Psyche

In this episode, I reflect on finally watching Robert Eggers’ The Witch—with full spoilers—and why the film feels like such a devastating psychological and theological horror story.

I explore Thomasin, Puritan fear, original sin, repression, the shadow, and the dark parody of individuation at the heart of the film. Drawing loosely from Jung and depth psychology, I think about what happens when a religious world has no room for desire, embodiment, grief, or becoming—and how the parts of the psyche we refuse to face often return in monstrous form.

The Witch is not just a story about the Devil in the woods. It is a story about what happens when a family, a theology, and a whole moral universe cannot metabolize their own shadow.

In this episode, I reflect on Midsommar after a client recommended I watch it and the film really gripped me.

Spoiler warning: I talk openly about major scenes in the movie.

What stayed with me most was the tension between modern individual alienation and the seductive pull of collective religious belonging. Midsommar is disturbing because the horror is wrapped in beauty, ritual, shared grief, and the promise of family. Dani’s pain is finally witnessed, but it is also used.

I explore the film through psychoanalysis, cult dynamics, and the post-secular question of whether we can create rituals that hold grief, transition, and longing without violating our freedom or individuation. I also reflect personally on my own suspicion of high-control religion, especially the ways these environments can stunt individuality while calling it belonging.

In this episode, I reflect on Rudolf Otto and Carl Jung’s idea of the numinous — the sacred as something that terrifies and fascinates, wounds and heals, interrupts and transforms. Since beginning The Crossing, especially Billy Parham’s journey with the she-wolf, I’ve found myself returning to this older language for the sacred: not as clean doctrine or easy comfort, but as mystery, awe, dread, beauty, and psychic depth.

This is a reflection on Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, Jung’s psychology of archetypes and God-images, and why numinous experience still matters for therapy, dreams, grief, art, nature, and ordinary life after certainty.

In this episode, I return to one of the most devastating scenes in All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole lying under the stars after seeing Alejandra for the last time. They love each other, and yet they cannot be together.

I explore this moment as one of McCarthy’s clearest expressions of tragic religious philosophy — a world where love is real but not always powerful enough to save us, where beauty and suffering remain bound together, and where the soul’s warmth is both what makes us alive and what makes us vulnerable:

“He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.”

This is an episode about heartbreak, adulthood, pain, and the terrifying possibility that there may be no limits to what the human soul can suffer — but also no easy limits to what it can bear witness to.

In this episode, I sit with one of Alfonsa’s most devastating lines in All the Pretty Horses: “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

I explore this through Freud and psychoanalysis — the movement from childish wishing into the painful terrain of reality, mourning, and adulthood. John Grady’s love for Alejandra is not dismissed as fake or foolish. The longing is real. The beauty is real. But McCarthy shows us that desire always has to pass through the world: family, history, class, gender, violence, loss, and forces outside our control.

This becomes an episode about heartbreak, fantasy, regret, and the impossible “might have been.” Psychoanalysis helps us see that maturity is not the death of desire, but the painful transformation of desire into something human-sized. The wish remains, but it can no longer demand that the world obey it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited, which I recently read in its dramatic form after watching the excellent and very faithful HBO adaptation with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Sitting more deeply with Professor White’s despair brought me back to Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation and the idea that the only philosophy worth pursuing is one that poses questions without answers. This becomes a meditation on pessimism, faith, despair, and the strange sacredness of staying in the room when no clean answer arrives.

Having finished All the Pretty Horses, I keep returning to John Grady Cole’s conversation with Dueña Alfonsa as one of the keys to the whole novel. Alfonsa is not just the woman standing between John Grady and Alejandra. She is history speaking to youth, the old world speaking to the dreamer.

In this episode, I explore Alfonsa’s vision of hidden strings, blood, sacrifice, freedom, honor, and love — and how John Grady’s journey teaches him that nothing beautiful in McCarthy’s world stays untouched. Alejandra, Blevins, the prison violence, and John Grady himself all become part of this larger tragic pattern where the world demands blood before it believes.

This is an episode about innocence after it has been broken, love after it has failed to save us, and the possibility of carrying the wound without making blood your god.

In this episode, I take a short detour from All the Pretty Horses into Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited, the HBO film adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. I reflect on Professor White and Mr. Black, despair and faith, nihilism and sacred obligation, and why I find myself living somewhere between them as “Mr. Gray” — drawn to the dark clarity of pessimistic philosophy, but still unable to escape the sacred call to be there for another human being.

Before I jump back into All the Pretty Horses, I wanted to offer a shorter reflection on a line I recently found from Cormac McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay Of Whales and Men: “I believe that we are arks of the covenant… and our true nature is longing.”

In this episode, I explore McCarthy’s vision of longing alongside psychoanalysis, James Hillman’s notion of pothos, and Augustine’s famous line that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But maybe God is not simply where restlessness ends. Maybe God is the restlessness at the core of our being.

This is a meditation on desire, nostalgia, melancholy, sacred ache, and why longing may not be something to cure, but something to honor.

In this episode, I reflect on a dream that woke me up in terror and left me sitting with images I still don’t fully understand: my childhood bedroom, my father reading Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, cherry cola concentrate, spiders, and my mother pulling an endless clear line from my throat. Rather than trying to decode the dream or claim one final interpretation, I use it as a way into McCarthy, the unconscious, and dream work as part of my own post-secular spirituality — a way of honoring symbolic life without reducing it to certainty, doctrine, or simple explanation.