Psyche

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo’s After Christianity, a book that was incredibly helpful to me during my own journey of faith, deconstruction, psychotherapy, and trying to figure out whether there was still some version of Christianity I could hold onto after the older structures of belief had begun to fall apart.

Vattimo’s work came back into my mind recently as I’ve been reading more Italian thinkers, especially around psychoanalysis, theology, and philosophy. What I found so compelling in Vattimo years ago was his ability to think Christianity after the death of God—not as a simple return to orthodoxy, and not as a clean rejection of faith, but as a fragile, interpretive, weakened form of belief.

This episode explores Vattimo’s idea of “believing that one believes,” his understanding of Christianity after metaphysics, and the possibility that what remains after certainty is not nothing, but a message, a trace, a form of life, and perhaps even a different kind of faith.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with Massimo Recalcati, and that rabbit trail led me to Luca Di Gregorio’s Lacan in Italy—and specifically to a line that completely grabbed me: that Lacan’s legacy “demands invention up to the limit of heresy.”

In this episode, I explore what it might mean to truly inherit a thinker without becoming their disciple in the worst sense of the word. What does it mean to be faithful to an intellectual tradition through creativity rather than imitation? Does Recalcati mean we should push right up to the edge of heresy without crossing it—or that real thinking inevitably looks heretical to somebody?

Along the way, I reflect on Jung’s famous anti-dogmatic spirit, the Zen phrase “kill the Buddha,” my own experience with a deeply Jungian therapist who embodied intellectual generosity rather than orthodoxy, and the strange tribalism that can emerge around thinkers like Lacan, Hegel, Freud, and beyond.

This becomes an episode about psychoanalysis, philosophy, therapy, and maybe even psychological adulthood itself—the difficult task of learning from our intellectual fathers and mothers without remaining their children forever.

I’ve been reading Massimo Recalcati’s The Son’s Secret: From Oedipus to the Prodigal Son, and a particular passage stopped me in my tracks. His reflection on the child as an irreducible mystery—foreign, distinct, impossible to fully comprehend—opened up something much bigger for me about personhood itself.

In this episode, I explore an idea I’ve privately thought about as anthropological apophaticism—the notion that every person contains a radical mystery that exceeds our interpretations, our diagnoses, even our empathy. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Richard Boothby’s reading of Lacan’s das Ding, theology’s apophatic tradition, and my own clinical work, I reflect on what happens when we forget that the people in front of us are not problems to solve but enigmas to encounter.

I also explore how this dynamic shows up in couples therapy, where the problem is often not that partners don’t know each other, but that they’ve become convinced they already know everything. When mystery dies, curiosity dies. And when curiosity dies, so often desire goes with it.

This is an episode about the ethics of not reducing people to your explanations of them. About the limits of understanding. About why love may require reverence for what remains unknown.

In this episode, I veer away from Hegel for a moment to follow a curiosity that opened up after listening to the latest Why Theory discussion of After the Hunt. That conversation sent me back to John Howard Yoder, one of the most important theologians of Christian nonviolence in the twentieth century, and also someone who shaped the theological world I was formed in during seminary.

But Yoder was not only a theologian of peace. He was also a man who sexually abused and exploited women, including women in his academic and religious orbit. And what makes his case so disturbing is not only the hypocrisy, as horrifying as that is, but the way he tried to turn his abuse into a theological experiment.

Drawing from Isaac Villegas and Rachel Waltner Goossen’s work on Yoder’s abuse, I explore how Yoder used the language of Christian freedom, community, nonviolence, intimacy, and moral discernment to rationalize his behavior and avoid accountability. I also reflect on the psychoanalytic insight that we are often most dangerous when we find beautiful, moral, or spiritual language to explain away the harm we are causing.

This episode is about abuse, power, self-deception, theology, institutions, and the need for a hermeneutic of suspicion toward our own noblest explanations. It asks what happens when the language of peace becomes a shelter for violence, when theology becomes an alibi, and when someone else’s suffering is finally allowed to interrupt the story we prefer to tell about ourselves.

For this episode, I’m diving into one of Hegel’s most haunting phrases from the Phenomenology of Spirit: “the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.”

What happens when philosophy is not primarily about acquiring knowledge, but about surviving the collapse of the certainties that once organized your world?

In this episode, I explore Hegel’s vision of negativity, contradiction, and transformation, moving through the religious symbolism of crucifixion and Calvary, the initiatory and almost alchemical feel of the Phenomenology, and why thinkers like Todd McGowan and Žižek help us see that contradiction is not simply a flaw in our thinking, but something woven into reality itself.

Along the way, I reflect on the strange and compelling resonance between Hegel, psychoanalysis, and Christianity, especially the idea that truth may emerge not through the preservation of certainty, but through the collapse of the fantasy of wholeness.

If philosophy has ever felt less like collecting ideas and more like losing your footing in the most productive way possible, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I’m continuing my slow entrance into Hegel by looking at Glenn Alexander Magee’s account of Hegelian panentheism — this strange, difficult, and fascinating idea that God is not simply outside the world, but also not reducible to the world.

What Magee helps clarify is that Hegel’s God is not the static, self-contained God of much classical theology. Hegel gives us a God who unfolds through nature, history, and Spirit; a God whose life includes the world; a God who becomes actual through the movement of reality coming to know itself.

I walk through the basic shape of the argument: Hegel’s Logic as God “in himself,” nature as the externalization of Idea, Spirit as the place where reality becomes self-conscious, and Christianity as a symbolic form of this deeper philosophical movement. I also touch on why Hegel is close to Spinoza but not simply Spinozist, why panentheism may be a better word than pantheism, and why Hegel’s theology remains so strange, compelling, and difficult to classify.

This is not an episode about proving or disproving Hegel’s God. It’s an attempt to sit with the architecture of the argument and ask why this vision still feels so powerful: a God not merely above us, a world not merely separate from God, and human consciousness as one of the places where reality begins to understand itself.

In this episode, I reflect on finally sitting down and slowly working through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has felt a little like wading into a vast, dark ocean. Near the end of the Preface, I came across a passage where Hegel warns against retreating into private feeling, into the “oracle” within, as if truth could simply be possessed inwardly without the hard human work of reason, communication, and shared agreement.

Around the same time, I was watching a documentary on Miss Cleo, the famous TV psychic from the 1990s, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange connection between Hegel’s critique of private certainty and the cultural seduction of psychic revelation. This episode brings those two threads together: Hegel’s insistence that humanity lives in the commonality of consciousness, and the danger of anyone who claims private access to truth in ways that bypass evidence, accountability, and the shared world.

This is an episode about reason, universality, politics, manipulation, charisma, feeling, and why our deepest humanity is not found in simply staying inside what we privately feel, but in the difficult and necessary labor of making ourselves intelligible to one another.

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, turning to Chapter 3, “Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real.”

This chapter centers on a deceptively simple idea: the order matters. In quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, history, politics, and even theology, the same elements can produce a very different reality depending on the sequence in which they appear. What comes first, what comes later, what gets observed, what gets named, and what gets repeated all shape the meaning of what is happening.

I reflect on Žižek’s use of quantum measurement, Freud’s sequence of remembering, repeating, and working through, and the way later events can retroactively change the meaning of the past. This is not about saying that facts do not matter, or that everything is just interpretation. It is about taking seriously the strange way truth arrives in time.

The episode continues the larger question of this series: what would it mean to have a materialism that is not flat or reductionistic, but strange enough to think collapse, contradiction, repetition, and the Real?

In this episode, I continue my series on Slavoj Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, turning to Chapter 2, “Why Quantum Mechanics Needs Hegel.”

Building on the first episode’s focus on Žižek’s claim that collapse comes first, this chapter asks the question from the other direction: not only why a Hegelian might be drawn to quantum mechanics, but why quantum mechanics may need something like Hegel if we are going to think through its deeper philosophical consequences.

I explore Žižek’s attempt to avoid both a flat, common-sense realism and a vague spiritual reading of quantum physics. Instead of saying that consciousness creates reality, or that reality is simply sitting there fully formed before us, Žižek pushes us toward a stranger kind of materialism — one shaped by contradiction, observation, retroactivity, and the absence of any final God’s-eye view.

This episode reflects on the observer, the void, the impossibility of a complete perspective, and the idea that reality may not be held together by a final guarantee, but by the very gaps and collapses that prevent it from becoming a closed whole.

In this episode, I begin a new series on Slavoj Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, starting with the Introduction and Chapter 1, “Why a Hegelian Needs Quantum Mechanics.”

This is not an attempt to turn quantum mechanics into a vague spiritual metaphor, and it is definitely not a physics lecture. Instead, I’m interested in what Žižek is trying to do philosophically: to rethink materialism after quantum mechanics, Hegel, psychoanalysis, and the strange collapse of our ordinary categories of reality.

The central idea I explore here is Žižek’s claim that collapse comes first. Rather than imagining reality as a stable field of possibilities that later collapses into one outcome, Žižek asks us to consider whether collapse retroactively gives shape to the field itself. From there, I reflect on Hegel, the observer, the Real, contradiction, history, and why a truly materialist philosophy may need to become much stranger than the older, flatter versions of materialism allowed.

This first episode is meant to be careful and in-depth, but still digestible — a way of entering the book without reducing it, and of staying with the difficulty of Žižek’s thought without turning it into jargon or easy summary.