what's going on?

As Taylor observes, many now experience this cultural shift as both gain and loss: unprecedented freedom to craft meaning, yet a spiritual landscape marked by fragmentation, drift, and what he calls “fragile conditions of belief”

“We are told we are saving time through the products of the appistocracy and yet we have no time. They’ve hollowed out the malls, stores and other public spaces – even ourselves, as we spend more time alone. Call it the hollowgarchy.”

Social media firms are] coming for every second of your life...And it's not because anyone is bad, it's not because anybody in this company has evil plans or is trying to do this, they're not even doing it consciously. Their entire model is growth. They’re coming for every second of your life. We used to colonize land. Then they realized [let’s go ... See more

Chomsky and Robinson also acknowledge that other great powers acted in much the same way that the United States has, and these states also invented elaborate moral justifications—the “white man’s burden,” la mission civilisatrice, the need to protect socialism—to whitewash their atrocious conduct. Given that this behavior preceded the emergence of ... See more

It’s frequently said that societal collapse is not a singular event, but a process. Jem Bendell’s seminal (and controversial) paper on the topic, Deep Adaptation, defines it as an “uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning.”

This paradox—deep longing for spiritual encounter, paired with weak interpretive infrastructure—calls for a renewed theological imagination.

The writer Jack Self summed it up much better than I can: “living through collapse isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries,... See more