Josiah Royce and the Destiny of the Individual

The question of immortality cannot be answered until we know what an individual truly is. Before we ask whether the self survives, we must ask what sort of being the self is.

Can vicarism save me?

We cast our sins on a scapegoat and call it grace. But what if we were built to carry them? Is vicarism our curse or our salvation?

Thomas Troward and the Science of Mind

Thomas Troward (1846–1916) occupies a distinctive and, in many respects, indispensable place within the movement later called New Thought. Where much of that current tended toward exhortation, therapeutic promise, or loosely articulated metaphysics, Troward sought to supply what it otherwise lacked: a principial foundation. His project was not to

From Emptiness to Logos: Fabien Muller’s Kenological Retrieval of the Johannine Prologue

Fabien Muller's Kenologische Versuche: Der Johannesprolog zwischen Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu und Meister Eckhart (Kenological Essays: The Johannine Prologue between Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, and Meister Eckhart, 2022) is one of the most ambitious recent attempts to recover the Johannine Prologue as a text of first philosophy. It is neither a work

Another Blow ‘Gainst the Devil You Know

As a strong protectionist and a supporter of faltering, disjointed efforts to re-establish an effective primacy of politics over economics—building and maintaining the power of sovereign authorities at various levels (from local to supranational) to break with kneejerk neoliberal economism—it pains me once again to see the slapdash

Unmani

Is our horror now more about the dissolution of the boundaries or being entombed by them? We’ve felt somehow thrice at a blow, so: diffusion’s angst and enclosure’s angst and angst’s angst—masticated in upper and lower bestial jaws, what will you not do? Anything, so

The Centre That Can Hold: René Guénon’s The King of the World

The King of the World (Le Roi du monde, 1927) is a short but exceptionally dense work in which René Guénon examines the traditional doctrine of a supreme spiritual centre governing the world. The immediate occasion of the book lies in the early twentieth-century diffusion of accounts concerning Agarttha and

Song of the Rain, Song of Sophia

Khalil Gibran's celestial rain as a mirror for creation's rhythmic longing and the indwelling presence of Divine Wisdom.

On the Poverty of Christmas

A Nativity sanitized of its social and political context is devoid of incarnation. Insofar as the phenomenon of Christmas is "Incarnate," it includes all the dung and flies that accompany our fleshly existence.

Dakpo Tashi Namgyal: Master of Mahāmudrā

Taken as a whole, Dakpo Tashi Namgyal’s teaching reveals a master who articulated Mahāmudrā not as a collection of exalted claims but as a rigorously tested path of recognition, diagnosis, and integration.

Beholding Calvary: On the Phenomenological Poverty of Penal Substitution

The model of penal substitution occludes the event of the Crucifixion with abstract mechanism. But the phenomenon of Calvary offers and compels something more.

Does universal salvation negate the sacrifice of the religious martyr?

Martyrdom in a universalist paradigm entails no fear of eternal damnation and is a more credible "witness" before others.

Peter

Revealed Knowledge and Authority in the Traditions of Matthew, Thomas, and Judas

Peter's Confession is not merely the origin of ecclesial authority, but the beginning of a hard lesson about how divine insight can coexist with human misunderstanding—and how the Church is built on both.

Married to the Mob II: America Settles?

An opinion piece in Vanity Fair wants to give us rubberneckers—or, you know, trainspotters, depending on which side of the tracks we may be standing (there can be only two, right?)—an apter set of historical precedents to talk about the M.O. of really existing Trumpism over against

incarnation

On the Need for Incarnational Priors

So long as we take our human experience seriously, anything that is thoroughly arbitrary cannot be genuinely salvific.

For Your Discretion: Unsaying the Subject

It gives me hope in the goodness of humanity to know that, unremarked by policymakers or the press or this digital panopticon in which we all voluntarily inform on ourselves, millions of men and women are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, quietly and durably happy. Every incentive structure leads

modernity

Tertium quid nimis: Shoe Drops on Sentinel

"A great master says that his breaking-through is nobler than his emanation, and this is true." ~Meister Eckhart, Sermon 87

Bulgakov

'Creatio ex nihilo' cannot be repeated

A brief reflection on Bulgakov and the irrevocability of everything.

metaphysics

Some Reflections on Integral Metaphysics

Metaphysics is not a science in the modern sense, but a mode of knowledge. Yet no conflict is conceivable between the two, nor there can be a symmetrical correlation between them, for their domains are so widely apart.

judgment

Can We Ever Be Lost to God?

Insofar as no moment "in time" is lost on God (since God is not bound by time and moments to God do not, as to us, slip away), what happens to those moments wherein one "chooses" God if we are to believe that one could later

A Calque, Ulysses? No, Logos Unbound

The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay. —Basavaṇṇa (12th cent.), vācana 820.

Good Friday

Jesus Didn't Kill Himself

At Calvary, Jesus was executed by the earthly powers of his day. "Atonement" cannot be sanitized of this political and historical reality.

apocalypse

An Inconvenient Horizon: Apocalypse Versus the Cult of an Endless Tomorrow

In an age of techno-nationalist optimism, apocalypse is heresy. But only our eschatological horizon can reveal what is ultimately illusory.

Dusty Spectacles; or, These Things Too

Ash Wednesday, 2025 “All nations surrounded me; in the name of the LORD I cut them off!”—Psalm 118:10. It is not that the old school contrarian commentators require remarkable foresight to call the experiment in exceptionalism on its cruel game ahead of time—it is after hours, and