Featured Essays
What Is Religion?
At some point, anyone who seriously reflects on their place in the world encounters a deeper question than what to do next. The question is whether we are being called—called to attend to something that exceeds us and yet moves through us. This essay explores religion not as belief or law, but as a cultivated openness to purpose arriving from beyond the self. It argues that discernment, not certainty, is what keeps purpose from hardening into dogma, and that metanoia names an orientation to the future that remains alive to what has not yet taken shape.
Energy and Epiphany in the Later Works of Michel Serres
A brief reflection on Michel Serres’ understanding of our ongoing power to expand our understanding and harnessing of energy to overcome fate and destiny. He re-reads the experience of religion in this context.
Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution
This essay introduces Michel Serres’ late philosophy by emphasizing its moral core rather than its metaphysics. Drawing on The Incandescent and le Grand Récit, it explores auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.
Fate, Computation and the End of Christian Time
This brief essay traces how Enlightenment calculation reshaped humanity’s experience of time, fate, and foresight—from biblical chronology to geological deep time and modern predictive control. Rather than condemning the Enlightenment, it argues for renewing its legacy by learning how to live responsibly within the futures we now help to compute.
Michel Serres: The Synthetic Experience of Religion
This essay offers an accessible introduction to Michel Serres’s philosophy through his final book Religion. It explains how concepts like clinamen, emptiness, and navigation help us understand responsibility, violence, and meaning in modern life.
Bataille, Religion, Experience
What is to become of religion in our time? In this essay, I descend into Bataille’s speculations on the contingent birth of consciousness out of the ‘water in water’ of pure experience.
Myth and Thought among the Greeks - Jean-Pierre Vernant
An exceptionally detailed and compelling investigation into the evolution of Greek philosophical thought out of myth.
Time and Theodicy
Religion and philosophy emerge when we descend into our experience of time
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.
Antirrhetikos - Evagrius
David Brakke’s Introduction to his translation of this key work by Evagrius of Pontus is well worth the read. In Evagrius I have found no one who more intensely thought about time as practice.
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.
Down to Earth - Bruno Latour
A highly accessible version of Facing Gaia. For me it is the classic statement of how the accumulation of wealth has become the latest expression of Gnosticism.
Religion, Philosophy, Time
Messianic Duration
Tone as a Practice of Time
A New Soteriology
Overcoming Ressentiment: Belief Versus Practice
American Ressentiment
What Is a “Confession?” Part 3
