Featured Essays

Featured

The Enlightenment did more than champion reason. It transformed humanity’s experience of time itself. As geology shattered the chronology of Genesis and time expanded in both directions, intelligence became something new: the capacity to orient ourselves toward an open future without relying on inherited certainty. In the age of artificial intelligence, that unfinished project deserves renewed attention.

The Enlightenment’s Wager: Intelligence, AI, and the Open Future

What if the Enlightenment was not merely a historical era, but an unfinished wager on intelligence itself? This essay explores AI, Bergson, David Deutsch, James Hutton, and the possibility that intelligence expands by turning fate into an open field of possibilities. Against polarization, monoculture, and ressentiment, it argues for a rejuvenated Enlightenment grounded in accompaniment, fallibilism, and the courage to leap beyond what we already believe we understand.

The Enlightenment and the Intellect

The Enlightenment did not simply give us better explanations—it gave us time. By stretching human awareness into deep pasts and open futures, it transformed intellect into a force that can confront fate itself. Now, as computation accelerates this legacy, the question is no longer whether we can understand the world, but whether our institutions can keep pace with what our intelligence has become.

History of Intelligence

AI sets in motion a new chapter in the history of intelligence’s confrontation with fate and necessity. Telling the stories of its twists and turns will broaden our upstanding of what intelligence has been and can be.

Computational Power

These essays examine how digital systems reshape experience, agency, and the unfolding of time. This is not a moral complaint; it is an examination of possibilities.

Rejuvenation

Modernity is not defined by the loss of meaning, but by the expansion of human self-assertion—the long effort of our genus to shape contingency, redirect fate, and assume responsibility for outcomes once attributed to nature or the gods.

Greg Laugero 6/29/24 Greg Laugero 6/29/24

Mark 3:31-35: Who Is, Here Is

This essay reads Mark 3:31–35 as a decisive reconfiguration of belonging. Kinship is no longer anchored in blood, tradition, or continuity, but in presence and action—who is here, and what is done. Time is no longer something one inherits; it is something one inhabits. Ethical identity emerges not from origin, but from participation in a living moment.

Greg Laugero 12/10/23 Greg Laugero 12/10/23

Civitas Peregrina and Affirmation

Greg Laugero 10/27/23 Greg Laugero 10/27/23

Mercy without Recognition

Mercy is often framed as an extension of recognition: seeing oneself in the other. This essay pushes in the opposite direction. It explores mercy as an act that does not rely on identification or reciprocity, but on attentiveness to the moment at hand. Mercy here is not sentiment but temporal discipline—an ethical response that resists calculation, delay, and justification.

Greg Laugero 10/4/23 Greg Laugero 10/4/23

Luke 9:57-62: Roads, Renunciation and Following

Greg Laugero 9/17/23 Greg Laugero 9/17/23

Jesus and Pilate - Giorgio Agamben

The trial of Jesus was not a trial but a “handing over” as a form of giving up in the face of the “crossing of the temporal and the eternal that assumed the form of a trial.”

Greg Laugero 8/31/23 Greg Laugero 8/31/23

The Highest Poverty - Giorgio Agamben

The monastery perfected the structuring life through the rigorous measurement of time. This went well beyond simply organizing the day. How the monks spent their time became integral to their salvation, and a template for others.