Spirituality
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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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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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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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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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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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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