I did not plan these six essays as a series.
At the beginning of the week, I was thinking about religious abuse and the forms of authority spiritual systems should never be permitted to exercise over another human being. By the end of the week, I was writing about artificial intelligence, human extinction, and whether our technological capability is developing faster than our capacity to live responsibly with what we create.
Somewhere between those two subjects were capitalism, life after religion, the formation of Existential Health Practitioners, and the memory of my high school friend Mike, who died by suicide.
On the surface, that is a strange collection of subjects.
Looking back across the week, however, I can see that I was writing about the same question from six different directions:
What gets to determine the value, direction, and meaning of a human life?
Religion can answer that question for us. So can the marketplace. Institutions can. Culture can. Technology increasingly can. Fear can. The need to belong can. Even our resistance to something we have left behind can continue organizing our lives long after we believe ourselves free of it.
The work of becoming human is partly the work of recognizing these forces without imagining that we can somehow exist outside all influence. None of us authors ourselves from nothing. We inherit languages, histories, bodies, relationships, cultures, economic systems, technologies, wounds, possibilities, and worlds already underway before we arrive.
But inheritance is not destiny.
Somewhere between surrendering ourselves to the forces that shape us and pretending we are completely autonomous lies the difficult territory of participation.
That is where this week took me.
I began with ** The Ten Commandments of Preventing Religious Abuse: What Spiritual Authority Has No Right to Take From You**.
This was not written from outside religion. I spent years inside institutional Christianity, including years as a pastor. I know something about the trust people place in spiritual leaders because people once placed that trust in me.
That history has made me increasingly interested in forms of religious harm that are harder to recognize than the obvious scandals. Religious abuse does not always begin with a predatory leader. Sometimes it begins much earlier, with an assumption embedded into the structure itself: that spiritual authority possesses a greater claim upon your life than your own conscience, perception, dignity, boundaries, and capacity for discernment.
Over time, people can learn to distrust themselves while calling that distrust faithfulness. Questions become spiritual deficiencies. Boundaries acquire the odor of selfishness. Desire becomes suspicious. Disagreement becomes rebellion. Eventually, a person may have difficulty knowing where the religious system ends and they begin.
That is why I increasingly understand religious abuse as an existential injury. It can damage our relationship with our own existence: identity, agency, belonging, self-trust, embodiment, discernment, and reality itself.
The alternative is not radical individualism. Self-trust does not mean I am always right. Self-authorship does not mean reality becomes whatever I want it to be.
The alternative is participation.
We remain teachable without surrendering our responsibility for our lives. We receive wisdom without handing someone else our conscience. We allow ourselves to be challenged and corrected without granting another person the right to erase us.
The work after religious abuse is larger than leaving the institution. It is learning how to inhabit yourself again.
That question of authority followed me into ** The Religion We Forgot to Deconstruct: Labor Day, and What Capitalism Taught Us About Human Worth**.
I spent years deconstructing Christianity. Eventually I realized that religion was not the only system living inside me.
Culture had given me assumptions about success, money, productivity, status, work, education, respectability, and what a properly constructed life was supposed to look like. I had examined the theology I inherited while leaving many of these other assumptions largely untouched.
That realization expanded what deconstruction meant to me.
A person can reject religious authority while remaining governed by economic authority. God can disappear while the marketplace quietly assumes the vacant position. Righteousness becomes productivity. Blessing becomes success. Status becomes evidence that life is going correctly.
The problem is not work, ambition, entrepreneurship, achievement, or wealth. The problem begins when an economic system becomes an anthropology—when a mechanism for organizing production and exchange starts telling us what a human being is worth.
Then income becomes importance. Productivity becomes character. Busyness becomes significance. Rest requires justification. Poverty becomes moral suspicion. We start evaluating ourselves with categories designed to evaluate economic activity.
You can leave the church and still spend your life trying to prove that you are worthy. The altar has simply moved.
That essay left me with a question that continued through everything else I wrote this week: How many judgments about ourselves have we mistaken for reality simply because we have heard them for so long?
That question led directly into ** You Left Religion. Now What? Building a Life Beyond the Beliefs That Once Held It Together**.
Leaving religion is often described as losing beliefs. For many people, that barely begins to describe what happens.
A religious world can organize morality, identity, sexuality, relationships, belonging, purpose, mortality, authority, community, and the story someone tells about why they are here. When that world collapses, the problem is not simply that a person no longer believes certain propositions.
An entire orientation toward existence may have disappeared.
Deconstruction is necessary for many people. It exposes contradictions, names harm, dismantles false certainties, and creates distance from structures that once possessed enormous authority.
But deconstruction has a limit. At some point, the question changes. It is no longer primarily: *What was wrong with what I believed? *It becomes: How am I going to live?
Mortality must now be faced without the assurances that once softened it. Meaning has to be discovered and created within the life actually being lived. Freedom brings responsibility for what we choose and who we become. Belonging must be rooted in relationship rather than ideological conformity. Self-trust requires confidence without the fantasy of infallibility. Uncertainty has to be inhabited without immediately constructing another system to rescue us from it.
These are not post-Christian questions. They are human ones.
That distinction has increasingly shaped my work. Religion is no longer the largest container for what I am trying to understand. Existential health is.
The destination after deconstruction is not another airtight worldview. It is a deeper capacity to participate in reality.
If existential health is going to become more than an idea, however, it needs intellectual depth.
That was the concern behind ** A Field Needs a Library: 13 Books Shaping the Formation of Existential Health Practitioners**.
A field cannot be built around the thoughts of one person. It needs conversation partners, disagreements, histories, disciplines, research traditions, competing perspectives, and books capable of disturbing the assumptions with which practitioners enter the room.
The thirteen books I selected for the formation of Existential Health Practitioners intentionally refuse to stay within one discipline. They move through anthropology, ritual, existential psychotherapy, religious trauma, ecology, resilience, spiritual care, Ubuntu ethics, gender, mortality, nihilism, person-centered psychology, race, power, and liberation.
Taken together, they make a claim about the human person.
We are meaning-making creatures, but we are also embodied creatures. Relational creatures. Mortal creatures. Ecological creatures. Historically situated creatures. We inherit identities and social worlds we did not choose. We possess agency, but never in a vacuum. We suffer because existence itself contains loss, uncertainty and death, but we also suffer because human beings construct systems that wound, exclude and dominate one another.
Any field concerned with human flourishing has to become large enough to hold all of that.
The library matters because existential health cannot become another ideology asking people to accept a prescribed interpretation of their lives. Its practitioners must become capable of encountering complexity without immediately reducing it.
A field needs more than answers. It needs people who have learned how to remain present when the answers become difficult.
September 10 arrived.
World Suicide Prevention Day has never been an abstraction for me. My best friend in high school died by suicide. His name was Mike.
Long before I had language for existential health, before I became a chaplain, before I sat with grieving parents or stood at suicide scenes, before I began thinking professionally about meaning, despair, belonging, or what makes a life inhabitable, there was simply a teenage boy trying to understand why his friend was suddenly gone.
That is where ** Mike Still Matters: What World Suicide Prevention Day Means to Me** came from.
There are statistics we need to know about suicide. There are interventions, risk factors, treatments, public policies, crisis systems, and clinical practices that save lives. All of them matter.
But statistics count what they cannot contain.
They cannot contain the sound of a parent speaking about a dead child. They cannot contain the empty place at the table. They cannot contain the years someone never lived, the person they never became, the friendships and ordinary afternoons and aging face that never existed.
They cannot contain Mike.
World Suicide Prevention Day reminds me why existential health cannot become merely an intellectual project. Human beings need more than arguments about why life should matter. We need relationships, communities, practices, and forms of life that make being here more inhabitable. We need places where suffering does not disqualify us from belonging and honesty about our inner lives does not cost us our dignity.
I could not give Mike any of that when I was a teenager. I did not possess the language. I have spent much of my life since then searching for better language.
Mike still matters.
The week could have ended there.
Instead, I encountered the story that became What Jacob Said: Is AI the Existential Threat That Can’t Be Stopped?
Jacob Coxon had spent three years working on frontier artificial intelligence at OpenAI and Anthropic before resigning from Anthropic and warning that the race toward increasingly powerful AI systems could end in human extinction.
Whether Coxon is right is not something I pretend to know.
There are serious disagreements about the probability, timeline, and mechanisms of catastrophic AI risk. Predictions of superintelligence may prove wrong. Safety research may solve problems that currently appear daunting. The future has an irritating habit of refusing to conform to our forecasts.
But the possibility itself raises an extraordinary question. What happens when human beings become technologically capable of creating powers they may not possess the developmental capacity to govern?
That question reaches far beyond AI.
We split the atom before developing the collective wisdom to eliminate nuclear weapons. We built technologies capable of manipulating human attention before understanding what perpetual manipulation might do to consciousness, childhood, politics, identity, and shared reality. We developed industrial capacities capable of altering planetary systems while struggling to coordinate around the consequences.
Our capability keeps outrunning our capacity. That may be one of the defining problems of technological civilization.
Artificial intelligence makes the problem especially visible because intelligence itself has occupied such a privileged position in our understanding of human uniqueness. We assumed that becoming smarter would somehow make us wiser.
Human history offers little evidence for that confidence. The most dangerous intelligence in the AI story may not ultimately be artificial intelligence. It may be human intelligence without sufficient human capacity.
Writing these essays left me thinking about something I had not fully seen when the week began.
There is a common structure beneath religious authoritarianism, the marketplace’s measurement of human worth, the disorientation after deconstruction, practitioner formation, suicide prevention, and the challenge of artificial intelligence.
Each forces us to ask what kind of human being is capable of living without surrendering their humanity to the systems they inhabit. That is a different question from whether those systems are good or bad.
Systems are unavoidable. We need institutions, economies, communities, technologies, traditions, bodies of knowledge, and forms of authority. The fantasy of the completely autonomous individual is no more adequate than the fantasy of the perfectly trustworthy institution.
The deeper issue is our relationship with them. Guidance can be received without surrendering conscience, just as participation in an economy need not grant the marketplace authority to determine human worth. Leaving a worldview does not require spending the rest of our lives organized around opposition to it, and learning from a field of knowledge need not turn that field into another orthodoxy.
Communities can make room for the truth of human suffering without making belonging conditional upon appearing well. Even extraordinary technological power can be held within a mature relationship to limits, where capability is not mistaken for permission and possibility does not automatically become destiny.
These are different expressions of the same developmental challenge: learning to participate in the systems that shape our lives without allowing those systems to replace the human capacities required to live them.
Can we participate without disappearing?
That may be the question I was writing about all week.
Participation requires something more demanding than obedience and more mature than rebellion. It asks us to remain in relationship with people, systems, ideas, institutions, technologies, and reality itself without surrendering the responsibility of being present to our own lives.
This is increasingly what I mean by existential health. It is not the achievement of permanent meaning, the security of certainty, or some state of invulnerability. Nor is it an optimized life from which suffering has finally been engineered away. It is the capacity to remain in contact with reality without abandoning ourselves, to live with uncertainty without reaching reflexively for an authority that promises to make it disappear, and to belong without betraying ourselves for the privilege of inclusion.
Existential health asks us to exercise freedom while accepting the responsibility that comes with it, and to face mortality without allowing death to drain life of its significance. It requires enough maturity to create powerful things without becoming servants of our own creations, and enough ground within ourselves that our worth does not depend upon certification from God, the marketplace, an institution, an algorithm, or the approval of those around us.
That is the deeper movement I now see running through everything I wrote this week: the recovery a…
