Charles Taylor
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Three Threats of AI to Human Agency
A letter can have presence. A phone call can have presence. A Zoom conversation can have presence. Even AI-assisted writing may preserve presence if the person remains genuinely involved, accountable, and responsive. Mediation is not the enemy. Substitution is. AI threatens presence when my words arrive but I have remained safely elsewhere. 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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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 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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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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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