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.

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.