Follow these essays
New pieces appear irregularly and are meant to be read slowly.
You can follow by email, RSS, or in Feedly.
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
What Is a “Confession”? Part 2
What is a “Confession”? Part 1
Rejoicing - Bruno Latour
A lesser known work of Latour’s that shouldn’t be. A very personal and remarkable understanding of what it means to be non-Modern and religious at the same time.