Thanks for visiting this substack. I plan to share a new reading, every day, from the secular canon.
This publication is starting mostly as an accountability mechanism for me to engage deeply with secular texts that I think are important to living a good life. But I’m choosing to do so in public because I suspect others may wish to join — to read, to discuss, and perhaps to contribute texts of their own.
I see this as an antidote to the shallow, “watery and domesticated” humanism described by Joe Carlsmith:
… a type that says something like: “Enough with this cosmic stuff—it’s gone dead. But let’s enjoy a nice afternoon, and our tea, before it gets cold.” Here I think of a talk I heard at an atheist club in undergrad, in which the speaker suggested that in the place of the orienting meaning that religion provides, maybe atheism could promote an activity like ultimate frisbee, which is fun and creates community … I like tea and frisbee fine. But some kind of existential intensity is getting lost, here. There is some un-relating to the whole story; some blinkering of the attention.
So, thank you for joining us. We’ll try to keep things short and sweet, here and elsewhere.