Next book news
Some updates from my “summer office”
Summer is here. It is a book-writing summer for me, which means showing up to my desk every day, getting words down on the page on the way to a first draft. But writing still requires reading, research, musing, and that happens here in the “summer office” with my trusty sidekick.
I’m excited to share that I’ve signed a contract for this next book with Yale University Press. I’ll be working with Jennifer Banks, Senior Executive Editor at YUP–a smart, incisive writer herself. The development and proposal process have been both generative and liberating and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to write something that I hope is unique and realizes something I’ve been dreaming about for a while.
The working title of the book is Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism for Moderns. I still haven’t perfected the elevator pitch yet, but the animating intuition of the book is that the contemplative & mystical traditions of spirituality have something important to offer us in our moment of acute anxiety in which our modern mastery seems to be failing us. Modernity made us for thinking and knowing, but we can’t seem to think our way out of this mess.
As a philosopher, I’m going to invite readers to encounter and reconsider the strange explorations of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross and others. They all invite us to find liberation in un-knowing. To make our way through the dark, not in order to solve the puzzle or find the answers, but to emerge into an awareness that is other than “knowing.” The author of The Cloud of Unknowing speaks of “the dark way that is contemplative knowledge,” a sort of understanding or awareness under which the very category “knowledge” buckles. But “the failure of our understanding can help us,” they counsel; “When we reach the end of what we know, that’s where we find God.” This requires, as Meister Eckhart loves to put it, a letting go in which we let go of even (especially!) our conceptual categories. But in letting go we receive. For St. Teresa, what we discover, in the end and above all, is that we are beloved. So “let us abandon our reason and our fear into God’s hands,” she counsels. “The important thing,” she emphasizes, “is not to think much, but to love much.”
By exploring the generative, life-giving, maybe even life-saving, endeavor of unknowing, you might say my book is an exercise in anepistemology, a philosophical meditation on un-knowing. But my “argument,” such as it is, is also organized by an accompanying intuition: that in some ways, our experience of contemporary art is a kind of echo of this experience of learned ignorance, of an incomprehension that is not less than “knowing” but more. And so the book will regularly engage art forms (across genres like poetry, fiction, film, sculpture, film, and music) that take us to the limits of what we can know and, thereby, open us to an experience of letting go in which our concepts fail and yet we become aware of something more—a luminous darkness.
I’m rambling, and my editor is probably cringing at such unedited scribbles in media res. But I wanted to share with you what’s animating me and what to look for in the future.
In fact, you can kind of get a foretaste of all this from a recent media appearance.
A little back story: a couple of months ago, I gave a keynote address at conference in Waterloo, Ontario co-sponsored by the Institute for Christian Studies (a grad school in Toronto where I did my master’s). The theme was “Beyond the Culture Wars: Fostering Solidarity in an Age of Polarization.” I found the theme provocative and generative.
I was happy to learn that CBC radio’s “Ideas” recorded the lecture (For American readers: CBC is kind of the Canadian NPR, and “Ideas” has been an iconic program, almost unthinkable down here, that regularly features scholars and intellectuals tackling fascinating topics. Back in the day I remember frequently hearing Charles Taylor on “Ideas.”) I then had a follow-up conversation with one of their producers. From all of this, they created an episode that presents my lecture, with moments of conversation interspersed. The talk was a bit of a “field test” for some things I’m working on in the book. You can listen to the episode online: Beyond the ‘culture wars’: How mysticism can get us beyond polarization.
Speaking of the Institute for Christian Studies, I’m also honored to have been appointed as a “Distinguished Associate” of the ICS. This feels like a bit of a homecoming, and I’m happy to champion their work. The two most important years of my intellectual formation were at ICS. I hope more people will have opportunity to discover this hidden gem.
It’s getting a little warm here in the summer office as the sun starts to descend into Lake Michigan. I’ll try to write again soon, sharing some of my recent reading, highlighting some stories, poetry, and essays that have occupied me of late. And I need to think out loud about Adam Shatz’s incredible book on Frantz Fanon, The Rebel’s Clinic. More anon.