Featured Essays
The Growing Gap Between Purpose and Discernment
We are not facing a collapse of meaning, but a growing gap between purpose and discernment. As computational power accelerates action faster than ethical habits can keep pace, disorientation hardens into resentment or withdrawal. This essay reframes our moment as a problem of tempo—and offers practical disciplines for learning to judge consequences in motion.
Practice: Discerning Accursed Shares
A practice of time that focuses on discerning how good intentions can create excessive energies that outrun good intentions. We live in a world where consequences spread faster than we can assess or predict. Learning to discern accursed shares as they happen will help us better navigate our growing power.
Practice: Ressentiment Check
Ressentiment is not a psychological weakness or a moral flaw. It is a signal that judgment has outrun discernment. This practice offers a way to notice when critique hardens into condemnation, suspend withdrawal that feels like moral clarity, and reopen ethical engagement in a world moving faster than inherited values can keep pace.
Practice: Repentance or Metanoia?
Metanoia is not repentance by another name. It is an orientation to time that delays meaning, resists judgment, and learns by moving forward. Drawing on Mark’s Gospel, this practice explores how patience, listening, and restraint can open a different experience of the future—one not governed by ressentiment or premature certainty.
Out-Computing the Gods
This essay examines how the discovery of computation transformed humanity’s relationship to fate. Beginning with Babylonian astronomy, it shows how early techniques of prediction turned omens into foresight, allowing humans to anticipate and intervene in processes once attributed to the gods.
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.
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.
Reading the Iliad: Mênis and the Moral Compass
Descending into Achilles passive mēnis in the Iliad leads to a better understanding of the birth of our democratic moral compass.
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