Psyche

In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology.

At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that conference cracked something open in me. I heard reflections on Johann Baptist Metz’s idea of memoria passionis, the memory of suffering, and encountered John Caputo’s emerging work on the weakness of God, which later became deeply important to me.

I reflect on how Caputo’s vision of weakness, vulnerability, compassion, and responsibility helped begin a long process of deconstruction—not as destruction, but as a way of becoming more honest, more human, and more open to the suffering of others.

I also share a story that has stayed with me for years: hearing Caputo’s former female support staff talk about how he actually lived his philosophy, including taking a pay cut so they could be paid more fairly. That testimony still moves me because it raises the deeper question: do our beliefs make us more compassionate, more generous, and more responsible, or do they simply make us more sophisticated?

This episode is about political theology, weakness, memory, vulnerability, and the strange grace of those moments that quietly begin to change us.

In this episode, I reflect on theopoetics as a way of returning to Christian theology without returning to literalism, dogmatism, or the need to win theological arguments.

As I’ve been rereading Christian theology, I’ve found myself drawn again to the strange, wounded, imaginative heart of religious language. I don’t take these ideas literally in the way I once did, but I do still find myself moved by them as metaphors, symbols, wounds, and invitations.

I explore Stanley Romaine Hopper, Death of God theology, and John Caputo’s weak theology as different ways of thinking about what happens to God-language after certainty.

This episode is not about debating belief or unbelief. It is about asking what theology can still do when it becomes poetic, imaginative, weak, ethical, and open to the future.

In this episode, I reflect on René Girard’s I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, especially the chapter entitled “Satan,” and explore how Girard’s understanding of mimetic desire opens up a powerful way of thinking about Christianity, violence, scapegoating, and the dangerous comfort of accusation.

Girard helps us see that desire is not as original as we imagine. We learn what to want through others, and the people who shape our desires can quickly become our rivals. From there, rivalry spreads, communities become anxious, and peace is often restored by finding someone to blame. This is where Girard’s reading of Satan becomes so provocative: Satan is not simply a cartoonish figure of evil, but the power of accusation, contagion, and false unity through a victim.

I also bring Girard into conversation with contemporary Christian nationalism, especially the way it often identifies immigrants, outsiders, and those who do not fit a narrow heritage vision of America as threats to Christian civilization. But Girard invites a reversal. The satanic is not found in the vulnerable outsider being accused. The satanic is found in the mechanism of accusation itself.

This episode is an attempt to think with Girard, not as an expert, but as someone newly struck by the force of his vision, and to ask what it might mean if the cross does not bless our accusations, but exposes them.

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo’s After Christianity and his provocative reading of Joachim of Fiore, secularization, and the possibility of a Christianity after metaphysics. Vattimo helps us imagine secularization not as the simple disappearance of faith, but as one of Christianity’s own historical effects — a weakening of domination rooted in the incarnation and the self-emptying of God.

I explore Joachim’s vision of the age of the Spirit, where faith is no longer secured by literalism, fear, or institutional control, but opened through interpretation, freedom, and charity. For Vattimo, the limit of interpretation is not rigid dogma or an outdated metaphysics of nature, but love itself — ama et fac quod vis, love and do what you will.

This episode is about what remains after the death of the metaphysical God: not nihilism, but a more fragile and generous Christianity, one shaped by weakness, hospitality, spiritual reading, and the possibility that the Spirit still breathes where it wants.

In this episode, I explore Heraclitus through James Hillman’s beautiful foreword to Heraclitus’ Fragments, especially the idea that the psyche is not something fixed, stable, or easily explained, but something always in motion, always in tension, always touched by contradiction.

Heraclitus gives us a way to think about psychotherapy beyond neat explanations and rigid identities. The self is not a finished object. It is a river. It is fire. It is the strange truth that “I am as I am not.”

I also bring in Borges’ short story “The Other” as a way of thinking about the divided self across time—the younger self, the older self, the wounded self, the becoming self—all meeting beside the river without ever fully resolving into one simple identity.

This episode is about therapy as a place where contradiction can be held, where symptoms can be listened to as signs, where dreams and fragments matter, and where change is not just something we seek, but something we already are.

In this episode, I explore the fantasy of the inner circle — that persistent feeling that somewhere, just beyond where we are, there is a more exclusive room, a deeper friendship, a more serious group, a hidden circle of people who really know, really belong, and really matter.

Building from C.S. Lewis’s essay “The Inner Ring,” I think through why the desire to belong can so easily become a desire to be inside because others are outside. I also bring in the image of the temple and the Holy of Holies as a way of asking whether even the innermost room would ever be enough, or whether we would simply begin searching for another room beyond it.

From there, I move into psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory, especially the idea that there is a lack or gap at the center of human life that no group, friendship, artistic recognition, or achievement can finally fill. I also reflect personally on my own friendships and the subtle ways this fantasy can still show up even when we are already loved and already belong.

Throughout the episode, I share a clinical reflection about an anonymous client, a college student on the autism spectrum, whose growing life as an artist has brought with it the fantasy that fulfillment will come only when he is accepted into the “real” inner circle of artists. His story becomes a way of thinking about the difference between genuine belonging and fantasy completion.

This is an episode about exclusion, desire, art, friendship, therapy, and the difficult but freeing possibility that the life we are looking for may not be waiting behind some hidden door.

In this episode, I continue working through New Perspectives on Henry Corbin by focusing on Joan Copjec’s chapter on Corbin, Lacan, Kiarostami, and the Cloud.

What surprised me most was seeing someone from the world of Lacanian theory take Corbin seriously — not as an odd mystical detour, but as a thinker who might help us rethink psychoanalysis, politics, cinema, and reality itself. Copjec brings Corbin’s Islamic neo-Gnosticism into conversation with Lacan’s Real and Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case to explore what makes resistance possible when power wants everything visible, teachable, governable, and controlled.

I reflect on Copjec’s idea of the Cloud as a hidden dimension inside reality, her distinction between nihilism and apophatic theology, and the radical political force of a God who cannot be possessed by the state, religion, ideology, or authority. This is not a politics of easy re-enchantment, but a politics of keeping the world open.

I also talk about Copjec’s recently published book Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, where she develops these themes further through Kiarostami, Corbin, and Lacan — a book I’m hoping to read soon.

At the heart of this episode is a question that feels urgent right now: What happens to politics, therapy, religion, and the person when there is no longer any hidden remainder, no unborn dimension, no Cloud, no Real — nothing that escapes power? And what kind of listening might help us hear the unlocated sound that keeps the world from closing?

In this episode, I spend time with New Perspectives on Henry Corbin, edited by Hadi Fakhoury, and reflect on why Corbin still feels so strangely alive right now.

Corbin is difficult to place. He moves through Islamic philosophy, Suhrawardi, Shi’ism, Heidegger, Neoplatonism, angelology, psychoanalysis, esotericism, and the imaginal world, but what keeps pulling me in is his refusal to reduce spiritual reality to dogma, psychology, politics, or fantasy. He gives us a way to think about imagination not as escape, but as a form of perception.

I also reflect on some of the chapters I’m most excited by, including Charles Stang on Corbin and Neoplatonism, Joan Copjec on Corbin, Lacan, and Kiarostami, Matthew Dillon on James Hillman’s democratization of Corbin’s imaginal thinking, and Wouter Hanegraaff’s haunting portrait of Corbin’s Freemasonry, neo-Templar spirituality, and personal longing for a hidden community of the spirit.

This is less a summary of the whole book and more an invitation into Corbin as a provocation: What kind of world do we think we are living in? What kind of knowing have we allowed ourselves to trust? And does the soul still have access to images strong enough to guide it?

In this episode, I return to Henry Corbin’s The Paradox of Monotheism and explore his strange, beautiful, and deeply provocative argument that monotheism can become idolatrous when God is imagined as the highest being rather than the mystery of Being itself.

Drawing from Ibn Arabi, Shi’a theosophy, Proclus, angelology, and Corbin’s reflections on mystical kathenotheism, I think through what it means to say that the One does not erase the Many, but reveals itself through many names, mirrors, angels, and Faces.

This is an episode about theology after rigid certainty, spirituality beyond flat relativism, and the possibility of a re-enchanted symbolic world where plurality is not a threat to transcendence, but one of its deepest forms of disclosure.

In this episode, I continue exploring creative expressions of Christianity and religion through an unexpected connection between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Carl Jung.

After discovering Henry Corbin in therapy years ago, I eventually came across Jung’s correspondence with Corbin around Answer to Job, where Jung acknowledges Schleiermacher as one of his “spiritual ancestors.” That admission opened up a fascinating question for me: what if Schleiermacher is best understood as Jung’s theologian?

I explore Schleiermacher’s famous idea of the “feeling of absolute dependence,” not as weakness or regression, but as a profound recognition that we are not self-grounding beings. From there, I connect this to Jung’s lifelong concern with the relation between the finite and the infinite, the ego and the Self, psychology and religion, and the rebirth of the God-image in modern life.

This episode is about theology that survives as atmosphere, religion after certainty, and the possibility that what looks like psychology may sometimes be theology returning in another form.