not make Jesus disappear. In some ways, it made him more interesting. When I began separating Jesus from the enormous religious apparatus built around him, I encountered someone considerably more difficult than the figure I had been taught to worship. He crossed boundaries that respectable religion depended upon, placed human need above religious rules, challenged systems of status and purity, and repeatedly moved toward people whom religious and social structures had pushed toward the margins.
What has continued to interest me is the way institutions absorb the people and movements that once threatened them. A disruptive life becomes a doctrine. A dangerous question becomes an approved answer. A movement becomes an organization. Something that once called people into a different relationship with life gradually becomes something people are asked to believe. Over time, what once disturbed us can become another possession we carry without allowing it to disturb anything at all.
I am not interested in recovering some supposedly pristine Jesus untouched by history, nor am I interested in replacing the Christian Jesus with another Jesus who conveniently reflects my own preferences. What continues to matter to me is the more personal question of what we do when something genuinely disrupts the way we are living. We can allow ourselves to be changed by it, or we can gradually make it comfortable enough to live inside the world we have already constructed.
Religion is hardly the only place this happens. We do it with teachers, philosophies, political movements, spiritual practices, psychological insights, and even our own moments of awakening. Something breaks through and shows us what we can no longer easily unsee. For a while it rearranges us, but gradually we explain it, organize it, give it language, and make it manageable.
Returning to this older piece reminded me that some questions do not become irrelevant simply because we have been asking them for years. Sometimes we finally become ready to understand what they were asking of us.
For a long time, the conversation about religion seemed to offer two primary choices. We could stay or leave, believe or reject, defend the tradition or dismantle it. I understand that binary because I lived inside it.
When the religious world that had organized my life began to come apart, much of my energy went into determining what I could still believe. I wanted to know what could be salvaged, what needed to be abandoned, and what I now thought about God, Jesus, scripture, church, spirituality, and the theological architecture that had once made the world intelligible to me.
Those were necessary questions, but they are no longer the ones that interest me most. ** The End of Religion Is Not the End: Rethinking God, Theology, and Religion After Religion** gathers together a series of pieces written around another possibility. The decline of traditional religion may not represent the end of humanity’s spiritual development at all. It may be one transition within a much longer human effort to understand and inhabit the mystery of our own existence.
Religion did not invent mortality, suffering, belonging, awe, moral bewilderment, or our longing for meaning. It arose, at least in part, because human beings needed ways of living with these realities. We built stories, rituals, gods, scriptures, communities, moral systems, sacred spaces, and theological explanations around the bewildering experience of being conscious creatures in a world we did not create and cannot control. Some of those structures carried us beautifully, some wounded us profoundly, and many did both.
What interests me now is what happens when those structures become less credible while the realities beneath them remain.
We can stop believing in heaven and still have to die. Divine providence may no longer make sense to us, yet we still have to live through things we cannot explain. Traditional conceptions of God may fall away, and still we can find ourselves beneath a night sky overwhelmed by the sheer fact of existence.
Leaving church does not extinguish the longing for belonging, any more than abandoning religious morality releases us from considering what we owe one another. We may dismantle every metaphysical certainty we were given and still wake each morning confronting the unfinished human question of how we are going to live.
The task after religion is not to find another structure capable of giving us back what we lost. It is to develop our ability to live more directly with the realities those structures once mediated for us. We may have to learn how to carry mortality without requiring immortality, experience mystery without forcing it into explanation, make meaning without demanding that the universe certify it, belong without disappearing into conformity, and live morally without imagining that someone beyond the world is keeping score.
Living this way requires a different relationship with uncertainty. It asks us to resist the impulse to replace one certainty with another and to consider whether not knowing might sometimes be less a deficiency than an honest description of the human condition. That question led me back this week to a philosopher whose life and work have long stayed with me.
I discovered Sir Anthony Kenny during a period when the religious certainty that had organized my life was becoming impossible for me to sustain. Kenny interested me partly because of the path he had traveled himself. He had been a Catholic priest and had inhabited that theological world seriously enough to give his life to it before reaching a point where he could no longer claim certainty about things he did not believe he knew.
** The Courage Not to Know: Sir Anthony Kenny: Conversations in Existential Health** is less about agnosticism as a philosophical position than about the posture beneath it. Kenny has been willing to take metaphysical questions seriously without pretending that seriousness requires resolution. There is something deeply compelling to me about a person who can remain with uncertainty without manufacturing an answer simply because not knowing is uncomfortable.
Human beings understandably want explanations. We want to know why something happened, whether we made the right decision, whether someone loves us, whether our lives matter, whether death is really the end, whether history is going somewhere, and whether the suffering we have endured belongs to some larger story.
Religion once gave me the extraordinary reassurance that somewhere, ultimately, there was an answer to everything. Even when I did not understand what was happening, God did, and even when something appeared meaningless, it could be placed within a larger purpose.
Losing that framework meant losing more than a collection of beliefs. It meant losing the assurance that reality itself was obligated to make sense to me. That has taken years to absorb, but I no longer think the alternative is cynicism or despair. There is another possibility in learning to live without requiring reality to provide guarantees it has never promised us.
Once we stop forcing every uncertainty toward an answer, we may become more attentive to what is actually here. A relationship does not have to last forever to matter. Beauty does not require a metaphysical explanation before it can move us. Love does not become meaningless because it remains vulnerable to loss, and a life does not have to fit inside a cosmic plan before it can become worth living. There is a particular kind of courage involved in allowing these things to matter without asking eternity to guarantee them.
This raised another question for me. If meaning is no longer guaranteed from above, where does it come from? The modern answer has often been that we create it for ourselves, relocating meaning from heaven into the individual. Instead of God telling us what our lives mean, we search inside ourselves for purpose, truth, and authentic identity. Lately, however, I have begun wondering whether this still places meaning in the wrong location.
I have spent a great deal of my life thinking about meaning. I once thought of it as something we discovered, a purpose placed into our lives by God that we were supposed to discern and fulfill. When that metaphysical framework no longer worked for me, I moved toward another familiar idea, that perhaps meaning is something human beings create for themselves. ** The Space Between: Maybe Meaning Was Never Inside You: The Transjective Nature of Being Human** explores another possibility altogether.
Meaning may not be a substance hidden somewhere inside the individual, nor an objective property of the universe waiting for us to discover it. It may arise through relationship, somewhere between a person and a place, between two people, between memory and the present moment, between a body and a landscape, between grief and what has been loved, between the person I have been and the reality I am encountering now.
The idea of the transjective gives us language for this. Some of the most significant dimensions of human experience cannot be adequately described as either subjective or objective because they arise through participation between self and world. Love, beauty, belonging, grief, home, and perhaps meaning itself have this quality. They belong neither entirely to us nor entirely to the world outside us. They emerge through relationship.
I know something of this through running. I can spend hours alone on a trail and experience something that would be impossible to locate exclusively inside myself. The forest is not merely scenery onto which I project my interior state, nor does it contain some objective package of meaning waiting for me to retrieve it. Something happens through the encounter itself, through my body moving across the ground, the weather, fatigue, memory, attention, solitude, and whatever condition my life happens to be in that day.
This matters because modern Western culture has trained us to locate so much of human life inside the individual.
There is value in these ideas, but perhaps the self was never as solitary as we imagined. Our health and flourishing depend not only on our interior lives but also on the quality of our participation in relationships, communities, places, histories, cultures, ecosystems, and the more-than-human world.
If meaning arises through the encounter between a life and reality, then no single culture can possess the definitive vocabulary for describing that encounter. Meaning is inevitably shaped by language, history, culture, p…
