Leaving religion can turn your whole life upside down. You can miss the people you’re furious with. You can feel betrayed by a church you gave years of your life to and still wish someone there would call. And if you were harmed in the name of God, leaving can mean facing what happened without the community you once would have turned to for help.
You can wheel in a new and improved belief system by Friday. Try trusting your own judgment on Saturday when someone you love tells you you’re making a terrible mistake. That’s where deconstruction gets personal. You may know exactly why you left and still have trouble saying no, believing your own account of what happened, or imagining where you’ll belong next.
That’s where my writing went this week. I wrote about what it costs to keep professing a faith you’ve outgrown, what happens when a church teaches you to doubt your own experience, and what remains of Jesus when we stop waiting for him to rescue the world. Underneath it all was a question I keep coming back to. Once you’ve stopped organizing your life around what you were told to believe, what do you want to give your life to?
Sometimes the first honest moment happens while you’re saying something you’ve said a thousand times. You hear yourself reassuring someone that God has a plan, and halfway through the sentence you realize you would give almost anything for them to stop you and ask whether you actually believe that. You might finish the sentence anyway. There’s a person in front of you who needs comfort, and you’ve spent years learning which words are supposed to offer it. Only later do you realize how much it cost you to say them.
In , I gathered essays for readers who have reached some version of that moment. They take up God, scripture, Jesus, heaven, hell, and the power that determines whose experience gets reflected in theology in the first place. An inherited belief can offer real comfort and still become impossible to affirm honestly. Giving it up can feel like losing a place in the world. Both deserve room in the conversation.
There’s a reason the honest sentence can take years to finish. Imagine telling a church leader that something happened in a room you were both in. Before you can get through your account, the conversation has turned to your resentment, your lack of submission, or your inability to forgive. You came in hoping to talk about an event. You leave wondering what’s wrong with you for remembering it the way you do.
That reversal is at the heart of . High-control religion can make the act of reporting harm feel like a moral offense. In time, you may start making the institution’s argument against yourself before anyone else has to. Rebuilding self-trust begins with restoring your standing as a witness to your own life. A witness can be mistaken and can learn more. A witness also gets to finish giving their account.
The question of authority reaches beyond who gets to interpret our lives. It also reaches into what we believe is ours to do. In , I ask what remains of Jesus when we stop expecting him to arrive at the end of history and repair what human beings have done to one another. I keep returning to a more immediate question. What have we learned to leave undone because we believe someone will eventually make it right?
A promise of ultimate justice can offer consolation to people who have every reason to need it. It can also offer people who benefit from an injustice somewhere to put the obligation to act. I’m interested in what happens when that obligation comes back into the present. Jesus becomes a more demanding figure for me there. The person who has been shut out is already here. The people with the power to open the door are here, too.
A person can give up belief in a divine purpose and carry forward the rule that only a divine purpose could make life matter. By that rule, everything finite arrives with a mark against it. A friendship will end. The work you cared about may be forgotten. A good afternoon with someone you love has no power to keep either of you alive. Measured against eternity, the afternoon barely registers. Ask the person who spent it with you and you may get a very different account of what happened.
In “Nothing Matters” Is No Way to Live, I explain why I wrote The Practice of Being Alive in response to both personal and cultural nihilism. The culture makes its own contribution when it praises care and gives the people doing it less and less time to care well. I wanted to write about the capacity to stay involved in a world like that, where much of what is worth doing comes with scant recognition and no assurance that it will last. You can begin to judge the value of keeping a promise by getting close enough to see what it means to the person who counted on you to keep it.
I put together because readers rarely arrive at this work in the order a writer would lay it out. One person is still afraid of hell. Another is trying to get through dinner with a family that interprets their departure as betrayal. Someone else has been out for years and is only now discovering how hard it is to want something openly. I gathered thirteen essays so you can start with the part of your life that is asking for attention now.
In , I trace how thirty years of helping people rebuild their lives after religion led me to see a missing dimension of human health. Leaving can take enormous courage. Then comes the work of trusting your judgment after years of second-guessing it, finding people you can belong with and speak honestly to, and deciding what deserves your commitment when certainty is gone. I kept seeing people have to develop those capacities at the very moment their lives were asking the most of them. That’s where my work in existential health began.
This week I collaborated with ** as an experiment in combining fiction and philosophy. I shared What the Light Withheld, a story written by Sara, who is an accomplished fiction author. I wrote a set of philosophical reflections to accompany it. The article is ** What the Light Withheld: A story by Sara, with philosophical reflections by Jim Palmer.
One of the things I value about fiction is that it lets us spend time with an experience before we have to decide what it means. In an article, I can tell you what I think and show you how I got there. A story gives you room to notice what I might have passed over. The detail you’re still thinking about an hour later may be one I barely registered. That difference matters to me, especially in an edition about learning to trust your own reading of things.
In , I take the question of existential health into higher education. A student can graduate knowing how to solve difficult problems and have had almost no occasion to ask whose problems they’re being trained to solve, what they’re willing to give their working life to, or how they’ll know when a definition of success is costing them too much. I’m interested in what an education would look like if it took those questions as seriously as it takes preparation for employment.
One of my Substack Notes this week is ** Women I Read on Substack and What I’ve Learned From Them. **In this note
In the ** Daily Reader**, I’ve been writing about approval and self-authorship. It’s hard to make your own choices when you’re afraid the people you love will pull away. This week I wrote about what happens when you make the choice anyway. Sometimes what feels like guilt is the fear of finding out what their love depends on.
My new book, , is still at #1 in Amazon’s Existentialist Philosophy category. I’m grateful readers are finding it, especially those who left religion and discovered how much of the work begins after you walk out the door. You can know why you left and still freeze when someone asks what you want. You can miss the people who hurt you. You can spend a Sunday morning doing exactly what you want and still feel, by noon, as though you’ve done something wrong. That’s the territory of this book.
I wrote it because I kept seeing the same trouble well beyond religion. We’ve learned to treat the conditions of being human as problems a better life would spare us. We want certainty before we choose, a reason for every loss, and some assurance that what we love will last.
Eventually, a life that can’t deliver those things starts to feel like a life that can’t offer much at all. That’s where nihilism gets a foothold. Existential health begins with a different relationship to being alive. We can learn to choose while we’re still unsure, grieve what we can’t make sense of, and give ourselves fully to people we know we can’t keep forever.
I wrote because I believe we can do more than survive the conditions of being human. A survival guide can help you get through a bad stretch. But uncertainty, loss, and the fact that our lives end are with us even on the best days. What we can change is how we live with them, and how much of ourselves we’re willing to give to a life that comes with those terms.
That’s the book’s answer to nihilism. You discover what your presence means by being present long enough to see what it changes. A friend tells you something they’ve kept to themselves for years because you made time to hear it. The conversation may never come up again. Your friend goes home having said it out loud for the first time. There’s a whole philosophy of meaning in the difference between the person who arrived and the person who went home.
I’d love for you to read The Practice of Being Alive. If you’ve already read it, please leave a brief, honest review on Amazon. A sentence or two about what stayed with you can help someone else decide whether this is the book they’ve been looking for. Read the book or leave a review on Amazon.
I’m working to establish existential health as a fourth dimension of human well-being, alongside physical, mental, and social health. That means asking researchers, educators, and practitioners to take seriously a question I first encountered in conversations with people whose lives had come apart. What capacities help us face uncertainty, loss, and mortality and still take an active part in our own lives? Building a field around that question is an undertaking of a different order from writing about it. It means putting the ideas where others can challenge them, developing practices people can use, and creating an institution that can sustain the work beyond my own involvement. All three are now underway.
My first ** peer-reviewed paper** on existential health was published this summer in the
We’ve incorporated the Institute for Existential Health, giving the work an institutional home. Volume One of the Existential Health White Papers is complete, and Volume Two is underway. The papers give us a shared language for capacities that can be difficult to name, let alone cultivate. I attached Volume One below:
This week I also met with a team of educators organizing a K–12 existential health pilot in a U.S. school district. I outlined the framework for this initiative in the first paper in Volume Two of the Existential Health White Papers: ** Existential Health White Papers: Volume Two Applied Domains of Existential Health: White Paper No. 12: Existential Education. **This week, our education team drafted a charter for the Institute for Existential Health’s first K–12 initiative. We’re starting with a K–5 pilot.
I’ll judge the progress of this field by what people are able to do with it. Can a researcher show us where the framework falls short? Can a teacher help a child stay curious about a question that has no easy answer? Can someone whose world has fallen apart learn to trust their own judgment at the very moment they need it most? Those are different tests, and I want existential health to be answerable to all of them. For years, people brought me these questions in private, often when they were already in crisis. I want us to become a society that takes responsibility for helping people develop these capacities long before they have to use them to put a life back together.
I’m asking for your help to keep writing and build the field of existential health. I want anyone who needs this work to be able to read it, whatever they can afford. I depend on readers who choose to pay to keep my writing free for everyone and give me the time to build a movement around existential health through research, education, and community.
You can support the work as a paid subscriber for $50 a year. That includes membership in the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**, where you’ll receive the Daily Reader and can take part in workshops, discussion circles, and support groups. A founding subscription is $250 a year and includes everything in a paid subscription, plus two private, hour-long video conversations with me each year.
If my writing has helped you put words to something in your own life, I’d be grateful for your help keeping it available to the next person who needs it. Become a paid or founding subscriber.
