Trying to muster coherence, I heard a calm German voice announcing our arrival in Zurich. Reality was coming back to me. I was on a train from Biel to Zurich airport, ending a whirlwind trip to Switzerland in a heatwave. I had fallen sound asleep and awoke at my destination.

I scrambled to gather up my things. I stuffed my book and iPad into my backpack, grabbed my suitcase, and hustled off the train. I navigated the transition from train station to airport, checked in, nabbed the obligatory Lindt & Toblerones for the family from the Duty Free shop, then sat down for a cappuccino, hoping to finish the draft of a chapter I had been writing on the train.

Only then did I realize: in my flustered scramble to get off the train, I had left a notebook behind. When I fell asleep, it must have nestled into a fold in my seat and escaped my harried attention when I awoke.

The bottom fell out of my stomach. I am sure that my shoulders visibly collapsed. I must have been the very picture of the Ben Affleck meme (minus the hair and the jawline and really, really wishing I had the cigarette).

If you’re a writer, you might be able to imagine how crestfallen I was. The notebook1 held over two years’ worth of musings, scribblings, notations, and dreaming—two years of reflection, introspection, and lament. In it were notes in which I was beginning to work out at least three new book ideas, along with the fruit of two years of reading in both primary texts and secondary literature. The journal included notes on visits to multiple museums, art exhibits, and film screenings, the record of my observations and emotional reactions, all fodder for who knows what in the future. It was hard not to think that a piece of my life had been left behind on that train.

Mirabile dictu, I did not cuss. Or cry. After an audible sigh, and then a deep cleansing breath, I was kind of surprised how quickly I was able to let it go.

It’s funny, actually. A testament to my Bible-college education, it’s crazy how quickly I recalled the travails of the Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, who dictated an entire scroll, only to have King Jehoiakim burn up the entire thing, and Jeremiah had to start over. I suppose I took some strange encouragement from the fact that, when Jeremiah did the whole thing over, “many similar words were added to them” (Jer. 36:32). Maybe loss is gain?

I am, no doubt, going to be working on something in the coming weeks and will, by force of mental habit, reach for earlier notes and be reminded they’re lost. I will feel the loss afresh. But I’ve been a bit surprised by my own calm about this loss. And so I’ve gotten curious about my rather zen composure.2

First thought is simply: mental health makes a difference. Seriously. My forty-two-year-old self would have lost his sh*t. And everyone around me would have paid for it. I would have been frantically worried that my career was over. This lost notebook would have been freighted with every other unarticulated loss in my life and would have become the totem of my deeper existential despair. Three cheers for counseling and fifty-something maturity!

I think another reason I haven’t been devastated is tied to one of the reasons I keep a physical notebook in the first place.3 I firmly believe that inscribing ideas with pen and paper is not just archival—prosthetic memory—but also generative. In other words, I think scribbling things down and marking up the page and drawing lines to connect-the-dots is its own form of thinking. And having done that (physical) thinking, the thought also stays with me in a new way, apart from its record on the page. The idea is mine because I’ve jotted down and worked it out, even if I don’t have the paper.

This is a new sort of epistemic trust I’ve been trying to practice over the past decade. A younger me was fastidious about preserving every scrap on which I had jotted down an idea or harnessed a thought, as if my thinking had been off-loaded to the material archive of my notes and now, to keep the ideas, I had to hoard the paper. But I’ve realized that the process of writing actually inscribes the thinking in me, and so I’ve tried to let go of the anxiety of preservation and come to trust that the ideas are being worked out in me and that they’re a part of me that I can access when I’m creatively engaged. I half wonder if the loss of the notebook isn’t a little test of my epistemic trust in this regard (yes, that Bible-college education did a number on me).

One last thought. My lost notebook included pages and pages of writing I call “journaling.” This is a practice I learned in therapy, and it is something that my wife, Deanna, often encourages when she can see dark clouds beginning to form in my eyes. Something’s going on, babe, she’ll say. Why don’t you make some time to journal? It is a physical ritual for introspection. I think by writing, so journaling is—cliché be damned—a way of processing something inchoate and stirring. There’s an act of naming here: naming emotions, fears, anxieties, laments. Sometimes “journaling” is just honest description of a situation, giving myself permission to name what (or who) has disappointed me. Sometimes it is a form of excavation: sitting introspectively long enough to see the monsters surface from the subterranean lakes of my unconscious; often enough they begin to dissolve as soon as they break through. Sometimes journaling is a physical act of wondering, or imagining possible scenarios, whether my worst fears or latent dreams.

Over the past two years with this particular notebook, I had “journaled” my way through some of my most difficult professional disappointments and disillusionment. I went through a season of profound disorientation; there were months I felt abandoned and adrift. Most of it was about profound alienation from the institutions in which I had invested myself. I am not ashamed to say there were multiple nights of tears. I am profoundly grateful for a partner who meets me in these spaces and shares the volatile work of discernment and healing. I’m also grateful for a community that gave us space to retreat for a time of world-changing, soul-saving discernment. Through all of this I was journaling in this notebook, working out just how and why I was so profoundly disappointed, why I felt so betrayed, what I could hope for on the other side, at least when I could glimpse it. (This might be something I write about more substantively at some point; we’ll see.)

January 2026 was a watershed in this journey and I have been at profound peace since that time.4 External circumstances haven’t really changed but the process accomplished a kind of soul-change that I carry with me. Much of that soul-work was worked out in the lost notebook. But letting it all go seems right—like writing one’s griefs on tiny paper boats and setting them adrift on the sea. Gelassenheit, Meister Eckhart called it. A letting go that yields freedom. The loss that is gain. The less that is more. The contraction that dilates the heart.

I didn’t leave my mind or ideas or future on that Swiss train. I let go of a lot that now leaves room in my heart for fresh work.

Thankfully I already finished the book that had occupied a good chunk of that notebook: a second, substantially revised edition of my 2009 book, Desiring the Kingdom, coming out this fall. Watch this space for more details in the next few weeks (including an exciting panel on the book at this fall’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting).

And it was another notebook that carried the work that became my latest book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. Looking back now, I realize that writing that book was its own sort of preparation for this season in which I’ve found myself. If you’re new around here, I hope you might check out the book.

I have no interest in being a pundit. However, in advance of an important Senate primary election here in the state of Michigan, more and more people invoke “electability” as a way to explain why they won’t vote for a candidate—in this case, Abdul El-Sayed, for whom I will be voting enthusiastically.1 As both a citizen and a philosopher, I have reservations about this “electability” argument. So, as an exercise for myself as much as anyone else, I’m here trying to work out why I think the “electability” argument is fallacious.

Conditions and Context: Democratic Primaries

The “electability” argument is invoked in the primary process, for obvious reasons. After all, it is an argument about which candidate would be more “electable” in a general election where proverbial independents and undecideds come into play. Primaries also function as proxy referenda for intra-party debate about priorities and future direction. This is why primaries play out mostly for the so-called “base” of the party. “Electability” arguments make claims about how candidates (and, by proxy, platforms & agendas) will supposedly fare in a general election where non-base voters have a say.

However, it seems to me that “electability” arguments are largely unique to the Democratic Party, or at least are now.2 The Republicans chose Donald Trump as a candidate, for goodness sake! And he won; twice. Any electability argument set sail from the Republican Party in 2015.

In the case of our 2026 Michigan U.S. Senate primary, these electability arguments are generated by the Democratic Party machine, which is now in full swing here. Trotting out party centrists like (unsurprisingly) Gretchen Whitmer and (very disappointingly) our own House representative, Hillary Scholten, the DNC is backing AIPAC darling, Haley Stevens. This is all to be expected insofar as the Schumer-Jeffries party lives off Zionist super PACs and remains committed to liberalism’s enshrinement of atomism, capitalism, and militarism. As I’ve written elsewhere, the leadership of the Democratic Party is just a progressive form of neoliberalism still intent on keeping billionaires happy. This is why they are anxious about a socialist-leaning candidate like Abdul El-Sayed. Instead of debating policy and platform, though, they trot out “electability” as basically an in-house version of Red Scare.

What’s Wrong with “Electability?”

Social scientists have documented just how amorphous and unscientific the concept of “electability” is. As a philosopher, I’ve been trying to articulate why I think such arguments are not just strategically wrong but fallacious and even, in some ways, unethical. I think there are a few problems:

“Electability” arguments forestall debate about principles. This is probably what most maddens me about the electability play. Once the electability card has been played, any substantive discussions about policies and platform are shut down. The election is turned into a simple tribal binary: I want our side to win; I don’t think that candidate can win; therefore, I am voting in the primary for the other candidate. What’s ironic, and a little crazy, is when people invoke electability despite agreeing with the supposedly “un-electable” candidate’s proposals. You’ll hear people say how they’ll hold their nose and grit their teeth and vote in the primary for Stevens, even though they disagree with important aspects of her proposals and voting record. They are happy to compromise for the sake of a possible future “win.”

Now, I’ll be the first to grant that politics is the art of compromise, especially when it comes to the hard work of legislation. But a party’s primary contest is one of the very few places where we can actually test and debate principles. And once people have decided to put the “un-electable” moniker on a candidate, we have shut down the possibility of having that debate. Indeed, the electability argument is anti-principial because it reduces everything to the pragmatism of appeal. For people who tout electability, it is strategy all the way down. This, I would argue, is a form of political cynicism.

Sometimes it’s worth the risk of losing an election to test principles and policies with an electorate. But we will never be able to conduct such an experiment if electability decides in advance who and what is viable. This is why:

“Electability” arguments are a stalking horse for the status quo. Concerns about electability are usually accompanied by a constellation of adjectives: the un-electable candidate is too “radical,” too “fringe,” too “progressive,” and even, sometimes, “un-American.” This is why I think electability is the Democratic Party’s version of a Red Scare: “We are capitalists, not socialists,” a group of House Democrats proudly proclaimed. Their implication, which wasn’t even subtle, is that socialism is Un-American. Such Democrats claim the mythical “center.” That is just code for sustaining the status quo.

But it is the status quo that is the problem. “Electability” seems like it can be a convenient cover for people who talk progressive but really don’t want to unsettle the status quo.

“Electability” claims are presumptuous and un-democratic. Claims about electability are speculative, at best. They are hypotheses about what a general electorate would do—what they want, what they like, what they hope for. In other words, electability arguments enshrine speculation and/or polling as if the future is determined. So electability arguments reify speculation and rob an electorate of agency. It is in this sense that I think electability arguments are un-democratic: in the name of a speculative claim about how an electorate will vote, the argument actually denies the general electorate an opportunity to vote for the supposedly “un-electable” candidate.

But an electorate can be full of surprises (hello, 2016?!). I’d rather an electorate have the agency to show us than trust speculation in advance.

“Electability” arguments seem (unconsciously) elitist. These days, electability arguments are trotted out against socialist candidates as too “radical” for the general electorate. In a state like Michigan, the speculation is that any viable state-wide Democratic candidate has to find some way to appeal to voters on the right. In the 2026 Senate primary, this is invoked to describe Abdul El-Sayed as “un-electable” because he is “too progressive” (e.g., medicare for all) for Michigan.

This strikes me as stereotyping pretending to be sophisticated political analysis. It is an elitist assumption that assumes the working class are basically incapable of voting in their own interest. Why can’t we imagine that a smart, savvy, articulate candidate like El-Sayed could convince and persuade rural, working class voters how his policy proposals are in their interest? White professional elites who opt for Stevens in the name of “electability” presume to have insight into the psychology of voters who live in another world. Why not respect these voters as people with agency who can make up their own minds on the basis of evidence and argument? Let’s drop the “electability” trump card and actually debate policies and proposals.

§

I don’t deny that we have to think about strategy. While I’m all for noble failures for the sake of principle, I also realize that idealist political posturing can result in making conditions worse for the poor and vulnerable by playing right into the hands of the Republicans.

Those are the questions I think about in November. In primary season, I want us3 to have real debates about fundamental and foundational questions about our hopes for the body politic. That means testing whether the party, and then the broader electorate, might be willing to entertain a political vision that is not just an extension of the neoliberal status quo.

In the most proximate case here in Michigan, the electability play assumes that Democrats will only win the state-wide Senate election in our supposedly “purple” state (Michigan went for Trump in 2024) if they can manage to win some “independent” voters in the center. Gretchen Whitmer, who clearly has national aspirations, has made this move, trying to court center-right support.

But I think this play for some fabled “center” is a misbegotten strategy; this is the DNC confusing 2026 with 2008. I don’t think the Dems win Michigan by courting a fickle “center;” instead, they should be mobilizing a more radical left. It’s not a matter of trying to win over people who voted for Trump in 2024; it’s a matter of mobilizing a bunch of voters who have concluded that the difference between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats hardly makes a difference.

The DNC wants to recover the status quo; candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and other democratic socialists have more imagination—they are imagining a different future altogether. What if this is the opportunity for it to begin to arrive? That’s what I’ll be voting for when I vote for Abdul next Tuesday: the hope that our political life need not be captive to Capital and billionaires—that we can imagine government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

We are spending a couple of weeks in France. The first week we were in Paris. I presented a paper at the big “Derrida Today” Conference at the iconic École Normale Supérieure. (Including mine, there were four papers putting Derrida and Hegel back into conversation, all by young scholars, which I count as intriguing.) Given the heat, we fled the capital a day earlier than planned to extend our time, now, in the south of France.

I know some of you will sympathize when I say that one of the biggest stressors of preparing for a two-week sojourn is selecting which books to pack! Deanna and I both love to bring reading that embeds us in the context of where we’ll be. In addition to a volume of Hegel (Faith & Knowledge) and Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (in preparation for a new book project), I selected three volumes for pleasure: Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork (absolutely stunning—I will have to say more later), The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (Canada, Paris, and the south of France all rolled into one!), and We Have Only This Life to Live, a marvelous collection of Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays and criticism published by NYRB Classics.

By the time I was in graduate school studying French philosophy in the 1990s, Sartre was already passé. (I suspect Derrida felt the same to young scholars studying in the 2010s.) Sartre and Camus lived on in undergraduate courses in “Existentialism and Phenomenology,” but this all had the musty whiff of recent history—what used to be edgy and provocative but now settled into a comfortable place in the curriculum. There was nothing left to surprise us; the canon was closed.

We were wrong about this, of course. We’re always wrong about the recent past, especially theorists and theory, perhaps. It’s as if we have to let thinkers become petrified and passé so that they can then be revisited and excavated afresh by readers in the next generation. (I feel like that was some of what was happening at the Derrida conference last week; I was quite struck by how remarkably young the participants were. A sign of re-discovery? These young readers returning to the text have something to teach us fiftysomethings.)

Returning to Sartre today is bracing. Here is philosophical prose that is alive, ambitious, even brash. This collection includes works of criticism (e.g., illuminating readings of Camus’ The Stranger and Bataille’s Inner Experience) and philosophical essays; but it also includes Sartre’s journalism, including a fascinating series of reports from the U.S. in 1945, with a particular focus on the state of the American working class, such as it is (which is…not!). These reports take on new valence in a moment where there is some furtive hope for socialist candidates in U.S. electoral politics right now. Sartre is at first puzzled and then unsurprised when he realizes that even organized labor in the U.S. is opposed to socialism (the AFL & CIO, he notes, are both “in favor of extracting the most from free enterprise”). “Marxism,” he reports in 1945, “about which the immense majority of Americans don’t know the first thing, is America’s bogeyman.” This, he documents, is because of all the ways U.S. capitalism hides class structure and division. We are all so “optimistic,” that we would rather believe we could be the 1% (Tomorrow! Tomorrow!) than dismantle a system that keeps creating a 1% that ascends further and further into the stratosphere. The political economy of the U.S. is a lottery that calls itself “freedom.” Workers operate on the false hope—built into the “American Dream”—that they can beat the house. This, says Sartre, is why there’s no proletariat in the U.S. When it comes to the American “worker,” “the plunder occurs with his consent.”

Included in this collection is also Sartre’s much-anthologized essay, “The Republic of Silence,” which begins with this notorious line, oft misunderstood:

Never were we freer than under the German occupation.

With nascent fascism percolating in the U.S. again, this searing essay takes on a renewed urgency. In the face of “smartly dressed torturers,” the choice to be human is presented starkly. “Is not this total responsibility in total solitude the very revelation of freedom?” Under the conditions of occupation arose a “Republic of Silence and Night”: “in the shadows and in blood, the strongest of Republics was forged. Each of its citizens knew he had an obligation to all and that he had to rely on himself alone.” This “Republic without institutions” would be the matrix for another Republic. Do we not face the same choice?

In case you’ve never read Sartre’s essay, or haven’t read it in a while, I here share it as a kind of intellectual public service.

The Republic of Silence

By Jean-Paul Sartre

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.

The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than…” And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO.

But the very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace. All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his own liberty, his capacity for resisting torture and death.

To those who were engaged in underground activities, the conditions of their struggle afforded a new kind of experience. They did not fight openly like soldiers. In all circumstances they were alone. They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance.

Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty? This being stripped of all, this solitude, this tremendous danger, were the same for all. For the leaders and for their men, for those who conveyed messages without knowing what their content was, as for those who directed the entire Resistance, the punishment was the same – imprisonment, deportation, death. There is no army in the world where there is such equality of risk for the private and for the commander-in-chief. And this is why the Resistance was a true democracy: for the soldier as for the commander, the same danger, the same forsakenness, the same total responsibility, the same absolute liberty within discipline.

Thus, in darkness and in blood, a Republic was established, the strongest of Republics. Each of its citizens knew that he owed himself to all and that he could count only on himself alone. Each of them, in complete isolation, fulfilled his responsibility and his role in history. Each of them, standing against the oppressors, undertook to be himself, freely and irrevocably. And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism. No one failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.

Yesterday, the IPO for SpaceX made one of the world’s most heinous public actors grotesquely wealthy. (Oxfam notes that this makes one person, Elon Musk, wealthier than 46% of the global population. Try to let that sink in.)

To better understand this phenomenon and, increasingly, the world Elon has made and that we have to live in, I commend an excellent new book by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. I want to highlight some of their account with the hope of enticing you to read the book for yourself.

Co-authored by a historian and a journalist, Muskism is the sort of “first draft of history” that is also shored up by serious historical scholarship. (I highly recommend reading this new one as a companion to Slobodian’s remarkable, award-winning history of neoliberalism and the rise of the far right, Hayek’s Bastards.1) Tarnoff’s journalism, coupled with Slobodian’s incisive theoretical frame, weds reportage to critical analysis and insight. And as a first draft of history, it also tells us something about the future, such that it almost feels like this book, published on April 21, saw June 12 coming.

“Muskism” is coined as a correlate to “Fordism.” If Fordism was shorthand for 20th century capitalism, Muskism is shorthand for 21st century capitalism. The authors track Musk’s formation and entrepreneurial history to glimpse what has shaped him and, subsequently, how his business practices and “philosophy” have shaped the world we inhabit today. You can see most of these features of “Muskism” in yesterday’s IPO offering, which also signaled the willing complicity of banks and governments in the monstrosity of such financial mythology.

Fabulism

A key ingredient of Muskism has always been “fabulism.” Musk “sells fantasy.” In this regard, Slobodian and Tarnoff note that “Musk’s wealth is also almost entirely held in the stock of his own company. As he put it in an interview, ‘if Tesla and SpaceX went bankrupt, I would go bankrupt immediately.” In other words, Musk’s own wealth depends on a hype-machine (which is why he bought Twitter, which he turned into a personal hype-megaphone, algorithmically centering his own voice and views.)

“Valuation,” as Marx anticipated, has a “mystical character;” in a financialized world, “worth” is numinous and mysterious. Musk understands this, and as a devoted reader of fantasy and sci-fi (common in the Silicon Valley set), he leverages this to inflate value. “Fabulism,” as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it, “is a literary genre that mixes fantasy and realism.” You have to keep inflating the bubble because “value” isn’t objective; rather, to paraphrase Richard Rorty, “value” is what JP Morgan will let you get away with.

This is why Muskism depends on the perpetual expectation of pending technological breakthroughs, planetary salvation, or financial windfalls. To sustain his wealth, Musk must sustain belief in the exponential future growth of his companies.

Yesterday’s IPO was a barometer of the extent to which the world—and especially the financial world—is buying the fantasies that Musk is selling.

Grift, or “State Symbiosis”

Such fabulism always functions as a mask or stalking horse. If you keep telling tall tales about SpaceX’s goal of colonizing [sic!] Mars, it will distract from the fact that SpaceX makes money by launching satellites—and that these satellites expand capacities for surveillance and military destruction. That way you can “talk libertarian” while creating businesses that are completely dependent on the state—both for infrastructure and as a client.

Slobodian and Tarnoff highlight this as one of the lessons Musk learned from Silicon Valley in the 1990s:

Silicon Valley would teach him that the real opportunity didn’t lie in escaping the state but grafting into it—using its guarantees as scaffolding for private gain. […] Uncle Sam would finance the future, but capital would own it.

Pressing for deregulation and decentralization was not about withering the state but rather making it pliable and dependent on private actors/corporations while, at the same time, these corporations leveraged state-funded investments. “Silicon Valley as a whole owed its existence to the federal government, which bankrolled the region’s tech industry after World War Two because the military needed electronics.” After the National Science Foundation relinquished control of the internet’s core infrastructure to the private sector in April 1995 (Al Gore was a key player in this), then the private sector dot-com boom began. Musk watched and learned: look for strategic opportunities to surf public-sector investment for private gain.

“Space [= satellites] represented the next big publicly funded business opportunity” (35)—not to mention an unprecedented expansion of the U.S. security apparatus alongside increasing privatization (38). The outworking of neoliberalism since Reagan, the pattern was “a form of privatization in which not only money but power flowed from public into private hands.” In other words, it’s not just that private coprorations would be contracted to do the government’s or military’s bidding. The government and military ceded agency about means and, frighteningly, even ends.

SpaceX, like Blackwater, would also benefit from the privatization of power. The company helped pioneer a new style of aerospace contracting in which design and production decisions were no longer dictated by the state, as in the traditional Cold War model. Instead, entrepreneur’s would be the ones in charge.

Slobodian and Tarnoff calls this “state symbiosis” (39), an arrangement by which private companies become “state-like”: “The goal was not to eliminate government but to vassalize it” (39). SpaceX is now “the de facto gatekeeper for government access to low Earth orbit,” which means strategic access to space is governed by Elon Musk—and not only for the U.S.. The un-democratic implications of this should be obvious.

This “sovereignty-by-service” is behind Musk’s arrogance and hubris on the world stage. “When a single individual owns the infrastructure, he doesn’t need to run a government to shape geo-politics” (55). This is especially true not only because his company is “state-like” but also because so many states—via his Starlink network—are dependent on his company.

Platform Capitalism

This gets a key aspect of Musk’s power—and “Muskism” as a philosophy to which others aspire, especially in Silicon Valley. It has been described as “platform capitalism” (and is a feature of “technofeudalism”). The authors summarize the formula: “Make a market not a product. Don't worry about revenue until you’ve reached hyper scale, then use your monopoly position to extract super-profits. Idolize your founder as a princely visionary” (29). In other words, create a platform; play the long game to first get everyone on that platform; then make them dependent on that platform; secure your monopoly; then extract, extract, and extract, without competition and, in some cases, with the force of government requirement. This cycle, of course, is not unlike the role of the drug dealer: give the first hits for free, create a market of people dependent on your supply, secure your market dominance and, ideally, monopoly.

This plays out in Muskism’s version of techno-sovereignty:

The wager of Muskism is that sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial—defined by access to bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate.

The goal of SpaceX is to monopolize state access to low Earth orbit, which has a range of geopolitical and military implications.

Fortress Futurism, or Apartheid Modernism

One of the lessons Musk absorbed from his South Africa childhood was not only white supremacy2 but also a particular worldview that leverages civil unrest and violence as a market opportunity for securing privileged whites (for the most part) in their compounds and fortresses. This is why Tesla is not about cars; it is about batteries and selling self-reliance for when the infrastructure collapses. The Tesla cyber truck is exhibit A with its Mad Max-ish “survival aesthetic”: “This was not a vehicle for a better world. It was a vehicle for whatever came after.” Muskism looks at our polarization and civil unrest and concludes: there’s a lot of money to be made in a (cold?) civil war. Which is why fomenting the civil war is a business strategy.

Late Musk: Cyborgs and Viruses

Tarnoff and Slobodian track Musk’s development up through his DOGE experiment with the U.S. government. DOGE looks like a failure if you think it was about efficiency and saving money. But what if it really wasn’t? What if it was about access and surveillance?

In the second half of the book, Tarnoff and Slobodian trace Musk’s formation by video game culture, Anime films & TV, and the way his “very online” persona feeds, and feeds off of, memes (this relates back to fabulism and hype3). This part of the story was kind of shocking to me, mostly because I am so ignorant about these digital worlds. What Musk grasped was that “the internet was becoming the primary layer of reality” (102).

For Musk, the internet is a human-machine interface. As Musk once told Joe Rogan, humanity is just becoming “the biological bootloader for AI” (105). If memes move human behavior (as Musk learned and leveraged), that also means this interface was susceptible to being leveraged ‘for ill,’ so to speak—for Musk that means the human mind could, by means of the internet, become infected with a “woke virus” that would contaminate us with ideas like (gasp!) all humans are equal. This explains a lot of Musk’s supposedly “erratic” behavior of late: It is all calculated to secure his empire. Thus Muskism turns out to be a form of “cyborg conservatism” (11).

§

This brief encapsulation is intended as a kind of PSA, written with the hope that you’ll read the book, which is well-researched, with copious notes. It is also written with a verve that matches the urgency of this inflection point. As the authors put it, “Muskism can be found in the feedback loop between man and moment. To understand the world that Musk aims to build, we have to understand the worlds that Musk built.” Muskism is the place to start.

It’s a weirdly special treat for a philosopher and wanna-be-theologian to have their work appear in German, a language we all had to learn as young scholars because the German-speaking intellectual tradition had so shaped modern thinking.

I was asked to provide a brief Foreword to the German edition, which was also an occasion to think about the book’s appearance a decade ago. I share this Foreword to the German edition below.

Foreword to the German Edition of You Are What You Love

This German translation of You Are What You Love joins other international editions of the book—Korean, Portuguese, Swedish, and others. It is perhaps fitting that, as I pen this Foreword to the German edition, I am also preparing a sermon for Pentecost. Like those first-century witnesses, I continue to be surprised by the many tongues in which my book comes back to me. Each new edition is a wonder. I am humbled and grateful.

This German edition appears as You Are What You Love turns ten-years-old. On the one hand, a decade is not very long (especially as I get older!); on the other hand, 2016 feels like it was a different century. To give you just some sense of a time marker: when You Are What You Love was first published in April 2016, most of us still thought the idea of Donald Trump being president of the United States was a farce. We had no idea it could both be a farce and reality.

I highlight this because, in an important sense, You Are What You Love tries to provide a fresh diagnosis of the ways Christians can be assimilated to the defaults of a dominant culture. All of our biblical knowledge, doctrinal articulation, and apologetic prowess fail to resist the lure of cultural liturgies that so often bypass our intellects and shape our imaginations, or what the Bible so often refers to as “the heart.” Too often Christians fend off false doctrines or bad ideas while, at the same time, happily apprenticing their hearts to the wiles of Mammon. Over the past decade, perhaps especially in the United States, but not only there, we have seen how Christian dogma can be enlisted for grotesque machinations of power, domination, and de-humanizing exclusion. In this sense, I think You Are What You Love’s diagnosis of cultural liturgies is only more relevant today.

I think of this book in the spirit of Augustine’s City of God. Not that I am claiming any comparison to that Christian classic! Instead, I mean that You Are What You Love undertakes the sort of cultural critique that Augustine modeled in his critical “reading” of the pagan rituals and “fabulous liturgies” of the late Roman empire. The threat of these rituals is not just that they might occasion false thoughts; it is that they might capture our hearts—that they would train us to love what Rome loves. They are exercises of libido dominandi.

But to counter these cultural liturgies, it is not enough to have an analysis or critique. We also need countermeasures. We need reformative liturgies that train our hearts to want what God wants—the vision of shalom so often sung by the prophets. This is why, constructively, You Are What You Love articulates the importance of retrieving the catholic wisdom of the church’s worship. Learning to love takes practice. Learning to love God, and love what God loves, takes the practices of embodied worship, animated by Word and Sacrament, in which we learn the shape of a cruciform life that bears witness to that coming kingdom where people from every tribe and tongue and nation sing the song of the Lamb who was slain yet reigns.

–Pentecost 2026

Over at the Yale University Press blog I have written a short essay that tries to situate my new book in terms of a wider cultural conversation about polarization, suspicion, disinformation and mistrust. Here’s an opening snippet:

Read the rest at the Yale University Press blog.

This is a pile of just some of the books I’ve been hoping to write about here at Quid Amo.

But alas, other more pressing obligations keep getting in the way. I’ve enjoyed a rich but heavy semester of teaching that includes new preps. In my 200-level course on modern philosophy (1600-1900), I’ve expanded the Marx unit and now incorporated the excellent new Princeton edition of Capital. And I’ve been teaching an intensive upper-level seminar on Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The students in this class have been intrepid readers alongside me as we wade through the brilliant density of Brandom’s 800+ age opus. This has turned the semester into an on-ramp to next year’s sabbatical project.

In addition, for the past month, when not teaching, I’ve been on the road in support of my new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark. This began with several events in NYC the first week; since then I’ve enjoyed a rich conversation about the book at Harvard Divinity School, a big warm reception for the book right here in Grand Rapids, and I’m just back from three marvelous events in different parts of Austin, Texas. For many of these events, I’ve been on stage with interlocutors who have, in a sense, metabolized my book and then offered it back to me in ways that helped me see my own creation in a new light (or a more luminous dark!). Very grateful for these generous readers.

It’s been moving and invigorating to hear how the book is landing with people in different seasons of their own journeys. I’ve been especially heartened to be in spaces where young people are nodding in hungry curiosity as I’ve talked about the book. And thank you, dear readers, who have shared your own vulnerable notes. It’s kind of the heart of the book: there is a tenderness born of the darkness in which we find one another again.

While finishing up the semester and tackling stacks of grading, I’ll continue to travel in support of the book. Maybe I’ll be in your neighborhood?

Remaining Tour Dates

CHICAGO
Tuesday, May 5, 4pm
Seminary Coop Bookstore, 5151 S. Woodlawn

DENVER
Thursday, May 7, 7pm
Platt Park Church, 1601 S Clarkson St, Denver, CO
Sponsored by the Denver Institute

ONLINE
Wednesday, May 20, 4pm ET
Image journal conversation with Nick Ripatrazone
[stay tuned for link/signup]

WASHINGTON, DC
Wednesday, May 27, 5:30pm
Rooftop reception hosted by The Trinity Forum

I’ll also be participating in the Understory Festival in DC on May 28-30.

Writing Elsewhere

In lieu of posting here, I’ve had a couple of reviews published elsewhere over the past couple of months. (The book review might still be my favorite genre.)

“A Cosmos Fueled and Fired by Love,” in Plough. This is my review of Clare Carlisle’s enchanting new book, Transcendence for Beginners. My working title was “Little Incarnations Everywhere,” which I still prefer. A snippet:

It is no mistake, I think, that in Carlisle’s argument and analysis, it is the novels of Eliot and Proust and the paintings of Celia Paul that calibrate the eye for such perception. There is something about the condensed attention of the arts – whether a novel, a poem, a film, or a sculpture – that angles our perception to see the human sub species aeternitatis. Not all art, of course, but art in its best, most evocative modes. It is the same artistic and literary sensibility that Carlisle brings to her own writing. She brings a biographer’s heart and a novelist’s eye to attend to even unnamed human lives in a way that makes them shimmer, each “a sign that love flows through us because it is an element of reality itself: like water, like air, like fire.” In her new natural theology, she invites us to see little incarnations everywhere, each a sign that the cosmos is fired and fueled by love.

“Christopher Beha’s Journey of Belief,” in America. This is my review of Christopher Beha’s new book, Why I am Not an Atheist. The title of my review in the print edition is “Metaphysics Won’t Save Us.” A snippet:

This explains my perplexity, even anger, when Beha, near the end of the book, tries to pin Christian nationalism and what he calls modern-day illiberalism on the legacy of Romantic idealism. His strange—and I think mistaken—claim is that “the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice.” (A reminder from Logic 101: Correlation is not causation.) Donald Trump, “the avatar of right-wing illiberalism,” is somehow the manifestation of Romantic idealism—“our first Nietzschean president.” And what about all of his support from Christians? Beha dismisses it as merely a form of identity politics. Those Trump supporters who “claim to be Christian tend to do so as an expression of a particularist identity rather than metaphysical belief.”

This, to put it mildly, is an all-too-convenient parsing of current realities. Metaphysics won’t save us from the specter of religious hatred and aspiring tyrants. One could argue that JD Vance shares Beha’s faith and metaphysics. He is no doubt committed to a correspondence theory of truth to boot. When Vance and Pete Hegseth invoke God, they are pulling the levers to power, not donning some pious mask. When you take them seriously, Beha’s attempt to play the cool-headed liberal feels like willful blindness.

And permit a proud-dad moment in here, pointing to another essay by a related Smith: our son, Coleson Smith, who won the 2026 Bette Howland Prize for nonfiction. You can read his winning essay, “Young Esco,” at A Public Space. It is moving and vulnerable and demonstrates a remarkable capacity to convey the lively compression of dialogue in nonfiction.

Quid Amo: Compact Edition

Here are a few things I’ve been loving over the past couple of months:

• Granddaughters! Growing so fast. Walking and talking and crawling and climbing and singing and laughing and just constantly stealing my heart and filling it with joy. Thankful for their parents who call and FaceTime so we always feel connected and can watch them grow.

• Pope Leo. That’s it. That’s the tweet. We’re Team Papa.

• The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

• Two albums on constant loop: Mumford & Sons, Prizefighter and Noah Kahan, The Great Divide.

Exhale. The day has arrived. My new book can now be found in the wilds of this world—or in bookstores, at least.

I am beginning the day with gratitude instead of anxiety. Of course one hopes that readers will love the little book-child you’ve sent toddling into the world. But one of the benefits of writing weird philosophy books like I do is that you have zero illusions about being a “bestseller.” I’m just not playing that game. One thing I’m grateful for is publishers who make room for this strange genre I might describe as “philosophical counsel.” I still can’t believe I get to do this.

This book has been percolating for a long time. In many ways, it reflects my tenure as editor in chief of Image, which I often describe to people as my “MFA-by-other-means.” In the Image community I had the opportunity to engage an inspiring cadre of poets, novelists, and visual artists whose art drew me into new experiences and inspired me to attend to the craft of writing in fresh ways.

But the seeds of this book were planted before I ever knew how they would flower—before I ever could have known that I would have to write this book. In many ways, this is a book I wrote for my younger self—frantic, hungry, anxious, compelled to perform in the hope he might be loved. This is why I am also grateful for the partner I’ve had through this whole journey. As I put it in the closing lines of the Acknowledgments: “For years and years, my gracious, forgiving wife, Deanna, encouraged my frantic, restless younger self to ‘just be.’ I hope this book is proof that I was listening.”

I’m also grateful for so many of you who have already told me you’re looking forward to reading the book. Thanks for welcoming yet another one of my brood. And I’m grateful for a few of you who received advance copies for review and sent me notes about how the book seemed to meet you where you are, as whole persons.

The Table of Contents visually presents one of my central arguments in the book: instead of thinking about mysticism in terms of an ecstatic event of rapture (think: Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”), we should think of the mystical tradition of contemplation as a spiraling path.

Of course this path includes experiences of union, even ecstasy. But as St. Teresa herself attests, nobody lives in ecstasy. One might touch this once and then live the rest of one’s life off its memory—a kind of wound of reason that is a mark of blessing like Jacob’s limp. This is why I describe mysticism as a spiraling path and ongoing journey of seeking solitude, sitting in silence, and dwelling in darkness in order to become the kind of person who can welcome wonder.

Another thing I’m grateful for: an editor with a keen writerly eye and the gentle capacity to push back and nudge me toward a better book (thanks, Jennifer!). In particular, she kept pushing for distillation and simplicity. Less is more. Get this down to the essential. This book is so much better than the longer manuscript I submitted.

But I thought this week it might be fun to share some snippets from the cutting room floor, as it were. (Is this what people call “bonus content?”) Here below is an example. This speaks to the journey aspect I’ve just described—the way in which mysticism is its own sort of pilgrimage of the soul.

[from the cutting room floor]

Contrast this, for example, with the way St. Augustine describes the vocation of being human. In a sermon from 416, preached at the shrine of St. Cyprian in Carthage, Augustine discusses a common image in monastic thought: the gospels’ contrast between Martha and Mary. When these sisters received Jesus into their home, Martha busied herself with the logistics and particulars of hospitality, attending to Jesus’ needs, while Mary simply sits at the feet of Jesus, attentive to his words. Jesus is grateful to Martha but praises Mary for choosing “the one thing necessary,” the “better part.” Mystical literature takes Mary’s “better part” to be devotion to contemplation. Augustine does the same, but he recalls this episode in the context of expounding chapter 3 of St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians in which Paul emphasizes that he has “not grasped” perfection, has not arrived, is still seeking.1 The only perfection that can be realized in this life, Augustine emphasizes, is to become the pilgrims we are called to be: “perfect travelers, not perfect possessors.”2 To be human is to be ever and only on the way. “I am still following, still forging ahead, still walking, still on the road, still extending myself; I haven’t yet arrived.”3 Which is why, unlike for Descartes, the time for contemplation is never past. Contemplation is how we go on. The path of human life through the valley shadowed by death and doubt is survived by walking contemplatively. We keep walking, keep meditating, Augustine counsels, precisely because we haven’t arrived. If you think you’ve arrived, Augustine counsels, keep walking and your illusion of arrival will be revealed by what you face over the horizon. There is no end to contemplation.

...

At the end of his sermon, Augustine asks, “What does walking mean?” I’ll tell you, he says: “it means forging ahead, in case you should possibly not understand, and start walking sluggishly.” No one said you have to run or hurry. This is a pilgrimage, not a race. So when you don’t understand, when you can’t make sense of this sad world or the inchoate terrain of your own heart, trudge on. Take the next step. And then another. “Forge ahead, my brothers and sisters; always examine yourselves without self-deception, without flattery, without buttering yourselves up.” Realize that your own interiority is terra incognita, that across a life you’ll never not be puzzled by your own conflicted motives and tortured wants. You can spend a life walking the terrain of your own soul. Do so fearlessly, Augustine recommends. “After all, there’s nobody inside you before whom you need feel ashamed, or whom you need to impress. There is someone there, but one who is pleased with humility; let him test you.” Even if you only spent the rest of your life meditating on your own soul, plumbing the depths of the abyss within, there is no edge to this territory, no end to our exploring. And yet, even deep within yourself, you are not alone. This, Augustine attests, is the curious surprise of contemplation: this dawning of an Other in the midst of the dark, a someone who prizes not validity but humility. Someone you trust enough to let them test you, press you, and discover the surprising joy, not of being in the know, but of a humility that is liberating. Walking both requires and enacts an epistemic patience that can live without conclusions, without resolution. This is what it would mean to make friends with mystery. “And you, too, test yourself,” Augustine exhorts. “Always be dissatisfied with what you are, if you want to arrive at what you are not yet.” So “always keep on walking,” Augustine counsels, “always forge ahead.”4

P.S. If you’re a podcast listener, you can get a taste for the book in my discussion with Joshua Johnson on the Shifting Culture Podcast.

My new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, will be released tomorrow. It will bring to an end the holding pattern familiar to authors: the long months between your final corrections of page proofs and the day readers can actually get their hands on the book. This always feels a little isolating for an author—at least for this author. It’s like you put a message in a bottle months ago and you’re waiting to see if anyone receives it on the other side.

This book has been percolating for a long time and changed significantly in the development process (for the better, I think, thanks to the marvelous insights of my editor). It was interesting to look back at my very first draft of the proposal and recall how I initially framed the book’s argument. My pitch was that in an age where a particular ancient school of philosophy—Stoicism—is experiencing a renaissance, we should be considering an alternative form of ancient philosophical counsel to deal with uncertainty: mysticism.

This came back to me yesterday in a lively discussion after my presentation at Trinity Church in NYC. We were talking about the sort of “therapeutic” discipline of the mystical tradition as a way to grapple with fear and anxiety—and how different mysticism’s “prescription” is from Stoicism. Stoicism remains a philosophy of assertion, autonomy, and independence—what Hegel would call a form of self-consciousnessness characterized by mastery. Mysticism, by contrast, is not a mindfulness that masters self but rather a form of contemplation where even contemplation is itself a gift. The mystic (again, per Hegel) finds herself in a radical dependence that is also a liberation.

Ultimately, my book is not an argument with Stoicism. We didn’t let Neo-Stoicism set the tone or play the role of foil. And I think that’s exactly right. But this subtext and implication remains relevant to the book. So I thought it might be interesting to share that earlier frame here as a way to make explicit the implicit, tacit argument with Stoicism that animates my project. Here’s a snippet of that earlier framing:

Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Life

The sense of dis-ease is familiar, shared, if unarticulated: a feeling that our humanity is at risk, whether by the trauma of environmental apocalypse; the demonizing, dehumanizing forces of fascism and terrorism; the specter of artificial intelligence run amok; or a threat as intimate and proximate as the tiny computers we fondle in our pockets. A character in Don DeLillo’s novel, Zero K, articulates one version of this fear:

Have you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?^[1]

Whether the scope is epic or intimate, global or personal, this creeping sense of our humanity being diminished feels like a quintessentially twenty-first problem. And yet a significant response has been the retrieval of a decidedly ancient philosophy. The late modern revival of Stoicism, fostered by Silicon Valley influencers, cognitive-behavioral therapists, and self-help gurus, is a strategy of mindfulness for a world awash in uncertainty and threats—a world that feels out of control.^[2] As a response strategy, Stoicism commends a mindful attention to our circumstances and our emotional responses (1) in order to recognize what we control and what we don’t; so we can then (2) aim to achieve apatheia, a tranquility or magnanimity or “greatness of soul” that is the fruit of mindful cultivation of virtue. Thus we might withstand the tumult of a fraught world. We can understand Stoicism’s attraction.

There is, however, a very different ancient school of “mindfulness” that I want to commend as a source for living wisely and well in the maelstrom of the twenty-first century. It is a monastic tradition of mystical contemplation that we should see as a rival form of mindfulness. As a radical alternative to Stoicism, this mystical tradition might have less allure to the moguls of Silicon Valley; and yet I think the mystical tradition holds out more hope for those of us awash in the world they’ve made—and long for a world beyond it.

The contrast with the new Stoicism helps define this mystical tradition of mindfulness (and hence my project). While Stoic mindfulness is attentive to what we don’t or can’t control, it nonetheless remains a strategy of self-control. For the Stoic, all the resources needed to live a magnanimous life already exist within. Mindfulness is the means to discovering one’s own power, in spite of everything.^[3] Stoicism remains a philosophy of autonomy and its “good life” is rooted in an egocentrism, or at least self-sufficiency. Again, we can understand its modern appeal.

The monastic contemplative tradition, in contrast, is a form of mindfulness that is attuned to our radical dependency. This dependence makes us vulnerable, but this vulnerability is also what makes us open to a beyond, even hungry for it. The monastic and mystical contemplative tradition is the ek-static alternative to Stoicism’s egocentrism. If the Stoic injunction is to master oneself, the mystical invitation is to lose oneself and thereby be found. If the Stoic telos is self-sufficient magnanimity, the mystical telos is union, communion, nothing less than Love—a form of self-transcendence in which we let go of control in order to find ourselves indwelling a Love at the heart of the cosmos and in communion with the beautiful, mysterious neighbors with whom we call it home. Instead of apatheia, the mystic pursues contemplation for the sake of compassion.

What commends mystic mindfulness—this alternative ancient tradition of contemplation—is also what makes it scandalous to modern sensibilities. Yet it speaks to an enduring, perhaps indelible sense that there “must be something more.” Monastic contemplation recognizes the same challenges that buffet us, but it proceeds from a different starting point and with a different hope rooted in our ek-static nature. The fullness of being human is found in communion with what is outside of myself—both a cosmic dependence on divine Love as well as the social web of friendship and neighbor-hood that suspends us. Mystic contemplation is like a journey of awareness where we step into the dark so that, when just the right light dawns, these webs become illuminated and we see that we are held by Love and made for Love.

The contemplative path to our awareness of this communion is not a puzzle to be solved, as if it was a question of “knowing.” It is not a matter of “understanding.” Here, too, is a scandal to our technocratic sensibilities and our hard-won modern enlightenment. But as the late medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it: “we can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought.”^[4] Only when knowledge’s enlightenment dims to darkness can we begin to feel our way to the sort of awareness that is union and communion. So, the author continues, “make your home in this darkness.”^[5] Here lies “the dark way that is contemplative knowledge,” a comprehension under which the very name “knowledge” buckles, inadequate.^[6] “But the failure of our understanding can help us,” they counsel. “When we reach the end of what we know, that’s where we find God. That’s why St. Dionysius said that the best, most divine knowledge of God is what which is known by not-knowing.”^[7] Only in mystic contemplation that ranges beyond my own mastery can I become aware of the mystery of my own being. This is scandalous and humbling because it requires that I let go of what I’m good at, and what modernity has trained me for—thinking—and instead attend to my loves. “No matter how sacred, no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer, because only love—not knowledge—can help us reach God.”^[8] This “dark path” of contemplation opens us, ek-statically, to the irruption of a grace from beyond. “In this way, you transcend yourself, achieving by grace what you can’t on your own.”^[9] This is scandalous to both modern, Stoic, and modern Stoic sensibilities.

It is equally scandalous, we should note, to modern and contemporary religious sensibilities. If this monastic, mystical tradition of contemplation is a fitting response to the distractions and dehumanization of late modernity, it is also a necessary means of renewing Christianity itself.

It is perhaps not an accident, then, that at the same time distraction poses an existential and spiritual threat to the fullness of being human, so many forms of modern religion have become an engine for domesticating the divine.^[10] Overly confident in their conception of the divine, for example, public forms of Christianity seem to eviscerate mystery. A God that can be conceptually encompassed and comprehended is invoked to carve up the world into a culture war of “us” vs. “them.”

In the face of such distraction and domestication of the divine, we can hear afresh Karl Rahner’s prescient insight: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.”^[11] We might even press the point more radically: if humanity is going to have a future, humans need to cultivate a mystical capacity for wonder. The path to such openness is the path of contemplation.

My book’s argument, in this regard, is twofold. First, I will argue that mystic contemplation is at once an antidote to, and liberation from, distraction and domestication in a way that Stoic mindfulness is not. I will argue that this ancient, monastic tradition of contemplation speaks to more fundamental hungers and yearnings that persist in late modernity. We might be surprised how much mystics give voice to murmuring wonderings in our own so-called “secular” consciousness.

P.S. Next public book tour event is “Arts at the Parish” at Calvary St. George’s in NYC on Saturday, March 28, 6-8pm. Event is FREE: you can register here.

^[1] Don DeLillo, Zero K (New York: Scribner, 2016), 239.

^[2] See, for example, Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2019); William B. Irvine, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019); and John Sellars, Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live (New York: Penguin, 2020).

^[3] It is perhaps unsurprising that Robert Greene, the author of the strangely popular book, The 48 Laws of Power, considers himself a modern Stoic.

^[4] The Cloud of Unknowing, with The Book of Privy Counsel, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2009), 21.

^[5] Ibid., 12.

^[6] Ibid., 87.

^[7] Ibid., 156.

^[8] Ibid., 28.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] The twining of these two realities—the existential threat of distraction and the domestication of the divine—was already discerned by the 17^th-century mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, informed, no doubt, my his own ekstatic, mystical experience on the night of 23 November 1654, memorialized on a scrap of paper he kept near his heart the rest of his life, sown into his vest. It begins with one word: “Fire” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings., trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178). It also includes a protest that informed his furthering thinking: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.” Elsewhere in his Pensées, Pascal famously and presciently observed “that man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room” (§168 [p. 44]). Distraction reduces human complexity; domestication of the divine reduces God’s mystery.

^[11] Karl Rahner, Concern for the Church, vol. 20, Theological Investigations (New York: Herder & Herder, 1981), 149.

• My new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing will be released one week from today! You can pre-order now or look for it next week at your favorite bookseller.

• Or…come see me on Book Tour! There are three events next week in New York City, then events in Boston, Grand Rapids, Austin, Chicago, and Denver (so far). Details here.

• I spoke with Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Publishers Weekly about the book: “A Philosopher Embraces Mystery.”

• If you’re a podcast listener and would like to like to get a taste of the book, you can listen to an early conversation with Rick Lee James on “Voices in My Head.” More to come.

OK, back to irregularly scheduled programming…

I often tell people that becoming a grandparent is like finding out, in the second half of your life, why you exist. Every single one of the clichés is true and I’m here for all of it.

I have come to the place where I think my calling to be a grandfather is the defining vocation for the rest of my life. My wife and I just came through a pretty intense season of professional discernment, reckoning with both challenges and opportunities, trying to listen for the whispers of the spirit about how to spend the next decade taking us to retirement. In the end, while there were all sorts of variables that factored into our decision, I would say the overwhelming determiner was this: What professional role/location makes us most available to our grandchildren—and able to support our children as they parent?1 I found myself immediately at peace with what some might judge as a less ambitious professional decision. But I’m not defined by the people who call me “Doctor” or “Professor.” I live for the people who call me Papa. (Or will, as soon as they’re old enough to talk!).

But I also can’t help being a philosopher-grandpa. This, too, is one of the gifts of my vocation and profession. To read, study, teach, and write about philosophy is to have constant opportunity to reflect afresh on the shape of one’s life. And insofar as that life keeps unfolding, and one keeps learning, there are always new facets and angles on one’s life—new opportunities to become more intentional about how one lives.

And so now, in surprising ways, I find myself reading arcane philosophical texts and thinking about grandpahood. Let me share just a couple of examples that have come to mind over the past couple of days.

This semester I am teaching an upper-level seminar on Hegel—more specifically on Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel. It is challenging, technical stuff. Today we were talking about Hegel’s concept of action. I will not bore you with the details. But two facets of this analysis resonated with me as a grandpa in interesting ways.

First, Hegel’s concept of action invokes a distinction between what he calls “the deed” (Tat) and “action” (Handlung). Roughly, it means something like this: what makes some “happening” X an action is that it is a happening for which some agent takes responsibility. It is something that happened because an agent intended it. However, once action X takes place, it is undertaken “in public,” so to speak. The action becomes a deed in the world—in the shared, social space of time and history. And here’s what’s interesting: the consequences of a deed can outstrip the agent’s intentions. This is because the consequences of an action can take on a life of their own, in the contingencies of an environment and the unfolding of history. Brandom draws on Donald Davidson’s notion of a deed’s “accordion effect”: action can be redescribed over time and continue to have reverberations beyond the agent’s intentions.

One thing that dawns afresh with grandpahood is a renewed sense of mortality—at least that has been my experience. I am more conscious of the dwindling years I have left, doing the math on a few rounds of my fingers. I also now want to live forever! I can’t tell you how many times I imagine my granddaughters walking down the aisle; how many times I imagine taking my grandson to visit colleges; how much I long to see my children’s children’s children. I want to be a danged paterfamilias (to quote Ulysses Everett McGill)!

I am, of course, well acquainted with finitude. This is where I find a strange grandfatherly encouragement in Hegel’s concept of action. What are the actions I can undertake, what deeds of mine can make a dent on the world that might make grooves for my grandchildren to run in? What have I done/can I do/need to do that could have an accordion effect that will outlast my own mortal coil?2 In a way, not even my own death is the end of the deed. Its consequences rumble on, tumble on. One of my favorite lines from this discussion in Hegel: “An individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action” (PhG §401). I am still making myself in my grandpa-ing. And my deeds could still be doing their work after I’m gone.

Here’s where a second theme from Hegel struck a grandpa chord for me. Hegel has what Brandom calls a “recollective” account of rationality. One way to describe this is to say we don’t know what something means except in retrospect. Meaning emerges as we make sense of what we’ve come through. As Hegel puts it, “the truth is the whole.” But that means you can’t know the truth until you have the full picture.

This plays out in his concept of action because he has an appreciation for how actions are often not discrete and punctiliar. They play out in time, over time (they are “diachronic,” through-chronos). So what I intend in my action might involve mistakes, false starts, wrong turns, dead-ends and backtracking. I am trying to accomplish X, so I act; but as time unfurls, I might realize that this action is not the way to accomplish X. So I revise, retool, reconnoiter and try again. For Hegel, one cannot judge or evaluate my action/deed with a mere “snap shot” of one of these false starts. The true is the whole and my ongoing acting in time can still be a way of chasing X, achieving X.

Here’s the passage that struck me, from Brandom:

“Because there is no end in principle to the progression to larger or later purposes, it is never too late for a new context to arise within which a previously failed project can count as successfully contributing to the realization of a plan.”

One of the clichés about grandparenthood is that it’s a second crack at parenthood. I think there’s a mistaken way to understand that (PSA: Don’t parent your grandchildren!). But there’s another way in which I have found it to be true. It’s not just that you might finally be emotionally healthy enough to be gentle and patient with your grandchildren in ways you weren’t with your own children (Kids, again: I’m sorry). It’s that you’re still a parent to your children who are now parents and your story is far from finished. Grandparenthood is a “new context” for parenthood and even if you might have “previously failed” in that project, or not “realized” it in all the ways you might have hoped, your story with your children is still unfolding. It’s never too late to still be the parent you wanted to be. Indeed, it’s never too late to be the parent you needed. To be that for your children is to be exactly the grandpa your grandchildren need.

I’m thrilled with it as an artifact: the subtle, mercurial cover; the distinct trim size; the interior design that gives the text some breathing room for contemplation. My primary emotions are gratitude mingled with marvel.

I’m excited to get to share the book with people and engage in conversation about it. To that end, we’re organizing a bit of a tour in the coming months. Some events are still in development, but I’m happy to share this confirmed schedule. I’d love to see you if I’ll be in your neighborhood!

Book Tour: Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

NEW YORK

Sunday, March 22, 10:00am
Discovery Class, Trinity Church, 89 Broadway
“The Power of the Mystics: How Contemplation Cultivates Resistance”

Thursday, March 26, 5:30-7:30pm
America Magazine, 1212 Avenue of the Americas, 11th floor
In conversation with Sam Sawyer, S.J., editor in chief
Wine & cheese reception
[This is, technically, an “invitation only” event. If you would like to attend this event, contact me using this form (select “General Contact”) and communicate your interest.]

Saturday, March 28, 6-8pm
Arts at the Parish, Calvary St. George’s Chapel, 7 Rutherford Place
In conversation with Rev. Andrew Jacob Smith
Registration is free

GRAND RAPIDS

Friday, April 3, 6:00pm
First Friday Local Author Series, Books & Mortar, 966 Cherry St SE

BOSTON

Friday, April 10, 6:00pm
Harvard Divinity School, hosted by Wayfare
In conversation with Zachary Davis, editor in chief

GRAND RAPIDS

Friday, April 17, 7:00pm
Sherman Street Church, 1000 Sherman Street SE
In conversation with Jeff Chu, hosted by Lisa Ann Cockrel
Books sales supported by Books & Mortar; book signing to follow.
This event is FREE but you are asked to register via Eventbrite.

AUSTIN

Thursday, April 23, 6:30pm (reception); 7:00pm event
First Light Books, 4300 Speedway
In conversation with Zac Koons

Friday, April 24, 6:00-9:00pm
All Saints Presbyterian, 7808 Rialto Blvd
Cross & Culture Lecture: “Cultivating Contemplation in a World of Distraction”

CHICAGO

Tuesday, May 5, 4:00pm
Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn

DENVER

Wednesday, May 6, 7:00pm
Downing House, Englewood, CO

Thursday, May 7, 7:00pm
Platt Park Church, 1601 S Clarkson St, Denver, CO
Sponsored by the Denver Institute

[Currently in development: Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Stay tuned for updates.]

I hope I might get to meet some of you on the road. And I hope Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is a book that meets you wherever you are.

Gratefully,
Jamie

P.S. My friends at America, the Jesuit magazine, asked me to reflect on how Augustine and Pope Leo, the Augustinian pope, might frame the Lenten journey this year.

These are dark days for the Republic. Bombings in the night. Executions in broad daylight. Hatred as policy. Propaganda that obscures. The maddening impenetrability of disinformation. Authorized obfuscation. A pall is draped over our collective consciousness.

All this darkness fits, somehow, with the sun-starved days of winter. We live with little light. We go to work in the dark and return home after the sun has set. The caverns between skyscrapers are dimmed in late afternoon. In January, even the daylight sky is often a tenebrous pewter ceiling.

So we chase the light. Some fly south. Some install lamps that mimic sunlight. Many pine impatiently for lengthening days. Most long for summer’s brilliance.

We yearn for the same in our collective national life. “Democracy dies in darkness,” as the Washington Post puts it. We want clarity, transparency, enlightenment. We want to understand. In our most common metaphor, to know is to see. And seeing requires illumination.

And yet, somehow, incessant waves of information haven’t dispelled the shadows. In a fitting irony, the so-called “disclosures” of the Epstein files were awash in pages of blacked-out redactions. We’ve unleashed machines that flood our digital lives with fakes—the irony of pixelated darkness. The glow of digital feeds on our phones is, more and more, a shimmer of obfuscation.

What if, instead of chasing the light, we got curious about the dark? What if we stopped pining for the summer sun and listened to the dark? What if the dark is a door to a different sort of discovery? What if there is a strange sort of “revelation” that is almost the antithesis of “enlightenment?” What if winter—even this winter of the Republic—is an invitation to make our home in shadows?

This is the surprising lesson I learned from mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. You might think of mystics as people defined by epiphany, blinded by the light. But, in fact, all of these mystics testify to the luminosity of the dark.

The medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing offers strange counsel, for example:

“Make your home in this darkness. Stay there as long as you can.”

Something happens in the dark, the mystics attest, that can only happen there. It’s not that the darkness is simply a prelude to light. Their counsel is not to be patient until the sun comes back. Rather, the mystics suggest that darkness has something to teach us. When we are “in the dark,” we lack the mastery and control of knowledge. This vulnerable vertigo of un-knowing, the mystics counsel, harbors the potential for liberation. What we learn in the dark is how to let go.

Darkness is a place of un-doing. But that makes it a place of possibility. Imagine the darkness of a womb: new birth is possible. You just have to let go of all you’ve learned to expect. The lesson of darkness is a kind of un-learning that begets liberation. Stop approaching darkness as absence; imagine darkness as pregnant with possibility.

The Rhineland mystic, Meister Eckhart, evokes the womb-like dark. The new you—your rebirth—“begins in the darkness of unknowing when you have relinquished all that you understand; only when you have abandoned your knowing and willing can God shine forth within you.” Whatever your relationship to faith, consider “God” as Eckhart’s name for a radically different possibility of being. The new you, he says, is only born in the dark. “You’re never closer to God,” he says elsewhere, “than when you are in utter darkness and unknowing.”

This is why the descent of darkness can be a portal, a door, an opening. Eckhart, reflecting on Saul of Tarsus’ encounter with blinding light on the road to Damascus, notes that in this moment, Paul is plunged into darkness. With his fall, “he began to see all things as nothing. Only when he rose from the ground, blinded, was he finally able to see God.”

So, now, I try not to run too quickly from the dark. I make my home there and stay as long as I can. I let go of my penchant to see and know—to control and master—and sit quietly, waiting to receive new possibilities rumbling in the dark. You can imagine how this feels. Indeed, you may have awoken this morning maddened by all this surrounding dark. Like me, you might find yourself, by turns, livid and sad, enraged and despairing, confused and angry. I want to do something; I need to do something; I need to assure myself and the world that I know what’s going on. I want the floodlights lit. I want to light them.

But there is a darkness that is impenetrable. I try to sit with all of this, in the dark, and not rush to resolve it. There is a sort of awareness available in darkness that is deeper than the knowledge available in the light.

This is not an escape from the world or a retreat from reality. To the contrary, the mystics testify. Something happens in me and to me when I make my home in the dark. From this humbling—even humiliating—experience of dwelling in the dark, new capacities are born, as if my soul is opened and unfolded in new ways. It is in darkness that compassion is born.

In the darkness we are all vulnerable. We are all fumbling about, reaching out. Without light, we have to feel our way around. Hands reach back. To clasp hands in the dark is to find a solidarity that’s hard to imagine in the pixelated environs of our rage. Huddling together in the dark almost feels like a place where a Republic could be reborn.

I have much more to share about these experiences and lessons from the mystics. That’s why I wrote my new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, which will be released on March 24. Watch this space soon for updates on a book tour that will take us to New York, Austin, Denver, and my home here in Grand Rapids—and (hopefully, in the works) DC, Los Angeles, Boston, and elsewhere.

In the interim before our spring semester begins, my wife and I have enjoyed the opportunity to make a retreat at an enchanted place in the Texas Hill Country that we have visited many times. What’s special about being here for a more extended time are the quiet days, between weekend retreats, when it feels like we have this vast, cavernous valley all to ourselves. Cliffs climb above us in majestic silence; the sun glints off ripples on the Frio River, somehow emerald green; and at night, miles and miles from any urban center, the sky is agleam with brilliant stars.

There is something almost monastic about the rhythms we adopt, our days stripped down to eating, reading, reflection, and prayer. We arrived with questions to be faced, decisions to be made, uncertainties we needed to grapple with. We gave each other space for personal reflection and then came together to share what we were sensing, what was percolating, how we felt led. It has been a dance of centrifugal solitude and then centripetal encounter. It is an incredible gift to receive the time & space to do this sort of soul work with a partner you can trust. Our time has been fruitful and I am grateful.

The arts are an integral part of this retreat center. There are two art studios on site, every weekend retreat features a concert, and each retreat offers a creative/artistic opportunity in the afternoons, led by an artist in residence for the weekend. After last weekend’s retreat, the artist kindly left me some of the materials for the project in case I wanted to try my hand at something creative in this quiet week of reflection.

He had brought a bunch of discarded library books, glued the pages together, and then provided tools for us to “carve,” as it were, a cavity in the book in which we could then place an image. Everyone, I gather, felt an initial discomfort cutting into a book (my heart is racing as I even type that)! The fruit of the project was a miniature shrine, of sorts—a kind of icon corner framed by word (but also, I guess, the destruction of word!).

The book left for me was an old battered copy of Cruden’s Complete Concordance. Its dense, onion-skin pages had the feel of a Bible, adding to my initial reservations. But I began to dig my way into its paper guts, layer by layer, extracting first the As, then the Bs, etc. I dug down to the Ls and decided I would stop at the page that featured LOVE.

Then I selected my image: a woodcut (I’m ignorant of its provenance) of St. Anthony of Padua preaching to the fishes. What drew me to this image?

If you don’t know the tale (fabulous, no doubt), the basics of the story are these: St. Anthony, that silver-tongued Franciscan preacher, ventures to the coastal town of Rimini to proclaim the Gospel and call its inhabitants back to God. The leaders of Rimini are not just uninterested but hostile. They tell everyone to ignore Anthony. He was greeted by only disdain and silence. So he turned to the mouth of river and preached a sermon to the only ones in Rimini who would listen: the fish. At his words, the fish gather, heads bobbing above the water, as if nodding in agreement. A hungry audience.

Drawn to this image, I got thinking about the sort of writer I want to be. Do I want to be the sort of writer who’s gladly received in Rimini, as long as I tell them what they want to hear? Or would I rather write what I feel compelled to write, and hope the fishes find me?

St. Anthony clearly failed to do his marketing research in Rimini. There are so many forces in contemporary publishing that keep nudging authors to appeal to a “market,” an existing “audience” already waiting for a certain kind of book. Agents will tell you who they are and what they want. Publishers think they know who they are and what they want. And not a few authors are writing the books that they think will be bestsellers in Rimini. (There’s also a lot of money to be made, I gather, by being decidedly anti-Rimini. There’s a huge market for the ex-Rimini memoir, it turns out.) The formula is easy enough to see; this is writing as algorithm.

I can’t imagine writing a book in this way—to fill a market niche. (Granted, this might explain my sales?)

I think this is what I love about St. Anthony: he doesn’t settle for an existing audience; he makes one. He doesn’t “find” an audience; his oratory evokes an audience.

I know that I write sorta weird books. They are books that fall between the cracks, a little bit. They are sometimes a little too philosophical for general readers, but also way too personal and “engaged” for academics. I don’t know that my last few books really fall into a delineated genre. I’m not sure how to identify my “audience” except to say, with profound gratitude, that a wonderfully weird amalgam of people seem to find their way to my books.

And I can’t imagine not having written those books. These were the books burning in my belly. These were the books I needed to write to wrestle with my demons. These were the books I needed to write to try to understand something about the world, history, myself, and God. The idiosyncrasy of each of them is a signature of a vocation and a calling: I’m trying to inhabit this strange space, passionate about philosophy because I think it can change your life—maybe even change the world.

This, it turns out, is not everyone’s cup of tea. Fair enough.1 My fishes will find me. That, too, is a miracle. And I’m grateful.

By the way, my next book—Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing—arrives in your favorite bookstore on March 24. It’s never too early to pre-order. Thanks for reading!

David Congdon has just published a fascinating essay, “What Has New Haven to Do with Hungary? On Theological and Political Postliberalism,” in the latest issue of the Journal of Religion.1 Here’s the abstract that immediately drew me in:

In recent years, a growing number of political theorists and religious writers and activists—including Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, R. R. Reno, and Adrian Vermeule—have aligned themselves with postliberalism, a political ideology that sees liberalism, in both its classical and neoliberal manifestations, as the source of the problems in Western democracies. Christian nationalism is one version of postliberalism. For theologians, however, the term postliberalism is often associated with the so-called Yale school of theology, spearheaded by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, that was prominent during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite some obvious differences, I contend that there is a direct line, or rather multiple lines, connecting theological postliberalism and today’s political postliberalism. The connections are ideological, institutional, and rhetorical: they share a philosophy of antiliberalism, were promoted by the same institutional channels and networks, and contributed to a common theological and political discourse.

At first blush, I was skeptical: this felt like a stretch, a kind of free association around the term “postliberal.” But Congdon carefully lays out this case. I see the trajectory now. My goal here is just to summarize his argument and then extend the conversation a bit. I’ll offer just a little bit of commentary on some of the specifics. But I also want to try to crystallize the question that Congdon’s argument catalyzed for me—about universality, Enlightenment, liberalism, and democratic socialism.

Full disclosure: as someone deeply influenced by, and indebted to, Hauerwas and Milbank, I have definitely been invested in the postliberal project in theology. Probably the place where this is most explicit is in my book on pragmatism, Who’s Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood, which includes a chapter on Lindbeck. I have, however, been a consistent critic of postliberalism in politics. See, for example, my critique of Dreher’s so-called “Benedict Option” or the political theology articulated in Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, which also lays out new distance between me and my Hauerwasian inheritance.2 (I also have a still unpublished paper on Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed that I should find a home for.) But this is precisely what makes Congdon’s argument so fascinating and generative. In some ways, Congdon is helping me articulate the intellectual discomforts that have propelled my more recent intellectual journey through Hegel. So in this post I’m thinking out loud a bit, making sketches for my (hoped for) sabbatical project next year.

From New Haven to Hungary

Congdon’s thesis is provocative, and somewhat counterintuitive: “Theological postliberalism [Frei, Lindbeck, Hauerwas] and political postliberalism [Deneen, Vermeule, Dreher],” he argues, “are two different historical stages on a single ideological trajectory” (416). What do they share in common? There are a few different aspects of their shared sensibility.

1. Both theological and political postliberalism involve an “assault on individualism” (417). This is part of a generally counter-liberal, anti-Enlightenment sensibility that criticizes rights-talk as atomizing and individualist. Anyone who has read Hauerwas could trot out endless quotes to this effect. You’ll find the same in Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.

2. Both theological and political postliberalism retreat from Enlightenment universalism3 and settle for/aspire to particularist communities. This is perhaps Congdon’s most interesting insight. He puts it this way:

Put succinctly, postliberal theology was a turn away from pluralism, universalism, and globalism and toward the insular, internal confines of the sectarian culture of the Christian church.

This is why postliberal theology has a “sectarian” tendency (“only the church” is a common refrain in postliberal theology, which Congdon calls its “sectarian ecclesiocentrism”). The political version of this sectarian tendency in postliberal politics is its localism. But Congdon argues that what begins, in Deneen, as a romantic veneration of the “front porch republic,” so to speak—the “local” communities of the Benedict Option—begins to expand. Indeed, how small is “local?” So there’s a straight line from this sectarian “localist” option that starts with some commune outside Tulsa, OK but then eventually becomes the “bigger” local of the nation. In other words, there is a postliberal logic of “localism” that leads to, and underwrites, nationalism (419). The postliberal starts by carving out a Christian enclave to pursue moral formation and then concludes that it counts as “love” to turn the nation into a big Christian enclave. Call it “integralism” (423).

3. Both theological and political postliberalism operate with a quasi-metaphysical commitment to a distinction between “us” and “them” or “church” and “world.” Put another way, postliberalism is a splitter rather than a lumper. Congdon summarizes:

Postliberal theology was to religious identity what postliberal politics is to political identity, in that both reject the apologetic effort to find common ground with cultural “outsiders” and instead recommend protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others. Theological postliberalism called this “intratextual theology,” while political postliberalism calls this “Christian nationalism.”4

For example, postliberal theology from Lindbeck to Hauerwas (and, to some degree, Milbank) emphasized, in Wittgensteinian fashion, the “incommensurability” of “language games.” This morphed into the untranslatability of moral norms between religious communities and between religious communities and “secular” culture. Thus Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine expounded his famous “cultural-linguistic argument for seeing different religious communities as incommensurable language games, incapable of understanding each other” (429). In Lindbeck’s later work, this morphed into increasing anxiety about secularity: “No reconciliation is possible between the secular and biblical outlooks,” Lindbeck later emphasized. (Does this sound familiar?) Thus Congdon summarizes:

A common feature of the postliberal family tree is thus a tendency to pit the church against modern society, to see the relation between church and world as an antagonistic one—a culture war both in theory and in practice. It is not surprising that American evangelicals found the postliberals to be congenial conversation partners, or that Lindbeck himself declared, in a talk at Wheaton College, that “if the sort of research program represented by postliberalism has a real future as a communal enterprise for the church, it’s more likely to be carried on by evangelicals than anyone else” (429).

This “ecclesiocentric” language will be familiar to anyone who has read Hauerwas or early Milbank (or, cards-on-the-table, early JKAS). Reframed as Congdon does, the antithetical stance vis-à-vis “the world” (i.e., “modernity” or “the state”) takes on a worrisome tenor. Congdon pulls on this thread, later citing Paul Griffiths in the pages of First Things:

Griffiths concluded his response to Deneen by acknowledging that, “for Catholics, it is always important to remember that the principal civitas here is the ecclesia Christi and the principal earthly sovereign the bishop of Rome.” Such a position may sound pious to the theological postliberal, but in the hands of the political postliberal, it is a call to arms (434, emphasis mine).

It is this baseline antithesis, Congdon argues, that explains the line that runs through the Benedict Option to the “Hungarian option,” so to speak—how we get from the “sectarian temptation” of postliberal theology to the “authoritarian temptation” of postliberal poilitcs (435).

The theological postliberals are in no position to criticize Deneen and the other political postliberals for being overly confident in the capacity of political theory to rescue the nation. Postliberal theology erected an entire edifice rooted in the idea that church and world (or state) are in a metaphysical battle to the death, with only one potential victor, in which the only hope for humanity is to gather in small-scale, tradition-homogeneous communities where proper Christian virtue and character may be cultivated and lived out. Most people, however, do not have the capacity to leave their jobs and social networks behind to establish a commune in the woods, and most do not wish to flee to Hungary. Is it any wonder, then, that Christians catechized on a diet of Hauerwas and Milbank would eventually seek to take over the reins of political power in the United States and elsewhere?

These threads braid together into a postliberal cord that runs through both theology and politics. Before I turn, more constructively, to what I think is the theoretical heart of the issue (and Congdon’s suggested alternative), just a few remarks on some details of this account.

A Few Musings

I find Congdon’s argument persuasive. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t offer a few tweaks, a couple of elements of pushback. Just a few comments in this regard:

1. Situating Milbank

Congdon offers a pithy provocation at one point:

If Hauerwas represents the Dreher of The Benedict Option, Milbank represents the Dreher who fled to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

On one level, this will sound outlandish. First, everyone knows that Hauerwas—like MacIntyre—castigates the Benedict Option. But I’m willing to grant Congdon a kind of inferential license here. His point, I think, is not so much about the explicit “political” statements of postliberal theologians but rather about political tendencies unleashed by their theologies. I think this is the core provocation that postliberal theologians need to absorb.

That said, situating Milbank is perhaps a little trickier than Congdon makes out. Congdon rightly notes that, unlike Dreher and Deneen, Milbank’s “postliberal” project is socialist. However, it is also unabashedly Christian socialist (Ruskin > F.D. Maurice) and hence entertains a “left integralism”: “authoritarianism is not the problem,” Congdon observes, “only the ends to which it is directed” (428). Thus Congdon sees “Milbankian imperialism” (429) as infected with the same issues as Deneen’s and Dreher’s sympathy for Hungarian authoritarianism (which JD Vance also clearly favors).

I would love to read a response to this from Milbank. He certainly, at times, extols a program that would be guilty of this charge. I’ll just say that I think two factors complicate this: (1) Congdon’s account doesn’t adequately wrestle with the particular histories that underwrite these projects. In this regard, especially in later work, Milbank’s account is never simply anti-modern and hence is not given to quite the same nostalgia as Deneen, Dreher, Brad Gregory, and the like.5 Milbank has always emphasis a counter-modernity from within. (2) More importantly, I think Milbank is working with an ontology or metaphysics that eschews sectarianism and, ultimately, undergirds the sort of universalism that Congdon thinks we need to underwrite a truly democratic (and hence anti-authoritarian) democratic project. We’ll return to this question of metaphysics below.

2. Situating David Bentley Hart

Congdon makes an off-handed comment (p. 434) that seems to try to lump David Bentley Hart into this postliberal camp. I think that is very hard to justify (and I might be over-reading Congdon on this point). It’s not only that DBH is committed to socialism, but also (as I alluded w/r/t Milbank above), there is simply no “place” in DBH’s theological vision—his cosmology—for the sort of partition or antithesis or dualism that is at the heart of these forms of postliberalism. Again, I want to return to this question of metaphysics below.

3. Where is Jeff Stout?

It’s lame to criticize what’s left out of a book or an article. And yet, given the story being told here, it is surprising that Congdon nowhere considers the work of Jeff Stout. The reason I think Stout is such a crucial counterpoint here is precisely because he is working through the same challenges of moral diversity in modernity as MacIntyre and Hauerwas. His earlier work, After Babel, is crucial in this respect, in many ways appropriating the Wittgensteinian account of language games in a Rortian inflection, and thus critical of any simplistic Enlightenment appeals to “objectivity” to secure ethical life and political discourse in modernity. In Democracy and Tradition, Stout explicitly engages and criticizes MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank in this regard. And yet Stout is also, at the same time, quite a trenchant critic of “liberalism” (e.g., of the Rawlsian variety). So in Stout you get someone who is a critic of “modernity” in key forms while also being a critic of the critics of modernity like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank. Another way to say this is that Stout offers an exemplary critique of religious sectarianism and Enlightenment liberalism. So he becomes a very interesting test case for Congdon’s project. In Stout you get a critic of “liberalism” who is an unabashed advocate of democracy and hence deeply opposed to authoritarianism. Is Stout a different sort of “postliberal?” I’m not offering an answer; I’m suggesting it’s a question worth asking with Congdon.

Ethical Universalism Needs an Ontology to Support It

OK, here’s my sketchiest first take on what I think is the real generative germ of Congdon analysis and argument.

As we already saw, Congdon sees postliberalism as “a turn away from pluralism, universalism, and globalism” in both theological ethics and politics. I think this is the nub of the concern. What’s worrisome about postliberalism is the combination of a narrow “particularism” about the good which then gets coupled with a willingness to impose a particular vision of the good (in the name of love). This is what holds together sectarianism and authoritarianism: only one “group” has correct insight into the good for humanity and thus, if we really want to see that good realized for human beings who don’t see it or disagree with it, we will have to impose it.

So I think Congdon is right: you get to postliberalism when you give up on “universalism” in the sense of an aspiration to commonly identify goods for all human beings.6 For Congdon, the alternative is a properly liberal theology that is committed to pluralism, universalism, and globalism. Thus he concludes by wondering aloud whether “a renewed theological liberalism might offer the way out” of the impasse of theological postliberalism.

Maybe. But this raises an important question: Whose “theological liberalism?” There’s more than one way to be a liberal theologian. (For an illuminating display of this point, do no miss Gary Dorrien’s masterful one-volume version of The Spirit of American Liberal Theology: A History.) I can’t quite put my finger on Congdon’s sympathies in this regard. His emphasis on autonomy and the individual rings “Kantian” to me, but I could be wrong; there are certainly liberal theologies that trace their genealogies back to Kantian forms of the Enlightenment.

But we need to remember that there are “liberal” theologies that are intra-Enlightenment critiques of “liberal” forms of autonomy, atomism, and individualism, as well as the epistemologies of early modernity. This, of course, is precisely the post-Kantian trajectory through Hegel and Schelling that leads us to Marx.7 It also explains why not all “liberal” theologies are liberationist; the latter requires a social ontology that, per Hegel, sees the conditions for the emergence of the “individual” as embeddedness in a community, a solidarity that precedes identity (or, as Rorty once put it in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: “that the individual apart from society is just one more animal”). This liberationist trajectory in liberal theology would be critical of any theology that settled for Kantian conceptions of autonomy, agency, and knowledge.

I think Congdon is right that what is needed to avoid the political pessimism of sectarianism (the pessimism that leads, in a kind of collective exhaustion, to authoritarianism) is a better account of universalism that underwrites the dignity and respect of all persons while also reckoning with deep differences and the pluralism characteristic of modernity.

But again, this is where I think a certain set of Hegelian intuitions is preferable to many other “enlightened” liberal theologies that might, à la Habermas, try to avail themselves of some form of “objectivity” to secure universalism. The Hegelian path to the universal passes, unabashedly, through the historical particular, most specifically, through the Incarnation. This eventually yields both an ontology and an account of the human “spirit” that underwrites just the sort of universalist (and democratic) aspirations that Congdon rightly points to as the antidote to authoritarianism.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that Congdon concludes by returning to the inimitable Harvey Cox. Specifically, he points to Cox’s critique of the 1975 “Hartford Appeal,” signed by postliberal luminaries like Lindbeck and Hauerwas along with many others like Richard John Neuhaus. The Hartford Appeal was meant to stem mainline Protestantism’s capitulation to the zeitgeist. Congdon sees The Hartford Appeal as “an early statement of what would become known as postliberalism” (426). Cox criticizes “the complete lack of ‘any Christological center.’” Further quoting Cox:

The Hartford Appeal does not recognize that “Christ is already hiddenly present, as He assures us He is, among the oppressed and the suffering,” that “the nasty ‘world’ … is also a place where God chooses to exercise his judgment and mercy.” Moreover, the appeal’s dualism does not reckon with the fact that “churches are just as often found among the oppressors.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. What’s at issue here is whether, in the name of theology, we keep reverting to a God/world and church/world dualism—or whether we can articulate, Christologically and incarnationally, an ontology and cosmology that grasps the union that underwrites universalism and hence a political project of solidarity. This is what is at stake in the work of Jordan Daniel Wood’s incisive book, The Whole Mystery of Christ; it’s what is at stake in David Bentley Hart’s new book, The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (even when he’s disagreeing with Wood). Only then will we see authoritarian postliberalism for what it is: a form of despair, a “certainty against the Spirit”8 that gives up hope that God will be all in all.

Indiana University Press is not a household name, by any stretch of the imagination. Smart “general” readers will encounter university press books from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale, but could perhaps spend a life of reading and not run into something from Indiana. The same might also be true for analytic philosophers, for that matter. But for those of us who work in “continental” philosophy, Indiana University Press has been a lifeline for generations.

Quickly scanning the spines on my office bookshelves, “Indiana” appears over and over and over again. For example, the book that, in some ways, launched my entire career was published by Indiana University Press (IUP): John D. Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics. It is hard for me to overestimate the significance of this book in my life. It was assigned when I was a first-year graduate student at ICS1 in Toronto by my advisor, now dearest mentor and friend, Jim Olthuis. Jim later invited Caputo to come and lecture at the ICS. I had the opportunity to meet Jack, present a paper on his work, and 2 years later, I was his doctoral student at Villanova University. In some ways, Radical Hermeneutics exploded my world—in a good way. It is still the book I recommend for students trying to understand the trajectory from phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger) to hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer) to deconstruction (Derrida). I owe so much to this book, which means I owe something to Indiana University Press.

That was just the beginning of an ongoing infusion of IUP books. For many years, one of my heroes, Merold Westphal, edited the Indiana Series in Philosophy of Religion, which basically shaped the subfield I called home. And IUP was home to some of Merold’s most important work on Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Levinas.

I can also still remember reading, in the basement of the St. Augustine Center at Villanova, John van Buren’s groundbreaking study, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. This careful study of Heidegger’s pre-Being & Time lectures is what crystallized my dissertation project on Augustine, Heidegger, and Derrida.

Translation has always been at the heart of IUP’s philosophy program, centered especially on the work of Martin Heidegger, but also voices like Schelling, Levinas, and more.2 This cultural investment in translation is at the heart of a cosmopolitan endeavor to expand worlds and build bridges.3

Some readers might have no idea about how tenuous are the shoestrings that hold together such publishing. Just this morning I received an appeal from IUP: if they could get just 75 new donors, it would unlock a $500 matching grant to support the journal’s publication of books and journals. $500?! These are the songs and dances that the corporate university makes us perform for a pittance, just to try to keep alive the sort of cultural endeavor that should be at the heart of a university’s humanizing mission.

Given the state of the world—and closer to home, the reactionary impulses of the Indiana state legislature—Indiana University Press has suffered grievous cuts and budget reductions recently. I can’t imagine my world without their work. So I’ve donated to IUP’s 75 for 75 campaign. I hope some of you might be able to consider joining me in support of such an important cultural institution that finds itself embattled by forces that devalue the life of the mind and the voice of the Other.

If you have spent time wrestling with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, then you should be interested in Peter Harrison’s important book, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. About a year ago, I was part of a multidisciplinary symposium on the book at the American Academy of Religion. The fruit of that symposium, deepened and expanded, has just been published in the journal, Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences, including a substantive reply from Peter Harrison. The issue is open-access.

Let me share a couple of snippets from my contribution (“Demythologizing the Demythologizers: What Comes After the Natural/Supernatural Dichotomy?”) to try to give you a taste of some of the issues at stake.

I see Harrison demythologizing the demythologizers. He shows how naturalism, as an ideology, is as much a history as a metaphysics (hence he begins with Hume “the historian”).^[1] Naturalism is predicated on a story about the rational, “civilized” west overcoming its captivity to supernatural myths and superstition through the emergence of modern science. But Harrison makes trouble for this progressive narrative by pointing out what it conveniently forgets. Naturalism concocts its own origin story, a heroic declaration of enlightened independence. His careful attention to the record and evidence deflates this narrative as myth. Thus he sees himself correcting naturalism’s “[h]istorical amnesia about the borrowings of the new sciences from the sphere of religion” (124; cp 238).

But Harrison’s interest is not some simple, reactionary remythologizing. This is why I think his project is so generative. I want to suggest that Harrison has given us an almost Hegelian, or at least dialectical, account of how this “new world” of naturalism emerged—and could only emerge—because of distinct theological developments in early modernity. But in doing so, he also invites us to think dialectically about what comes after demythologizing the natural/supernatural distinction itself.

In what follows, I will first highlight Harrison’s account of naturalism’s indebtedness to religious and theological paradigms. This raises important questions about how concepts can be at once inherited and redeployed in new contexts. Could naturalism’s debts to religion be forgiven? What would that mean? I then consider and extend some of the conceptual mapping that Harrison undertakes with respect to notion of nature, naturalism, and supernaturalism. I will conclude by asking the question that Harrison raised for me: Why do we (“we”)want to be naturalists?

^[1] The descriptor “ideology” is mine, not Harrison’s; but I think his account warrants use of the term. While I can’t pursue the intuition here, I do believe that naturalism functions ideologically in some ways, especially if we work with Althusser’s account of ideology (“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”: 2001, 109). For an argument to this effect (drawing on Habermas), see Spiegel, 2021.

Harrison complicates simplistic narratives about enlightened liberation from religion and theology (what Taylor calls “subtraction stories”). So naturalism could only become a default because of distinct, contingent, historical developments in theology and religion in the West (significantly related to the Reformation). So naturalism sort of has a crazy uncle it doesn’t want to talk about.

Naturalism emerges as a loud Nein! to what was a newly emergent supernaturalism.^[1] Once the distinction between natural and supernatural turns into a contest, then it has to eventually become winner-take-all. Thus, in later modernity, naturalism takes over the monopoly on causality and even, eventually, meaning. “By the second half of the nineteenth century two of the key prerequisites for the emergence of scientific naturalism were in place: a naturalism/supernaturalism binary and an accompanying epistemology that vested this dichotomy with moral and philosophical legitimacy” (280-281). But if one zooms out and keeps this long conceptual history of naturalism in view, then “[i]t looks very much as if advocacy of naturalism, understood as an appeal to invariant regularities in the physical world, is really just a version of deism under a different description” (343).

If Harrison’s history is correct, then we reach a question that is more philosophical than historical—or at least a matter of philosophyofhistory^[2]: “what do we do with naturalism?” (379). More specifically, what do we do with naturalism’s indebtedness to religion? The skeleton in modern naturalism’s closet is, paradoxically, an empty tomb: “Christianity…turns out to have been the agent of naturalization” (232). Harrison’s conceptual genealogy of naturalism uncovers its theological ancestry. The question is what we do with this, given that naturalism is staked on the refusal of religious and theological accounts of the cosmos and meaning.^[1] Consider a parallel in Hegel’s account of the dialectic between “faith” and “enlightenment” in Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1977, 328-355.

^[2] “Progressive philosophies of history, on this view, are essentially crypto-theologies of history. If this is true, it follows that our confidence in the superiority of naturalism as an approach to the world is, in fact, indebted to the religious assumptions upon which the idea of progress was original[ly] founded” (344).

Harrison’s response to all of us is, as usual, irenic, serious, and genuinely curious. It is fun to see a brilliant mind glimpsing new directions.

Anyway, this is all pretty niche; except that the questions Harrison raises, and the evidence he grapples with, really are germane to big questions we face. I encourage you to dip into the whole issue and pick up the book if you’re intrigued.

Some of this talk anticipates themes from my forthcoming book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing (which, as the kids say, is available for pre-order).

Introduction: An Unthinkable Event

We are here to stage a perhaps surprising encounter between an ancient creed and contemporary art. This event is catalyzed by the singular fecundity of the creed generated in Nicaea 1700 years ago. The intuition behind this encounter, I think, is what we should see as the theological creativity of the Council’s work, bequeathing to us an understanding of God’s relationship to the world that is audacious, evocative, and pregnant with meaning and mystery. Encapsulated in the Nicene Creed is a cosmic vision that expresses with philosophical subtlety something that couldn’t be dreamt up by philosophy: that the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen…came down” and became human.

Thus the “event” in 325 that we commemorate was itself a reckoning with the more primordial event around which human history bends—the Incarnation of God as human, the descent and appearance of God in the flesh, both an actor in, and victim of, the vicissitudes of history. Nicaea was a reckoning with the unthinkable that nonetheless confronted humanity: that, in Jesus, God was with us in some new way. The incomprehensible reverberated from Bethlehem and Jerusalem and, almost three hundred years later, a community endeavored to articulate something of this mystery that left footprints in the mud and drops of blood on the ground and an empty tomb whose very abandonment kindled hope.

Paul Ricouer once said that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” In a similar way, we could say the community at Nicaea was provoked to a new sort of thinking by this surprising encounter with the unthinkable: God become human. In their imaginative wrestling with such a reality, the Council was not trying to “comprehend” it per se, but instead trying to take some measure of the spiritual and metaphysical and historical cataclysm in Bethlehem and Jerusulem—like trying to sound the depths of an unplumbable crater. It is an impossible endeavor, and yet—being the sorts of creatures we are, with an insatiable impulse to think and speak, to comprehend and confess—it is also an unavoidable task. In that sense (and I hope this isn’t heretical), to commemorate the Council of Nicaea is to recall a noble failure. (“One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology,” Jean-Luc Marion suggests.) And yet it is the sort of failure that is generative, that nonetheless reaches toward and touches the mystery that calls us, sustains us, saves us.

This, it seems to me, is why it makes sense for a community of artists to find ongoing nourishment in Nicaea. Reckoning with the unthinkable yet undeniable, Nicaea is a feat of faith-filled theological imagination that narrates the mystery of the incarnate God in a way that beckons, nourishes, and hallows the ongoing imaginative work of incarnation we call “art.” So in my brief time this evening, I want to consider just a few themes generated by the “surprising encounter” between God and the world reckoned with by Nicaea, and how the “surprising encounter” between Nicaea and the arts might reframe the vocation of the artist—and perhaps even the role of art in the human adventure of history.

A. The Art of Imagination: Rethinking “Thinking”

Nicaea is a reckoning with a historical event that required reconnoitering the very categories of thought. The testimony of the apostles and the kerygma of the church pointed to a reality that could not be comprehended with the available stock of concepts or within the strictures of existing logic—that Jesus, this historical human who suffered and died and (incredibly) rose again, was the Creator of the cosmos. This provocative rabbi, scapegoated by the state, was not just holy but divine. This surprising fusion of Creator and creature in the historical human, Jesus, could not be thought within existing logics. In Jesus, not only did justice and mercy meet; so too did mutual exclusives! Somehow, in Jesus, the Infinite is also finite, the absolute is also conditioned, the eternal dwells in time and history. How could this be? Are we mad if we confess this—literally irrational? No, the Council proposed. This event of Incarnation requires us to rethink our thinking. The Jesus-event is an earthquake that reverberates to reconfigure thought itself.

This is why at the heart of Nicaea is a feat of imagination. The formulation of the creed required a reimagining of thinking that, in some fundamental way, had to reinvent a different logic—what I have called “the logic of incarnation.”^[1] What Nicaea rejected were attempts to reckon with the Christ-event^[2] with available concepts and logic; because to do that—to try to “think” the enfleshed God with existing categories—was to always end up diminishing the cataclysm. Every attempt to “think” the Christ-event with existing logics ended up “resolving” the mystery of the Incarnation by reducing Christ to either the creature pole or the Creator pole—either Arianism or Docetism. When the Creed dares to confess that Jesus Christ is “begotten, not made, of the same being as the Father” and that “through him all things were made,” the Council ventured to think with a new logic. The logic of incarnation is provoked by the historical event of the Incarnation. It is a nonbinary, even dialectical, logic that refuses inherited either/ors, that transcends off-the-shelf categories. The Nicene Creed bears witness to a newly elastic imagination that, provoked by the Incarnation, begins to think identity and difference differently.

This, I would propose, is something that art also tries to do. Art refuses to be governed by binary logics or discursive conditions. What the law of non-contradiction rends asunder, art endeavors to hold together. This is why, as my teacher Cal Seerveld (now of blessed memory) put it, play is at the heart of art-making. Art refuses the binary logic of analytic precision and conceptual mastery. One of the joys and mysteries of art is its ability to hold together contradictions. Whether a painting or a song, a film or a poem, the most enduring art is the most capacious. The best artworks make room for the messiness of the world around us, the swirling complexity of the soul within, and even, sometimes, the infinite mystery of divine love. Like harmonies and chords, the most enduring works of art hold together complexities—they give us a way to live with, and into, tensions, even contradictions. Where a syllogism has to resolve to a conclusion, a poem remains open. (This is why poets are exiled from the Republic.) While a treatise has to make an argument, a sculpture can evoke fourteen feelings and seven ideas all at once, and all of them can be true.

When art lapses back into binary logics—when art allows itself to be governed by the policing forces of discursivity—the result is no longer art, but propaganda.^[3] What does it look like for our art-making to be nourished by the nonbinary logic of incarnation—to dwell in and with the mystery with which Nicaea reckons?

B. Art as Event: Metaphysics meets History

One of the jarring features of the Nicene Creed is the surprising encounter between metaphysics and history. In its first lines we are taken, as it were, into the vault of heaven, into the inner sanctum of Triune life. We are sailing in what might feel like the Platonic realm of the Forms, the ethereal air of ousia, of substances and then plunged into the mud and the muck of creation. “For us…he came down.” He was crucified “under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.”

The conceptual parsing that generated the confession of Christ as homoousion was not some flight from the world into abstraction. Instead, properly reckoning with Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection propelled the Council into “speculation” in the best (Hegelian) sense of the world: trying to think in a way that reconciles opposites in order to make sense of our experience. If Trinitarian wrangling feels like a form of metaphysical speculation, it is prompted and demanded by this incredible historical reality: that “for us human and for our salvation,” God came down. I think this intersection of metaphysics and history is at the heart of Nicene Christianity.

In an essay on Beethoven’s operas, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno reflected on this essential connection between metaphysics and history. Adorno, whose outlook could be quite despairing, finds in Beethoven hints of a way the world could be otherwise. Or, at least, Adorno finds in Beethoven something that helps him make sense of our ineradicable desire for the world to be otherwise. We are never sky-hooked out of history, Adorno would (rightly) emphasize. We never get some standpoint above the fray. But, in the music of Beethoven, he admits that something transcendent flashes as a possibility in this world he experienced all too often as a prison. He puts it this way:

Metaphysics is not an unchanging realm to be grasped by looking out through the barred windows of the historical; it is the glimmer—albeit a powerless glimmer—of light which falls into the prison itself.^[4]

I’m not suggesting artists should be waylaid by metaphysical speculation. I only mean to suggest that, in this surprising encounter with Nicaea, artists might consider the ways in which their art lets the light from beyond fall into our historical prisons. What if your art is a furtive glimmer of another world, or how this world could be otherwise?

I’m reminded of Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison, in which he constantly expresses how much he misses making music. In later letters, it’s clear that someone somewhere in the vicinity of his prison has a radio. Several times, he speaks of overhearing a symphony or aria on this distant, anonymous radio. Snatches of music arrive for him like the ravens that fed Elijah. Each moment is a sonic infusion of hope and humanity. What if your art might be someone else’s radio, wafting into spaces you’re not even aware of, allowing them to hear something other than all the tiresome voices in this building we call late modernity?

C. Art as Incarnation: Spirit meets Spirit

The incarnate Christ is the conduit of the Spirit, the giver of life. His ascension unleashes the scandalous deputation of humanity as bearers of the Spirit in history’s continued unfolding. The incarnate Christ is the nexus of communion between God and humanity. And now, in some significant sense, we, enlivened by the Spirit, are commissioned as “little Christs,” as C.S. Lewis once put it, to be ambassadors of communion and reconciliation.

The arts represent one of the most potent modes of such communion and reconciliation. Our encounter with Nicaea should alert us to the way that art can be an incarnate form of encounter—what we might think of as a “para-sacramental” means of grace by which the world is invited to encounter transcendence in matter. The “transcendence” I have in mind is not only “vertical” but also what we might call a “horizontal” transcendence: the genuine otherness of another human being in all their fullness and mystery. In a world bent on reducing us to machines, where even “intelligence” becomes artificial, encountering the surprising transcendence of another consciousness is like a foretaste of divine transcendence. Such communion of minds in the work of art is a “forerunner” (to use Evelyn Waugh’s metaphor) to a communion with the Spirit, the giver of life.

Two centuries ago, Hegel already gave us a way to appreciate this. In his lectures on aesthetics, he emphasizes the way art effects a communion of minds, of “spirit” (Geist) in Hegel’s language. Every work of art is minded, we might say—it is a working up and working over of materials that reflects the intentionality, reflection, and desire of the artist. At the same time, every work of art is material (“sensuous,” is how Hegel describes it). So every work of art is its own sort of incarnation. Every work of art, Hegel says, originates “from the spirit” and “belongs to the territory of the spirit; it has received the baptism of the spiritual.”

Contrary to the Romanticism of his day (and ours!), Hegel provocatively suggests that this spiritual baptism of the material work of art means that a landscape painting is superior to a mountain vista or stunning sunset. The landscape painting is a work of “spirit,” which means that it is a site or occasion for the communion of minds in a way that nature is not.^[5]

I once heard my friend, the novelist Garth Greenwell, comment on his experience of seeing Van Gogh’s trees in a recent exhibit at the Met. “When I look at a tree,” he admitted, “a real tree out in the world, it does not seem infinite to me. I see a material thing. It doesn’t suggest something that dwarfs my ability to know. It seems to me that the tree is in some sense knowable. But when I go to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Met and look at Van Gogh’s paintings of trees, those trees feel infinite to me, they feel, finally, un-knowable. There is something in human consciousness, in Van Gogh’s consciousness poured out over cypress trees, in my consciousness receiving Van Gogh’s paintings, that feels infinite to me.” This, I think is a powerful testimony to art as a site of communion, an incarnate nexus in which spirit meets spirit, transcendence encounters transcendence. By cracking us open to this infinity, even if only initially the infinite mystery of another human consciousness, it seems to me art is an antidote to reductionism and the claustrophobia of naturalism. The encounter of spirit in a work of art pierces the prison of what Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self” of modernity. In doing so, it also cracks us open to the possible incursion of grace.

Like Hegel, we might think of every artwork as a site of incarnation. The work of art, he says, “stands in the middle between” sensuousness and thought, between body and mind. Inherently material, the artwork is also more than material; it is a site of “sensuous presence.” And when we encounter the work of art, we are both engaged by the material and pulled beyond it.

“These sensuous shapes and sounds appear in art not merely for the sake of themselves and their immediate shape, but with the aim, in this shape, of affording satisfaction to higher spiritual interests, since they have the power to call forth from all the depths of consciousness a sound and an echo in the spirit. In this way the sensuous aspect of art is spiritualized, since the spirit appears in art as made sensuous.”

The material artwork is not a ladder to be kicked away; rather, it is in the material that minds meet. The sensuous is a site for a communion of spirit.^[6] Spirit recognizes spirit is the sensuous work of art—whether a symphony or a sculpture.

Our art-making will embody a “Nicene” sensibility, not by piously repeating or picturing sacred history but, instead, by endeavoring to be art that is suffused with human spirit that, in its fullness, is its own incarnate prelude encountering the divine.

D. Art as Emptying: Kenosis and Risk

Hegel, it should be noted, is an interpreter of Incarnation who rightly grasps the Incarnation in terms of kenosis, which brings me to a final theme. The Incarnation is an “emptying” of God into the vicissitudes of time and what Hegel described as the “slaughter bench of history.” “He came down,” the Nicene Creed confesses, not to parade in glory or float above the fray like some invincible wraith. The Incarnation of the Son is God’s exposure to suffering and death “for us humans and for our salvation.” Here, too, something about the very heart of God is revealed in the Incarnate Son: God with us is God who suffers with and for us. This is a radical moment of Nicene faith. Again, I think Hegel is a surprising interpreter of the implications of this fundamental aspect of our credo:

The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass onto something else; Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.^[7]

If our art-making is its own sort of incarnation, then art that reflects Nicaea must be art that “looks the negative in the face.” It will be art that takes risks, including the risk of being misunderstood, perhaps even the risk of appearing unfaithful. I’m thinking, for example, of a poem like “Sparrows” by Bryce Taylor:

Sparrows

By Bryce A. Taylor

There was a girl in my high school always smiling
and the other day, in a bathtub, she shot herself.
Her mother was downstairs with her two little kids
whose universe will begin with that bang.
Somehow there’s still air in the lungs of earth
to blow through the reeds, and random sparrows
are still flying, the scarred eternal intellect
threading the spider that threads its orb web
to catch, immobilize, guzzle the juices. Yesterday
black vultures in my neighborhood quarreled
over rubbery pink remains of a squirrel run over
on a street where the kids play. The Manicheans
were onto something, separating the good god
from all of this, but you’re so stubborn, you
insist on hanging dead in the web and being
there, in the tub, not pulling the trigger maybe,
but kissing the wrinkled finger as it pulled.

There is no aesthetic tradition that has done this more powerfully than the legacy of Black music. As James Cone argued The Spirituals and the Blues, this musical legacy “unites the joy and the sorrow, the love and the hate, the hope and despair of black people; and it moves the people toward the direction of total liberation.” This rhymes with Nicaea.

Are we willing to tarry with the negative in our art-making—to descend, as the Incarnate God did, into suffering?

Without End: Ever Beginning

It is important to appreciate Nicaea as a beginning, not an end. As I’ve suggested, we might consider the Council’s work not so much as defining a boundary as aiming to preserve mystery. The Creed guards against false resolutions that all amount to reductions governed by a binary logic that can’t adequately absorb the wonder of the God-man. But this is a delineation that is meant to open up the mystery not domesticate it.

In his study, The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, Mark Smith notes how under-determined the Creed was. It did not end a conversation; instead, it invited centuries of further reflection, wrestling, and wrangling. Subsequent Councils were a testimony to the plenitude of what Nicaea touched upon. “Nicaea’s capacity for flexible re-expression” is a testament to what we might call its apophatic wisdom—how much it leaves unsaid, how much of the mystery remains open. Subsequent reception demonstrated “how ‘Nicaea’ cold be both reaffirmed as sufficient and yet also acknowledged (even if not openly) as inadequate.”^[8] Every generation can only engage in what Smith calls “creative re-reception” of Nicaea: “an ‘artefact’ such as the Nicene Creed, itself the product of specific circumstances and motivations, cannot simply be reaffirmed in a new time and context without remainder. Rather…it is an ‘open work’, ‘finished in its unfinishedness’, which must be encountered and received anew.”^[9] One can see this dynamic at play in our own day in “Neo-Chalcedonian” discussions, in the wake of Maximus Confessor, about the role the Word plays in creation (“through him all things were made”) and whether we should understand creation itself as Incarnation.^[10]

This “spirit” of Nicaea suggests why the Christian affirmation of the arts should always entail the celebration of contemporary art-making. Contrary to any Golden-Age-ism that nostalgically enshrines some past epoch, each generation is called to imagine anew. Each generation is called to incarnate the mystery for fresh contexts and new audiences. Each generation of artists to called to create and perform now, embedded in new contexts. Nicaea was its own improvisation, calling forth seventeen centuries of further improvisations. Every work of art is its own event of reception and improvisation. We will never be done making.

In the Incarnation, God became local—“moved into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson memorably put it. Our neighborhoods, whatever and wherever they may be need, need you, artists, to incarnate the beauty and mystery of God—to give us songs to sing that rhyme with Nicaea.

^[1] See James K.A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge, 2002) and idem., The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021).

^[2] I have always appreciated Oliver O’Donovan’s endeavor to say that what we reckon with in Jesus is a multi-momented “event” that is inclusive of incarnation, ministry, cross, resurrection and ascension (see Desire of the Nations). Any invocation of Jesus that leaves out one of these moments diminishes the fullness of the event that is Jesus.

^[3] See Rainbows for a Fallen World.

^[4] Cited in Peter Gordon, A Precarious Happiness, p. 43.

^[5] “[O]wing to the feeling and insight whereby a landscape has been represented in a painting, this work of the spirit acquires a higher rank than the mere natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than any product of nature.”G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 27, 29. A fascinating aside: Hegel entertains an objection, namely, the possibility that a direct encounter with nature is, in fact, an encounter with God, the “artist” of nature. This suggestion, Hegel replies, fails to understand the dynamics of God’s adventure as Spirit. “God is more honoured by what the spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature,” because it is humanity’s spiritedness/mindedness, which finds expression in the emergence of culture from nature, that is most “God-like”: “in art-production God is just as operative as he is in the phenomena of nature; but the Divine, as it discloses itself in the work of art, has been generated out of spirit, and thus has won a suitable thoroughfare for its existence, whereas just being there in the unconscious sensuousness of nature is not a mode of appearance appropriate to the Divine (30).

^[6] “[T]he work of art, as a sensuous object, is not merely for sensuous apprehension; its standing is of such a kind that, though sensuous, it is essentially at the same time for spiritual apprehension; the spirit is meant to be affected by it and to find some satisfaction in it.” Hegel, Aesthetics, 38-39, 35.

^[7] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §32.

^[8] Mark S. Smith, The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, AD 431-451 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2-3.

^[9] Ibid., 5.

^[10] I’m thinking of Jordan Daniel Wood’s stunning book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).

Analytic vs Continental

General readers interested in philosophy might be surprised to learn that, in the world of “professional” philosophy, a longstanding antagonism has existed between two different camps often described as “analytic philosophy” vs “continental philosophy.” You’ll notice that these are strange comparatives: one term is descriptive, the other is geographical. The distinction is notoriously fuzzy, often pilloried as a ham-fisted fiction, or resisted as unnecessarily divisive—and yet everyone recognizes the difference when they see it.

When I talk to normal people about my profession, I—somewhat provocatively, admittedly—articulate the distinction something like this:

• “Analytic” philosophy, or “Anglo-American” philosophy, is a form of philosophy that aspires to be math. It is primarily animated by the endeavor to reduce (i.e., break down, analyze) philosophical questions to a clarification of terms. With terms clarified, the terms can then be run through the machine processing of logic to secure conclusions. It tends to be ideologically a-historical and interested in the “history” of philosophy only as a mine for propositions and “intuitions.” This is the legacy of philosophers like G.E. Moore, W.V.O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Lewis, and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. (In my experience, the “normal” person I’m talking to, who might be an avid reader of philosophy, has never heard of many of these names.)

• “Continental” philosophy is sexier and edgier—think Sartre and Beauvoir in cafés on the Left Bank. It is loosely related to philosophy emerging from continental Europe, especially Germany and France. But it is also a style of philosophy that is pretty much inseparable from the history of philosophy. Constructive, generative work in continental philosophy is almost always a conversation with—and explicitly indebted to—the history of philosophy. But, post-Hegel, it is also nourished by a historicism that recognizes the material and social conditions of thought. For the general reader, this is the philosophy they know as “existentialism” or “deconstruction.” It is a form of philosophy that often aspires to literature. It is associated with names like Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Slavoj Žižek. (Cards on the table: if we accept these terms as heuristic, then I am a “continental” philosopher.)

Now, while this can be painted as a deep-seated antagonism between rival “camps” in professional philosophy, that doesn’t quite capture the reality on the ground. Because the fact is, analytic philosophy is the dominant mode of professional philosophy in the United States, the UK, and increasingly, around the world. So these are less like warring “camps” and more like the analytic metropolis with a continental tent city pitched in Zuccotti Park.

I should also note that the world of philosophy of religion and “Christian philosophy” is dominated by analytic approaches (think: Alvin Plantinga). That legacy shaped the default ethos of the storied philosophy department I joined at Calvin College almost 25 years ago. While continental philosophy was present as a kind of minority report, the default assumptions were analytic. (I used to have a senior colleague who, in seminars, would sometimes respond to my papers by wryly commenting, “I thought I understood what you were saying but then you went all Merleau-Ponty on me.”1)

I’m not complaining. I have often said that, as the product of a decidedly continental graduate program, coming to Calvin was an opportunity for a continuing education in the dominant form of professional philosophy. I learned to “talk analytic.” One way that continental philosophers try to find space in the analytic hegemony of professional philosophy is to effectively “talk analytic” about the generative German and French philosophers that really animate their interests. But through engagement with analytic philosophy, I think I have also acquired some virtues with respect to clarity, precision, and argumentation. And some of the puzzles posed by analytic philosophers elicit genuine curiosity.

Continental philosophy also deserves its own criticism. I’m not here as a simple apologist for continental philosophy. Indeed, I have been critical of continental philosophy of religion as a subdiscipline in my recent book, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology (see chapter 3). Like any academic field, it can become incestuous, self-involved, and jargony, absorbed by abstract puzzles and play. In its worst moments, continental philosophy is a kind of conceptual onanism. But that is not baked-in to continental philosophy per se.

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy

This all a personal preface to some notes on Christoph Schuringa’s engaging new book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso, 2025). Given my own focus and research, I’m indebted to Schuringa as the editor of the Hegel Bulletin, but in this book he ventures into very different territory. With journalistic verve and a remarkable mastery of arcane debates in analytic philosophy, Schuringa endeavors to concretize “analytic” philosophy not just as some vague “style” but as a hegemonic program in professional philosophy with a distinct history (a history that differs from analytic philosophy’s own myths about its history2).

Critically, Schuringa’s history of analytic philosophy is a social history. The forces that produced the hegemony of analytic philosophy are not simply internal to professional philosophy. Analytic philosophy arises and grows to dominance because of external—social, material, economic, political, historical, non-philosophical—factors that both encourage and reward a form of philosophy that largely gives comfort to the hegemony of U.S. interests in the twentieth century, viz., liberal capitalism.

When analytic philosophers derive intuitions from “common sense” and so-called “ordinary language,” this is cover for naturalizing the status quo. Thus Schuringa suggests that 20th c. analytic philosophy is “a continuation of a basically eighteenth-century mindset marked by bourgeois ideology’s twin face—liberal and empiricism” (15). This is why analytic philosophy is rooted in an evasion and dismissal of post-Kantian philosophical tradition (Hegel, Schelling, Marx, et al). As Schuringa notes, analytic philosophy “circumvents” this post-Kantian philosophical development “in order to take things up where David Hume left them” (154).

The heart of Schuringa’s history is a series of regional histories: Cambridge, home to G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell (ch. 2); Vienna, home of the Vienna Circle that bequeathed a misbegotten positivism to Anglo-American philosophy (ch. 3); Oxford, site of the rise of “ordinary language philosophy” (ch. 4); and then a chapter that traces the migration of analytic philosophy’s center from the UK to the U.S., particularly Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton (ch. 5).

I can’t possibly do justice to Schuringa’s careful documentation of these histories which draws not only on published works but also correspondence, archived lectures, and other ephemera that capture the ethos of these institutions at crucial periods in the 20th century. In Cambridge, rejecting the (Hegel-tinged) “idealism” of F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green, Russell and Moore effectively oversaw a retreat of philosophy from any sort of endeavor that might impinge on the world. As Schuringa summarizes (27), G.E. Moore’s project

shows just how deeply analytic philosophy could be implicated in the reproduction of the status quo: here, that of a world whose appeal has now become entirely unfathomable, marked by the superior aestheticism of an upper layer of Edwardian society whose thin veneer of modernism masks an insecure conformism.

In Oxford, this retreat hits ethics, too. “Moral philosophy retreated into a ‘meta’ mode. The game became of the analysis of moral discourse, abnegating the defence of any (‘first-order’) moral views themselves” (108). In this vein, Schuringa’s analysis echoes Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of moral philosophy in the 20th century.

Philosophers at War

Given his journalistic profiles, Schuringa provides some fascinating vignettes along the way. The Vienna Circle, for example, is often perceived as the simple progenitor of Ayer’s positivism (“verificationism”). But Schuringa notes the underdetermination of what was happening in Vienna in the first part of the 20th century, including a very different, socially attuned “Red Vienna” that generated early sympathy between Neurath and Horkheimer. If you only know the received history, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School were in fruitful conversation (and Paul Tillich was at one of the early meetings, p. 84). Schuringa also highlights “a significant connection,” in the 1920s, between the Vienna Circle and the Bauhaus (74). Roads not taken.

But Schuringa’s account of the Cold War history of analytic philosophy is the most sobering. This is where his material and social history impinges on analytic philosophy’s own mythology. Any “adequate explanation of the rise of analytic philosophy in the post-war United States must consider the highly specific political and social conditions which obtained, and how they shaped the activities of those subject to them” (121). In this respect, Schuringa notes the radical difference between the pre-war 1930s and the post-war 1950s. In the '30s, in light of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, communism and socialism were live options even in the American context.3 After the war, given revelations of the show trials in the Soviet Union and the fomenting of the Cold War, the pendulum swings wildly right to enshrine liberalism and capitalism.

It’s not just that professional philosophy was not immune to this; professional philosophers were explicitly enlisted in this ideological battle. Perhaps one of the most shocking pieces of evidence Schuringa unearths is the fact that influential analytic philosophers “Hans Reichenbach, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson and Nicholas Rescher were all employed by RAND. Another, John Rawls, began in the same period to develop a political philosophy grounded in game theory [developed out of RAND]” (122). Alongside, and not unrelated, were the pressures of McCarthyism that directly affected the philosophical academy, casting those with “continental” sympathies as suspect. The result? “Its chilling effect encouraged conformism and severely hampered those with the most radical agendas in philosophy” (140).4

“The Accents of Infallibility”

Part of the social history emerging from this British context is a history of class and the legacies of Oxbridge elitism and the postures of the tutorial system. Along the way, Schuringa is attentive to what I’d call a tic of the analytic style of philosophizing that has always driven me crazy. I guess you have to appreciate how much analytic philosophers pride themselves on being the guardians of “rigor” in professional philosophy. And yet when you scratch below the surface of analytic style and posturing, you start to realize that this “rigor” is dependent on a rhetorical device that substitutes for analysis and argumentation.5 John Maynard Keynes, who rubbed shoulders with G.E. Moore in Bloomsbury, described this already in his memoirs, which Schuringa cites (45):

In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was the master of this method—greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that this hair shook.

I have seen such performances countless times. (It is also a famous trope for lazy liberals to dismiss socialism as just bonkers—see anything in the NYT about Zohran Mamdani.) Schuringa names the inconsistency here:

“Officially, it is supposed to be argumentation that wins the day; often, however, objectors rest their demurral on such statements as ‘That strikes me as false.’6 Objections the speaker feels incapable of dealing with are dismissed with the declaration, ‘I don’t know what you mean’—the implication (sometimes voiced) being that the objector is ‘confused’, not that the speaker needs to listen more attentively or learn something new.”

He later hints at the substitution of charisma & power for argumentation: “The profession ‘I do not understand this,’ if aimed by the right person at the right target, counts as a powerful objection in analytic philosophy” (158).

This is why Schuringa’s chapter on the role of “intuitions” in analytic philosophy (ch. 9) is so crucial. Outside the profession, it is hard to describe how much the allegedly rigorous logical machine of analytic philosophy is fueled by the sketchy chaff of “intuitions.” Basically the whole operation gets off the ground on the basis of “armchair assumptions” about what “we” all tend to think—again, completely devoid of any sophistication about history or context. (Feminist philosophy has been an important source of critique in this regard.) Schuringa well summarizes (234):

The results are unsurprising: a ‘philosophy’ whose wheels spin idly in the service of well-entrenched patterns of thought. Here analytic philosophy wears its social function on its sleeve. Opting for ‘common sense’ as its ultimate basis, its practitioners speak with one voice in order to feed their own ideology back to themselves.

This makes his next chapter, “Colonizing Philosophy,” important, and perhaps his most controversial. In the 21st century, philosophers apprenticed to analytic procedures have nonetheless been awakened to big, systemic questions of justice and exclusion.7 And so we see the rise of analytic social philosophy, even an “analytic Marxism.” But Schuringa suggests that, ironically, this amounts to “philosophical Columbusing” (echoing Kevin Richardson): analytic philosophy “discovers” what Marx was already addressing in the 19th century. But now analytic philosophy appropriates it without taking on board the fundamentally historical and material conditions of such a critique. “The danger that attends analytic social philosophy,” he warns, “is not merely that of reinventing the wheel, and doing so badly, but of selling the wheel back to its original inventors after having subjected it to analytic refurbishment” (261). Analytic philosophy “colonizes even the anti-colonial” (283) and cherry-picks critique without reckoning with the more fundamental questions of philosophy’s relation to history.

The Alternative?

My only disappointment with Schuringa’s important, compelling book is that it ends abruptly and too soon—without even an epilogue that might hint at the alternative. It’s not that I don’t know what he has in mind; I’m pretty sure I do. But that’s because I’m immersed in the same professional world, and share (I suspect) many of his philosophical sources and assumptions. My concern is the missed opportunity to winsomely sketch a very different vision of what philosophy is for, especially for a wider audience.

Marx, part of the post-Kantian tradition evaded by analytic philosophy, already hinted at the alternative: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” But this was not license for emotivism or some anti-intellectual activism; Marx saw philosophy as crucial to this social endeavor.

Already in 1844, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx envisioned a collaboration between theory and practice that is attuned to history. “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat,” he wrote, “so the proletariat finds its 8intellectual weapons in philosophy.” Thus “philosophy cannot realize itself without the sublation [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichtung] of philosophy.” This is why philosophy is, fundamentally, the work of critique (as Hegel put it, “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought”). Philosophy reads the signs of the times to discern how the Zeit is shaping (often mal-forming) our Geist. This—precisely the attunement to historical conditions eschewed by analytic philosophy—is the work of Marx’s Capital. But you can see the endeavor presaged in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The feat of consciousness comprehending these material conditions is the task and unending vocation of philosophy.

I promised that Quid Amo would be a place where I’d share some of my enthusiasms, some things I’m loving right now. Herewith a digest of some recent delights which, for me, is also an exercise in gratitude.

10. Two new albums: “I quit” by HAIM is at once poppy and dark, lyrical and naughty. And Bruce Springsteen’s “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” hooked me from the first song (but I’m a prime sucker for the Boss).

9. “My Mom Jayne,” a documentary by Mariska Hargitay about her mother, the blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield, who died tragically in a car crash when Mariska was just 3 years old. The story material is remarkable in itself—with twists and heart-rending turns. But the film is also the story of Hargitay, an actress, reassessing her relationship to her mother and her mother’s legacy, complicating our (and her) received picture of her mother and herself. I’ve been gushing about this to all our friends. A well-crafted artwork that is deeply humane.

8. I’ve been enjoyed reading some Substacks from a cadre of young theologians who are also thoughtful writers. It’s a little hard to describe what Tim Troutner, Jordan Wood, and Andrew Kuiper share in common—I’d say it is a certain kind of faithful audacity in their theologizing, animated by ancient theologians like Maximus the Confessor, in serious (and revisionist) conversation with Hegel and German idealism, aspiring toward a cosmic vision of creation’s union with God “who is all in all.” But rather than being a form of arcane metaphysical retreat into ethereal realms, they also exhibit a deep concern for contemporary justice with what I think I could call a leftist, even socialist (?) bent which (I’d argue) follows from the vision of divine/human solidarity expressed in their writings. They are just a few young voices who remind me I have a lot to learn.

7. Vera, or Faith, the latest novel from Gary Shteyngart, my favorite American satirist since his beguiling novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Like SSTLS, Vera is set in a sort “near” dystopia that is unsettling because it is completely plausible: a future that holds up a mirror to our present. As we’ve come to expect from Shteyngart, it is smart, wry, and insightful—while also being uproariously funny. And while there are cynical characters, there is a new tenderness in this novel that explores the anxieties of children and the hungers of/for familial love. I inhaled it in two days.

6. The “cocktail of summer” for me this year is the White Negroni. You’ll find a few different renditions; here’s what I’ve been making:

1 1/2 oz. Gin

3/4 oz. Suze [this is the secret sauce of this drink, the “Campari” of the White Negroni]

1 oz. Lillet Blanc (Dolin Blanc also works, but not Dolin dry vermouth]

Cin cin!

5. Tour de France: Unchained1 on Netflix. This is a serial documentary about the Tour de France—think of it as the cycling equivalent of “Drive to Survive” (a series about Formula 1). Even though I’ve been a huge F1 fan for a decade (maybe because of that), I think the Tour de France series is so much better. It’s partly because the “machines” at the center of this race are still (barely!) humans. But I also think the directors and editors of “Tour de France” find much more compelling narratives, episode-by-episode. It is not uncommon for an episode to bring me to tears.

4. Our gardens are a riot of color and life right now. They are the fruit of a dozen years of ongoing labor and care, envisioned and overseen by Deanna (I’m just a sous gardener). Deanna begins each morning, coffee in hand, surveying her kingdom (don’t ask her about the rabbits; her language turns un-lady-like). I get to look at them all day from my front office window. It is a special joy to see people walking on the sidewalk stop to gaze, sometimes touching and inhaling the scent of lavender, enjoying a gift Deanna has made for the world. It’s remarkable how many neighbors tell her, Thank you.

3. Last fall I picked up a mint edition of The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest [1914-1919]. These are letters from a young Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, to his remarkable cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon [who wrote under the pen name “Claude Aragonnès”]. Teilhard de Chardin is, I believe, due for retrieval and reassessment—a stunning, adventurous thinker about cosmic reality. From the horrors of the trenches of World War I, in these letters we see the gestation and growth of his thought. The letters are also a wonderful testament to an enduring friendship that is tender and intellectually charged. In the hope-quenching circumstances of the Great War, Teilhard de Chardin enjoins his cousin to seek union with God:

“we humbly expose ourselves to the radiation of the infinite Being, ardently longing that he may penetrate us and transform us into himself.”

2. River SUP-ping. I’ve enjoyed stand-up paddle boarding for probably a decade now, including on the vast beauty of the Great Lakes. But this year I’ve been especially enjoying river paddle boarding on bucolic sections of the Grand River outside of town. On a recent evening I felt like I had the world to myself in the silence of the river—until I quietly paddled below a gleaming bald eagle perched on a branch waiting to fish. It was magical.

1. Our grandchildren. In 2025 I entered my “grandpa era” and I am gobsmacked and smitten. I feel like Aquinas at the end of his life, after that mystical vision: “I have seen things that make my writings like straw.” Becoming a grandparent is like finding, in the second half of a life, the reason you were born—a life’s work you can take up only because of the work you’ve put in in the first half.

Out & About: Updates

• I’ll be speaking at the Duke Initiative in Theology & the Arts big festival/conference, “Visible & Invisible: Surprising Encounters in Theology and the Arts,” September 4-7, 2025 at Duke University in Durham, NC. Maybe I’ll see you there?

• I’ve just finished the copyediting on my new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, forthcoming from Yale University Press (never too early to pre-order 😇). While this stage can be drudgery, I’m grateful for a fantastic experience with a masterful copy editor who at once “got” my voice and improved my prose. I’ve also gotten a first peek at interior design and I can’t wait for you to get to see it.

• I’m starting to dream & scheme the book tour when the book launches on 3/24/26. We’re looking at stops in NYC, DC, Austin, Los Angeles, and of course Grand Rapids, and elsewhere TBD. If you or an organization you know might have ideas for a venue/host in these cities or elsewhere, please reach out and contact me here.

I’m very excited to share this first peek of my next book, now announced on the Yale University Press site.

I quite adore this cover, which turned out different from any of the working sketches I had in my head. I am very grateful that the good folks at Yale UP let me keep this title (kind of a mash-up of St. Gregory of Nyssa, Howard Thurman, and the Cloud of Unknowing). But that much title copy makes it hard to include an image, so I love how the designer went for a mood rather than representation. (And I’m almost equally geeked by the trim size: 5.50 x 7.50 in.—a wonderful artifact.)

I’ll have much more to say about this in the coming months, but here’s the catalogue copy as a teaser:

A philosopher journeys back to the mystics to learn how to live with uncertainty in the twenty-first century

How do we live when we don’t know what to believe, or who to believe, or how we could even know? In this deeply felt book, philosopher James K. A. Smith explores how radical uncertainty can be liberating, opening us to another way of being. The pain of his own profound uncertainty led Smith to a surprising source for modern consolation: the mystical experiences of Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint John of the Cross, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing. These mystics testify to a deeper truth beneath all that distracts and all that foments anxiety and fear. It is love.

Drawing on ancient traditions of contemplation as well as on contemporary novels, poetry, film, and paintings, Smith speaks to the fundamental yearnings that persist in late modernity, including the philosophical quest for knowledge and certainty. He shows us how the gifts of the Christian contemplative tradition and the riches of creative works embody a liberating spirituality that recovers the fullness of being human.

As Smith traces his twenty-first-century journey with the mystics, he reveals that wisdom is learning how to live with uncertainty. In bringing a philosopher’s eye and ear to the mystics, Smith brings a mystical heart back to philosophy.

This won’t be released until March 24, 2026. (We’re in the copyediting stage right now.) But as the kids say: it’s never too early to pre-order. ;-)