Essays

Trusting Again: On the God Emerging From Faith Reconstruction

A growing movement of believers are rejecting the notion of an all-powerful God, finding inspiration and comfort in a morally relatable, but limited God.

Patrick Wilson

Beyond the Clock to a Sacred Phenomenology of Time

Modern life has created a spiritual crisis around time. By combining Henri Bergson’s concept of lived time (durée) with Shia Islamic metaphysics, we might move…

Sabahat Fida

‘Love Is Blind’ and the Atomization of Finding a Mate

Our dating lives have become more atomized, excluding the social capital from friends and family that has traditionally benefitted courtship.

Anna Nunan

What ‘Beowulf’ Says About the American Incarceration System

America’s mass incarceration system is built on Beowulf’s same mistaken view for how we ought to address “evil” in society.

Carissa Chung

The Opposable Thumb at the End of the Imagination

Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Rick Joines

Tender-Minded vs. Tough-Minded Thinkers

Philosopher William James‘ concept of tender-minded vs. tough-minded thinkers helps us better understand what most informs our personal beliefs.

Jeffrey Howard

On the Something There Is

Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.

Rick Joines

Your Job and Cancer Are Nothing: Part III

Bringing meditation techniques into his new role as a middle school teacher, a former academic finds some resolution despite a new crisis.

Donovan Irven