Writing
Essays
I write about meaning, truth, religion, discipline, and modern life.
Essay archive
The Burden of Killing God
Getting rid of God does not get rid of judgment, guilt, dignity, worship, or meaning. It forces the question of what now carries them.
If you get rid of God, you do not get rid of judgment.
The Shape of Suffering
Pain and damage are real, but the wound does not get the last word. Suffering takes shape in the judgment under which events are received.
Pain is not subtle. A body under strain announces itself whether you want it to or not.
Bounded Infinity
The problem of evil fails as an indictment of the goodness of being or a benevolent higher power once its hidden assumptions about power, possibility, goodness, suffering, and evil are exposed.
The problem of evil often sounds stronger than it is because suffering is not an abstraction. Pain can make a question urgent. It cannot turn confusion into proof.
The Weight of the World
A philosophical essay on whether grief, promise, beauty, and obligation are merely local meanings or signs of what reality is.
You can see this most cleanly at the edge of a hospital bed. Someone you love is being described through numbers, images, risks, and protocols. The description matters. It may save her life. But no one in the room thi...
What Counts as Evidence for God
The sentence "there is no evidence for God" usually hides a narrow theory of evidence. This essay asks what would count instead.
When someone says there is no evidence for God, the most useful question is: what would count as evidence?
When the World Shrinks to Objects
Meaning is universal in experience, but strangely weak in public language. This essay asks how object-talk came to dominate our sense of what is real.
Purpose does not usually come up in polite conversation. Outside religious settings, it can feel too intimate, too grand, or too unstable to bring up.
What Makes Meaning Hold
Some things deepen a life and keep their weight when life gets hard. Others only feel important for a while.
For all the talk about meaning being subjective, people usually make sharper judgments than that in real life.