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Well-formed Small Groups Form Their Members
New one out today: “A well-formed group asks students to practise attention. They must listen closely enough to understand what another person means, not merely wait for their turn to speak. It asks them to practise articulation. They must put a thought into words that others can hear, question, and use. It asks them to… Continue reading
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A Sovereign Alberta Within a United Canada? When Political Language Conceals More Than It Says.
Political language does more than decorate policy. It helps citizens understand what kind of world they are being asked to inhabit. When language clarifies, citizens can judge. When language blurs, citizens may still feel oriented, but the orientation is emotional before it is truthful. They know where they are supposed to stand before they know… Continue reading
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Known Enough to Become Yourself
The self that comes back is never simply the self that left. Continue reading
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The Political Stakes of Authenticity
Quebec sovereignty in the 1990s drew much of its force from language, culture, historical memory, and the desire for collective recognition. Even at the point of possible rupture, the language still carried the question of relationship. Alberta separatism, by contrast, often speaks in the register of release. Continue reading
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Authorship, AI, and the Responsibility to Answer for What We Write
Don’t refuse every tool; refuse to become one. Continue reading
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Authenticity isn’t Legibility
Many performances of authenticity are protective. They arise not from vanity, but from fear. People learn to reveal enough to appear honest, but not enough to risk being known. Performed vulnerability then becomes a shelter. It looks like openness while preserving control over exposure. Continue reading
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The Human Being Is Not the Source of Meaning: Heidegger and Sartre
For Sartre, authenticity is bound up with self-creation. The authentic person accepts the burden of freedom and refuses bad faith. They do not pretend that their choices are dictated by some fixed essence or external authority. They own their freedom and act. But for Heidegger, authenticity is not primarily self-creation. It is a more truthful… Continue reading
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Consumerism, or Consumption, of Self
I still think about an encounter I once had with Rosie, a young woman who appeared at my door in the middle of the night. What stayed with me was not merely the strangeness of the situation, but the unmediated quality of it. There was no audience, no profile, no performance, no curated identity. There… Continue reading
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The Most Important Educational Technology: The Small Group
What if the most powerful educational technology available to us right now is not artificial intelligence, adaptive software, predictive analytics, or the next digital learning platform? What if the most powerful educational technology is still the human small group? Continue reading
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Desire: Curated Before Noticed
A person begins forgetting what it feels like to encounter reality without immediately filtering it through visibility, aspiration, anxiety, or comparison. Silence becomes difficult. Boredom becomes intolerable. Ordinary life begins to feel insufficient unless it can be translated into something shareable, admirable, or meaningful to others. Continue reading
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Fragmented Identity
Looking back, I realize continuity rarely survived through dramatic moments of self-discovery. More often, it persisted through ordinary practices repeated quietly across time. Continue reading
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The Immediate Life and the Formation of Authenticity
A child is suffering. A relationship fractures. A conversation suddenly turns tense. Fear, anger, exhaustion, embarrassment, or grief emerges before thought has time to organize itself. We speak quickly. We defend ourselves instinctively. We search for relief before we search for meaning. Continue reading
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Secular and Sacred Social Imaginaries
Most of us live between these two imaginaries. We have inherited a secular way of thinking, but we have not lost the sense that meaning might be given rather than made. Continue reading
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A Preview of “The Architecture of Authenticity”
What follows is a preview of the book I am writing. I will be spending much of the summer of 2026. Sooo… a request: I am dying to hear if you would like to read a book like this. Would you? Continue reading
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Value Beyond Money: 5 Places to Find It
The question is not whether we believe in value beyond money. It is whether we are willing to take it seriously. Continue reading
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A Changing Feminist Question
“How are you living with your partner that empowers the freedom of the woman in your relationship?” This was the question of the boomer age, and my boomer siblings had put this question to my parents. But now, I feel no need to address this question. What I have come to realize is that this… Continue reading
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The Innocence That Kills: American Exceptionalism as Spiritual Pathology
The pattern is not incidental. It is structural. Each act of civilizational harm is metabolized by the myth of exceptionalism and converted into evidence of American seriousness, American resolve, American willingness to bear the weight of world-historical responsibility. The victims become, at best, unfortunate costs. The perpetrators remain, in their own self-understanding, the good guys. Continue reading
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Freedom Under Constraint: Middle Age, Wartime Imaginaries, and the Meaning of Easter
I had a plan for my retirement. Once the kids moved out, I thought my spouse and I were going to teach in the Middle East for a few years before we put our feet up on the beach in Thailand. The Middle East is the gateway to the rest of the world. Wars have… Continue reading
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Interpretation: Between Facts and Freedom
The central issue is not simply what is happening. It is how what is happening is being made intelligible. Because events, on their own, do not arrive with meaning already attached to them. They must be interpreted. They must be narrated. They must be placed within some kind of framework that allows people to say… Continue reading
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Air at 49
You have always walked your own road,not the easy one,but the one that asked something of you …and you answered. Not with noise,not with spectacle,but with a steady couragethat reshapes the world quietly. You carry distance in your bones …miles from where you began,threads of home stretched across time zones …and still, you stand,rooted in… Continue reading
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The Nuclear Option: Who needs Bombs?
“Closing the Strait of Hormuz would be Iran’s ‘nuclear option.’ The phrase is meant metaphorically. And yet, like many metaphors, it reveals more than it intends. Continue reading
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How Governments Frame Wars to Control the Moral Question
The first battle in many wars is therefore a battle over framing. Leaders attempt to shape the moral question the public believes it must answer. If they succeed, they gain a powerful advantage. People do not simply react to events. They react to the story that explains those events. Continue reading
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The QuestionS of Wars: Why Every War Asks the World Different Moral Questions
When a war begins, people often hear the same moral demand. You cannot remain neutral. You must choose a side. The statement sounds principled and urgent, and in moments of violence it can feel persuasive. Yet it is also misleading. Having lived in Saudi Arabia, and being exposed to both their value for increased wealth… Continue reading
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Arendt Reconsidered Zionism
Arendt believed she had identified a governing logic: the pursuit of security through domination, reliance on imperial sponsorship, and the presumption that conflict is eternal and unsolvable. In her view, this logic would entrench rather than resolve hostility. Continue reading
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Action in an Age of Systems: Anthony Giddens, Hannah Arendt, and the Problem of Technocratic Rationality
Her analysis of totalitarianism underscores how thoughtlessness and procedural obedience can replace moral responsibility. But her critique extends beyond extreme regimes. Whenever politics is reduced to technique, something essential is lost. Continue reading
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Love and Christian Nationalism
I am not a Christian nationalist. But neither am I comfortable with the reflex to sneer at those who are. That reflex reveals something troubling about our age: we no longer know how to disagree without attempting to destroy. The word “debate” increasingly feels like a ritual of denunciation. The goal is not persuasion, but… Continue reading
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A Letter to Western Canadian Readers: On Power, Separation, and the Cost of Exit
When separatism is framed as leverage (“do this or we leave”) it signals a shift away from persuasion and toward coercion. It treats political relationships not as shared projects to be renewed, but as transactional arrangements to be threatened. Continue reading
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Donald Trump and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence: Power Without Power
“A politics that cannot cooperate must coerce. And a politics that must coerce has already failed.” Continue reading
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Beyond Mastery: Grounded Human Power
The choice between domination and cooperation is therefore not merely political or organizational. It is existential. How we exercise power shapes who we become. Leverage secures obedience but hollows identity. Cooperation demands patience and humility, but it produces belonging. Continue reading
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A Letter to David Brooks
My brother and I have had recent dialogues about the necessity of the death of self. I feel like in much of the conversations surrounding the death of self, many people have meant the complete submission of the individual. But some mystics have understood the death of self to mean the destruction of the false… Continue reading
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Why Everything Feels Worse (And Why That’s Not an Accident)
At first, these systems work well. They serve people. But once we depend on them—once leaving becomes risky or complicated—the priorities shift. The system starts serving itself. Continue reading
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Understanding Sovereignty in Modern Political Discourse
Sovereignty renewed appeal cannot be explained solely by shifts in global power or the breakdown of international institutions. Rather, sovereignty has become inspirational because it mirrors a deeper concern of our age: the struggle for authenticity, i.e. the desire to act from within one’s own values rather than as an instrument of external systems. In… Continue reading
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Carney at the World Economic Forum – with commentary, links and references
Greenland looks like it will be an international testing ground. Minneapolis looks like the domestic testing ground. Continue reading
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Sovereignty: The Power Beyond Ownership
” Sovereignty and ownership overlap in everyday speech, but philosophically, linguistically, and practically they point to very different kinds of authority and relation.” Continue reading
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The Death of Ivan Ilych and 3 Days of Screaming on the Beach
“Once we faced the existential terror and went through it, we began to re-connect and enjoy life.” Continue reading
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Anabaptism and the Post Secular Condition: Witness, Pluralism, and the Limits of Secular Reason
I had gone out into the world as if it was completely unknown; I came back with the world in tow. Continue reading
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Doubt Beyond Certainty
My hunch that our religious instinct is best realized when we are exploring, and when we occupy places that permit exploration. Continue reading
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Secularism and Pluralism: Divergent Social Imaginaries
My faith as a Christian cannot be privatized. My relationship with God is personal, but it isn’t private. Continue reading
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A Deteriorating Internet
Advertising becomes more aggressive. User data is harvested more thoroughly. Algorithms are introduced not to foster understanding, but to prolong engagement. What was once delightful becomes tedious. Continue reading
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The Gift of Knowledge: Absorbed by Truth
Why do I say ex-philosopher? Because, since Descartes and perhaps before, modern Western thought has turned knowledge into a problem to be solved. Rationalism, empiricism, idealism, phenomenology, utilitarianism: all these systems tend to make knowledge into a mechanism of control, a means of prediction, a form of power. Descartes and Locke both used the word… Continue reading
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The Aura of Thought: McLuhan and Benjamin on AI
“Without presence, there is no memory. Without struggle, no ethics. Can a civilization survive on imitation alone?” Continue reading
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What A.I. Really Threatens: Yuval Harari and the Red Flag of Intimacy
It isn’t our sovereignty that AI threatens (since we never have been sovereign); it is our authenticity. Continue reading
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The Problem with Mass Pop Music isn’t that it’s “Pop”: Mass Culture and Mass Society
Republicans don’t annoy me; Democrats don’t either. Conservatives don’t annoy me, neither do Liberals or New Democrats. But…. technocrats annoy me. The Problem with Mass Pop Music isn’t that it’s “Pop”: Mass Culture and Mass Society Continue reading
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Rethinking Inclusion Part 3: Case Studies in a Revolution in Education
When we dug into it, we found that human agency, while widely assumed as a human right, is, in fact hotly contested and often inarticulate. It turns out this so-called human right to agency is something that isn’t assumed; it must be achieved. These institutional barriers have become systemic, and as such, we may begin… Continue reading
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Rosie
I hope, at some point, a kind stranger will be a safe light in the middle of the night for my youngest. Continue reading
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Technocratic Rationality, Value, and How Accounting Undercuts HR
“Instead of being framed by accounting practices, a company’s vision has to inform its accounting practices.” Continue reading
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A Meaning of Otherness: Colossians 3
Whether it is Bible reading or living in a home, we metaphorically translate what is foreign into familiarity and move what is to what ought to be. That is, overcoming otherness is bringing our uniqueness to a situation not originally intended to accept it, and then translating and transforming the situation so the uniqueness can… Continue reading
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Moral Ideals and the Pathology of “Doing Your Best”
“… Development itself constantly changes the self’s possibilities such that what would count as one’s ‘best’ transforms in ways that are at once real and out of view.” Continue reading
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Evangelicalism and Conservatism: From Doctrine Back to Disposition
If you have been paying attention, you will notice that there have been two particular examples of fragmentation that have coincided with each other, a fragmentation of the conservative movement, and a fragmenting of evangelical Christianity. In the heart of conservatism, there is a disagreement between the centrists who have complex sensitivities and more radical… Continue reading
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Podcast Episode: The Innocence That Kills: American Exceptionalism as Spiritual Pathology
Pip: There is a kind of pride that doesn't know it's pride — it just calls itself responsibility. Raymond Klassen at Ideals and Identities has thoughts about that, and they are not comfortable ones. Mara: Today we're looking at American exceptionalism as a spiritual formation — what it costs to believe a nation is innocent… Continue reading
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 