At the same time that I was studying to become a professional philosopher, I was also a young itinerant preacher serving a circuit of rural churches in southwestern Ontario. During the week I would wrestle with the arguments of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, then on Sundays I would preach to farmers, carpenters, and countless grandmothers in tiny chapels that felt a million miles away from the university. While I was honing my philosophical expertise in argument and analysis, I was also preaching at outdoor revivals in a dusty gravel parking lot, my pulpit perched on the back of a flatbed truck, my congregation a small sea of windshields.  

This might sound like a recipe for existential schizophrenia. But I didn’t experience it that way. For my younger self, both philosophy and religion were fundamentally about truth, about getting it right. As a young preacher who was also a budding philosopher, I could envision preaching only as didactic induction into the truth. The pulpit was where one dispensed instruction. I look at my sermon notes from this period and cringe. I want to go back to these congregations and apologize—for boring them to death, sure; but also for my youthful selfishness, for imagining that my abstractions and speculations had anything to do with their lives. Here were people who had been quietly burying their elders, terrified for children bent on destroying themselves, facing death and loneliness and loss without ever having been given permission to doubt, carrying any number of secret burdens and sins they longed to confess; and there was a twenty-two-year-old kid who’d read a lot of books, standing in front of them trying to parse trinitarian personhood through nineteenth-century scholasticism as if it mattered. They needed so much more than a brash philosopher-preacher. 

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twentysomething self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning—arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison. It was a false security that may have locked away the demons I needed to confront, but also locked other people out. The security of knowledge and religious certainty turned out to be a sterile, lonely cell. 

“All men by nature desire to know.” We could start here, which is near enough to the beginning of philosophy itself. This famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is as good as any manifesto for philosophy you could expect. Aristotle, of course, was a student of Plato, who was a student of Socrates, martyr to philosophy’s quest for wisdom. Aristotle was, in turn, a teacher of Alexander the Great, who famously ran out of worlds to conquer. 

I organized my life around something like this vision. Coinciding with a religious conversion, my path to philosophy was paved with polemic and fuelled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago, I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation. My almost salvific hope in analysis and argument was not an accident. My pursuit of philosophy was bound up with a religious quest. With the zeal of a convert, I picked up the tools of philosophy to shore up the foundations of faith. But philosophy and faith can be a volatile combination. When religious fundamentalism avails itself of philosophy’s sharp-edged tools, philosophical certainty underwrites religious dogmatism. 

Only much later would I realize the insecurity of this endeavour. As Reverend John Ames, the voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, puts it: “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manicheans and Pelagians with iron-clad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, if you’re lucky, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine that my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love. 

Looking back now, I see that my intellectual desire to be a doctrinal bulldog wasn’t just about winning arguments. I wanted to earn my place in a tribe. As much as I cringe at my younger self, I try to be gentle with him. He wanted to belong. He wanted security. For all his intellectual swagger, he was still a boy who had been abandoned by his father. 

He was looking for a stable family, a safe home. He wanted the world to be clear and definable and controllable. And he seems to have imagined that intellectual performance was a way to convince people to love him, finally. 

So I answered the call to philosophy with a mix of wonder, a hunger to know, and a desire to win—and zero self-consciousness about all these other needs and fears and desires rumbling under the hood. I was too young to anticipate the disenchantment of professionalization. Nothing beats the love of wisdom out of you like a graduate program in philosophy, which is mostly an apprenticeship in polemics. Maybe philosophy begins in wonder, but a doctorate in philosophy is where wonder goes to die. What begins as a quest for wisdom ends as a search for a job. And a job is the reward for repressing wonder and pursuing mastery. The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardour of the religious apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. I’m a philosopher and I’m here to help. Stand back: I know things. We can think our way out of this mess. Now here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, in the (late) middle of a life, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind. Or whether that’s even the point. As a philosopher, I’m learning how to wonder again. But before I could imagine another way to be a philosopher, I had to recognize that, first, a lot of change needed to take place in me. 

What happens when the lights go out and the world goes dark? What happens when the philosopher is enveloped by a cloud of unknowing that refuses to be dispersed by the tools of knowledge and conceptual analysis? What are the consolations of philosophy when a dark sun dawns and every cherished distinction fades to grey? What do you do when you no longer know what to think? 

This is a testament to the failure of philosophy as I knew it. This is a testimony to the liberation of unknowing. This reaches toward philosophy as it could be—illuminating the idea that the love of wisdom can be a path to the wisdom of love. 

Knowledge is a powerful tool for certain sorts of needs. Knowledge has yielded air travel and air conditioning, vaccines and penicillin, communication satellites and solar energy. And yet our neighbours and fellow citizens befuddle us more than ever. The exponential expansion of our knowledge over the past several decades has done nothing to prevent deep rifts in our social fabric. Instead, knowledge has been weaponized in ways that seem to have only exacerbated our alienation from one another, even ourselves. It seems unlikely that we can think our way out of the culture wars.

The personal, intimate experience of mutual incomprehension characteristic of our contemporary culture wars is a potent, unsettling example of perplexity. Set aside the incessant chatter of public discourse, the unending loops of talking-head TV, the alienating bitterness of social media. Much could be, and has been, said about the vitriol that suffuses these anonymous spaces like dank, recycled air that everyone inhales and circulates, without a second thought. Let’s, for just a few moments, forget about the culture wars “at scale” and instead consider what the culture war feels like “at home,” so to speak. Here close. In your life.

In our intimate, incarnate circles—in our own families, for example—we experience the current culture wars with a mix of pain and puzzlement. Someone who was an intimate friend from your book club or congregation becomes hard to recognize. You sense some new distance, maybe even suspicion. And then this distance is pierced by a jolting remark that feels like ventriloquism: as if someone else’s voice is speaking through this friend you’ve known for years, saying the strangest, even hurtful, things. You are befuddled, perplexed. And then your puzzlement turns to pain when you realize that they no longer know you either. You, too, are someone else to them. You are no longer known and seen as you were. The alienation is mutual. Sadness settles in when you realize that you are just as opaque to them as they are to you. It’s not just that you disagree; you no longer recognize one another. When you sense their anger and suspicion, you want to hold them by the shoulders and tell them:

It’s me. Me.

Even while silently asking yourself:

Who are you? And who am I to you?

These are not puzzles that “knowledge” seems able to solve, at least not the sort of knowledge we have mastered in modernity, the knowledge that exercises mastery. The persistence of suffering, whether social or interior, is not likely to be mitigated by progressive enlightenment. There seems to be an almost inverse relationship between our accumulation of psychological data and the profound anxiety and unhappiness that beset us. Each year our technology extends our knowledge farther and farther into the galaxy while our daily lives are lived increasingly under the oppression of a dark sun, our lives shadowed by alienation and distrust.

It was a season of dark depression that first rattled my youthful confidence in philosophy. It descended on me in my early forties, and I have never been so tormented by perplexity. I was a stranger to myself. None of my analytical skills could help me claw my way out of the lonely trench in which I found myself, alienated from those right next to me. I was oblivious to its cause, and I despaired, realizing that my intellectual strengths were powerless to dispel the black sun that oppressed me. My puzzlement and bewilderment: What’s happening to me? I wondered. Nothing in my external circumstances, I thought, should engender sadness or disappointment. To the contrary. My wife was devoted and forgiving; we had built a beautiful family and home; I enjoyed professional success and privilege. But why am I sobbing in the middle of the afternoon? Why am I either an angry monster or a lethargic shell? Why do my wife and children feel a million miles away, and why do I keep pushing them even further? I didn’t understand, and that in itself was an affront to my philosophical confidence. 

This experience was humbling on a number of registers, including intellectually, because I had slammed headfirst into a challenge that refused to be solved by analysis. All my vocational confidence in the power of reason was quite literally humiliated in the face of depression. I couldn’t think my way out of this. 

Instead, a hand reached down into that dark pit. In fact, it was the hand of a therapist, and he didn’t just reach down into the pit; he jumped down there beside me. I can’t help but recall here a moment from popular culture that I’ve never forgotten, a scene from The West Wing. Chief of Staff Leo McGarry reaches out to his deputy, Josh Lyman, who is struggling with PTSD, and tells him a parable:  

My therapist helped me find the way out. But it took a while. I think that’s because I brought my philosophical prejudices to our first meetings, expecting that he’d give me the information I needed to figure out my problem. Eventually, through his patience and compassion, through a remarkable ability to be with me in a way that embodied grace, I realized what we were doing. He wasn’t going to teach me or instruct me. Our conversation wasn’t a way to exchange ideas. It was an exercise in re-narration. If I was going to be restored to health, it was because I had managed to “re-story” my imagination. My depression had brought me to the limits of my intellect; the healing that began with therapy would have to transform my idea of myself as a philosopher. I was going to have to rethink this desire to know. 

Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, I can see how this journey, which includes the journey through depression, was catalyzed by poetry. 

As I would discover in the journey of re-narration with my therapist, my depression stemmed from a deep wound inflicted by my father, who had abandoned our family when I was eleven years old. I imbibed the story my mother kept telling: that I was “better off” without him. I internalized and lived out her version of the story for decades. The birth of our first child briefly rattled my acceptance of this narrative. Becoming a father, I had a new intuition of what my father had done and what I had lost. Andrew Root describes my experience of father-loss as an ontological rupture in a child’s being that generates “ontological insecurity.” Such ontological insecurity, he argues, manifests as “a fear that is deeper than logic.” When I became a father in 1992, the wound came to the surface again. But I squelched this realization and confrontation, cloaking it under rage instead. I buried the fear and left the scab in place. The demons were once again locked away in the basement. 

A decade later, around 2002, the lock on that basement door was rattled by a poem. In the clearance bin of a Book Mart on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, I stumbled upon an early collection by Franz Wright called The Beforelife. I was immediately absorbed there in the shop. It was as if all the blank space on the page was its own cocoon, a buffer between me and the world. The book’s broad, bright margins were a hedge of protection for my attention, and I was lost in the way language could dance and play: the vibrating energy of allusion, the heart-stopping pause of a line break, the concise compression that seemed to make words swell to overflowing. The binary toggles of my philosophical mind—this or that, true or false, yes or no—were subverted by the way that Wright’s poems could hold together swirls of contradiction and by the way my heart could only say Amen. There was something my body “knew” that discursive concepts could never articulate. Wright’s poems seemed to come from somewhere else. Later I would learn that they came from a country I knew: a land of children abandoned by fathers. Wright’s poem “Goodbye,” about being haunted by his absent father, arrived like a painful epiphany, the breakthrough that was its own sort of breakdown, leaving me in tears in that warehouse of a store surrounded by strangers oblivious to my existential crisis. “I have overcome you / in myself,” Wright defiantly announces, going on to trace a kind of detoxification of the soul. Not until I read this poem did I realize such overcoming would become a defining aspiration of the rest of my life. But even when I read the poem, I still hadn’t realized that I was up against something I couldn’t think my way out of. And it hadn’t yet dawned for me that philosophy could be something else. 

Wright’s poetry made my life more difficult, and I’m grateful. Wright’s poetry led to a darkness that turned out, ultimately, to be a path to liberation. Wright’s poetry broke the basement lock and released the demons I had to confront. 

One day during that season of depression, my wife came home from a garage sale with a battered copy of Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross (1542–1591) and gave it to me. It was an act of both love and desperation. Neither of us really knew the terrain that St. John was surveying, but we knew something of dark nights. It would be a while before I had the opportunity—the willingness? the courage?—to begin reading it. What I found there was a cartography of the soul’s hungers and fears that rivalled and outstripped the maps of the philosophers. What I found was a mirror that reflected my own perplexing experiences and exasperated quest. What I found in St. John of the Cross was the first of many companions in the contemplative, mystical traditions who helped me reimagine what philosophy (and faith) could be. 

For mystics like St. John of the Cross, unknowing is not an affront or a failure; it is a portal and a pathway. St. John revels in paradox: “Vexation makes us to understand,” he counsels. Mystics like St. John of the Cross invite us to cultivate the capacity to wade into the dark. To receive the gift of unknowing as an opportunity to unlearn the habits that disappoint us. To become receptive to other gifts. 

This is not magic. This is an invitation to an ordeal. The path is harrowing before it is liberating. A persistent thread in the mystics, ranging from St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) to Thomas Merton (1915–1968), is the purgation required to be liberated from the limits of knowing. We have to lose to gain; we have to let go in order to welcome. We have to undergo an emptying that finally opens us to receive what we didn’t know we’d been longing for. St. John of the Cross says that “this is the characteristic of the spirit that is purged and annihilated with respect to all particular affections and objects of the understanding, that in this state wherein it has pleasure in nothing and understands nothing in particular, but dwells in its emptiness, darkness and obscurity, it is fully prepared to embrace everything.” I had to undergo something to even entertain what he is describing here, but having undergone such loss—of confidence, mastery, and the need to be seen as one who “gets it”—I read these words with a recognition that was the beginning of liberation. 

On the other side of this dark cloud, having been stripped of confident cleverness and attachments to knowledge, the mystics bear witness to a sense of companionship, an awareness of love. A friend in the dark. St. John says this sense of companionship in the dark is so powerful that we might begin to prefer the communion of the night to the loneliness of clarity: “In the midst of these dark and loving afflictions the soul feels within itself a certain companionship and strength, which bears it company and so greatly strengthens it that, if this burden of grievous darkness be taken away, it often feels itself to be alone, empty and weak.” Three centuries later one hears something similar in the German Romantic poet Novalis (1772–1801). Penned after the death of his betrothed, his Hymns to the Night praises the dark. “How poor and childish the light seems now,” the poet reflects. “More heavenly than those flashing stars seem the infinite eyes that Night opens in us.” Something is found in the dark. And so “my heart in secret stays true to the Night, and her daughter, creative love.” 

I will never forget reading a particular passage from Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century contemplative and activist. I was sitting on a hillside overlooking Florence, adrift and unsettled. Purged of all sorts of sureties and identities over the previous several years, wavering in vocational uncertainty and a spiritual malaise, I experienced such a start of self-recognition upon reading this that I gasped aloud:  

Maybe Aristotle got it only partly wrong. Maybe all human beings desire to be known—to be seen, recognized, loved. 

What if philosophy tackled not just ignorance but fear? What if philosophy’s quest for wisdom was, more fundamentally, a therapy for anxiety? What if philosophy became a method not for resolving ambiguity but for learning to live with it? What if philosophy, instead of a search for certainty, was a way to live a meaningful life despite uncertainty? Could philosophy be unhooked from its modern fixation on knowledge and recover its love of wisdom? And might wisdom be an awareness, derived apart from knowledge, of being beloved? What way of life would flow from that awareness? Could this be a philosophical quest more germane to the moment in which we find ourselves? If the perennial (and particularly modern) quest for knowledge and conceptual mastery has yielded the world we now experience, it seems unlikely that more knowledge is the solution. Maybe we need a different quest. 

Apprenticing myself to the mystics, I began to see an alternative vocation for the philosopher and a very different expression of faith, both in the service of a fraught call to be(come) human. I brought a philosopher’s eyes and ears to my reading of the mystics in order to bring a mystical heart back to philosophy. 

The mystics are already philosophers of a sort. St. John acknowledges his debts to Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius, for example, and one hears Augustinian echoes in St. Teresa of Ávila. Theirs is a philosophical practice nourished by contemplation, by an acute, interior self-reflection bent on making the self/mind/soul available to the gift of awareness—a kind of wonder, really—a gift that cannot be achieved by analysis. This is precisely the ancient vision of philosophy as “spiritual exercises” recovered and celebrated in Pierre Hadot’s seminal work, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Philosophy was not envisioned as a mere academic subject, a “field” of knowledge alongside biology and geology. Philosophy was a discipline in the spiritual sense: a repertoire of exercises to transform one’s life. Philosophy was soul therapy. Philosophy was an invitation to conversion. The poverty of modern philosophy, for Hadot, is the fruit of its professionalization and the loss of this spiritual tenor. So, in an important way, the mystics represent a redemption and recovery of another side of Aristotle—his notion of theoria as intellectual contemplation that brings us nearer the divine. To return to the mystics, as a philosopher, is to revisit the contemplative ideals of ancient philosophy. 

In bringing a mystical attunement back to philosophy, I encountered anew and afresh the tradition of phenomenology that was the focus of my graduate training. Phenomenology is, at its simplest, a philosophy that attends closely to experience, to the mystery and depth of consciousness. While this can take on a positivist strain that feels like a reductionistic “philosophy of mind” where MRIs dictate what counts as true, there is another side of phenomenology that has long expressed a fascination with mystery and transcendence. 

After working through my emotional crisis, alongside my crisis of faith in what I thought philosophy was for, I found my mystic companions propelling me back to phenomenology with new questions and new openness. Coming back to phenomenology, mid-life and mid-career, with a wounded heart, a humbled ego, and deeper desires, I found something different. I found sages. I found philosophers sincerely grappling with the profound complexity of the world and our social life. Feeling more receptive, I returned to two French phenomenologists. 

The first was Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995). A survivor of the Holocaust, Levinas was acutely aware of the way that modernity turned knowledge into a form of possession and control, a kind of grasping. “In the last analysis,” he observes in Totality and Infinity, such philosophy imagines that “everything is at my disposal, even the stars, if I but reckon them, calculate the intermediaries or the means.” Even the stars; even other human beings; even God: all is available for knowledge to master. In the face of such devouring conceptions of knowledge and philosophy, Levinas bears witness to the alterity of the Other, the otherness and “height” of what he simply calls “the Face.” When he ventures a name for this “bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality,” we might be surprised: he calls it “religion.” Later Levinas will describe this sort of encounter with otherness as “a spiritual intrigue wholly other than gnosis.” What if this, too, could be a vocation for philosophy? Could a mystically inflected philosophy occasion “an awakening irreducible to knowledge”? 

Philosophy need not be what it has become in modernity. Lodged in the heart of philosophy is a seed of instability and impossibility: desire. We see it in Aristotle’s axiom: “All men by nature desire to know.” Desire is embedded in philosophia, the love of wisdom, and this desire introduces a welcome instability in philosophy itself. This is the proposal of another French phenomenologist I have been drawn back to, the creative and original Jean-Luc Marion (1946–). In many ways a student of Levinas, Marion is a Catholic philosopher whose career has focused on the limit cases of experience, and hence the sorts of encounters that can’t quite be comprehended as “phenomena” according to traditional phenomenology. But Marion is equally interested in the ways that love and desire shape our engagement with the world (what phenomenologists describe as “intentionality”). In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion’s diagnosis of modern philosophy can be read as a parallel to Hadot’s critique: “Philosophers have in fact forsaken love.” For philosophy to take love seriously does not mean merely subjecting love to analysis and conceptual parsing. This would be to reduce philosophy’s vocation to its modern fixation, what Marion describes as a “radical mutation” of philosophy into a metaphysical endeavour that “opened the way to the project of science and, indissolubly, to technology’s hold upon the world.” We want to know things in order to control them, only to eventually buy and sell them.  

So love cannot just become another “topic” for philosophy, because philosophy has morphed into this narrow exercise of knowing as conceptual mastery. Instead, philosophy needs to be reoriented at the root by a more radical “logic of love,” as Marion puts it. “Philosophy defines itself as the ‘love of wisdom’ because it must in effect begin by loving before claiming to know. In order to comprehend, it is first necessary to desire to comprehend; put another way, one must be astonished at not comprehending.” This is what philosophy calls “wonder.” When philosophy’s quest is reduced to knowledge without love—when we pursue knowledge instead of wisdom—it shouldn’t surprise us that the quest for knowledge can also be unhinged from truth. The result is the ubiquity of ideology.  

Philosophers have spent centuries focused on epistemology: how we know. Marion, like the mystics, presses a different question: Why do we want to know? What do we want when we want to know? Should we learn to want something else? Could I learn to want to unknow? And if I could learn that, could I perhaps become honest and recognize that I want to be known? 

In Levinas and Marion, we see how phenomenology can be practiced as a mode of attention, and that such attention is primarily a mode of reception. Phenomenology so practiced is a way of becoming open to what is given, to the giftedness that is primary in our experience. Phenomenology as receptive attention is thus a form of contemplation, a return to philosophy’s most ancient foundation in wonder. If this is a testament to the failure of philosophy, it is also an exercise in hope that philosophy could be otherwise—a spiritual practice oriented toward a contemplative phenomenology of wonder that dwells with the liberative possibilities of unknowing precisely because such unknowing, such dispossession of the knowing ego who endures the experience of nothingness, gets everything back again as gift. 

This search for other epistemologies, for the multiplication of epistemologies, and for the liberation of what we might call “anepistemology” is beautifully enacted in the distinct form of attention that naturalist Barry Lopez brought to the world. Consider, for example, his account of a day wandering in traditional Warlpiri land in northwestern Australia:  

To cultivate such intimacy and openness, Lopez had “to divest [him]self of familiar categories and hierarchies.” He had to set aside concepts and frameworks that would have mastered this place by slotting it into the catalogue of the familiar. This was an exercise, he says, in “letting the place overwhelm me.” This is an unknowing generated not by lack of knowledge but by a surfeit of attention to the generosity of the Other, which in this case was a natural landscape.  

I note Lopez’s dialectic of intimacy and loneliness. Certainty is how you end up alone. Indeed, how lonely is the modern subject? How lonely have we become with all our knowledge? Confident in what we know, we are walled off from the surprises of intimacy. Categorizing everyone in advance as “them” or “us,” woke or righteous, we have lost all capacity to approach other people as an unfamiliar landscape, worthy of curiosity and openness. Incessant distraction and the cultural demand for performance can close us off to our own interiorities as unfamiliar landscape as well. Nonstop commentary and discourse can shut down our availability to wonder about all the unfamiliar landscapes of our time. 

“I gravitate toward environments of uncertainty,” Lopez confesses. I understand the allure now. Confusion no longer scares me. Lack of clarity is not a sign of epistemic failure. I’ve learned how to make a home in the dark, to dwell patiently in the unknown. I find myself dreaming of a contemplative phenomenology that attends to others with the wonder and curiosity that Lopez exhibits. This would be a philosophical approach that begins with questions like his: Who are you? Who am I to you? What am I afraid of? Why are you afraid? This would be philosophy that helps one live with and through uncertainty. It would be the desire for, and pursuit of, a sophia that is otherwise than knowledge, a wisdom that is, ultimately, an awareness of cosmic care. 

Which is all to say: I find myself, as a philosopher, humbled and uncertain, drawn to a contemplative path that I can travel with mystics—and artists. It was a poet who first cracked me open to a way of inhabiting the world otherwise than knowing. Novelists and filmmakers and sculptors are the ones who have prepared me to receive the wisdom and testimony of the mystics. Art somehow bypasses my analytic defences; art makes an end run around my well-honed habits of discursive control. It is in the contemplative spaces of the gallery and the cinema that I have let go of conceptual analysis and learned how to receive, how to rest, how to refuse the commodification of attention. This is offered in the mode of testimony, rooted in my experiences on this path. It is an invitation to the mystical itinerary that can begin in the quiet of the gallery, or the darkness of the cinema, and that can illuminate ways to live meaningfully in the midst of uncertainty—philosophy reimagined. 

This article has been excerpted from Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, by James K.A. Smith, new from Yale University Press. Copyright © 2026 by James K.A. Smith. All rights reserved.