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Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

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  • May 23, 2026

    The Most Important Educational Technology: The Small Group

    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

    Leadership and Business, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, Charles Taylor, education, Hannah Arendt, learning, neurodiversity, Social Imaginary, teaching
  • May 17, 2026

    Desire: Curated Before Noticed

    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

    Leadership and Business, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, Charles Taylor, Existentialism, Girard, Mass Society, philosophy, Spirituality
  • May 17, 2026

    Fragmented Identity

    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

    Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, Charles Taylor, identity, Paul Riceour, Spirituality, Thich Naht Hanh, Thomas Merton
  • May 10, 2026

    The Immediate Life and the Formation of Authenticity

    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

    Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Meditation, Authenticity, Charles Taylor, Thomas Merton, Understanding, Reflexive, Simone Weil, McGilchrist
  • May 1, 2026

    Secular and Sacred Social Imaginaries

    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

    Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, Charles Taylor, sacred, secular, Spirituality
  • April 28, 2026

    A Preview of “The Architecture of Authenticity”

    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

    Leadership and Business, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, Charles Taylor, Mass Society, Meditation, philosophy, Politics, Spirituality
  • April 19, 2026

    Value Beyond Money: 5 Places to Find It

    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

    Leadership and Business, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Attention, Authenticity, contemplation, Freedom, Money, Value
  • April 14, 2026

    A Changing Feminist Question

    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

    Childhood education, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    Authenticity, father, femininity, feminism, LGBTQ, masculinity, mothers, Spirituality
  • April 7, 2026

    The Innocence That Kills: American Exceptionalism as Spiritual Pathology

    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

    Leadership and Business, Politics and Society, Spirituality
    American Exceptionalism, Authenticity, Charles Taylor, History, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Mass Society, Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr, Social Imaginary, Spirituality, Violence
  • April 5, 2026

    Freedom Under Constraint: Middle Age, Wartime Imaginaries, and the Meaning of Easter

    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

    Spirituality
    Authenticity, Meditation, Politics, Spirituality
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Recent Posts / blog

  • Three Threats of AI to Human Agency
  • Well-formed Small Groups Form Their Members
  • A Sovereign Alberta Within a United Canada? When Political Language Conceals More Than It Says.

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