Breaking Silence

An odyssey of delay, disclosure, and the disciplined risk of reasoning from where you find yourself

I owe my listenership an explanation. Four months ago, I began the third season of the podcast—“Book Three: What Is ‘the Real’?” The first two parts of the Introduction were released, and then, without warning, the feed went silent.

Sorry.

If I may explain: The Introduction was a very late addition to the already long—four-year—production of Book Three. While several chapters were already in the (virtual) can, the Introduction itself was unfinished when I began releasing it. And, as it turns out, it still is.

The last four months have been something of an odyssey. A confluence of factors conspired to throw my ship off course. The first delay—the lotus-eater—was my family vacation to Croatia. I thought I could bridge that absence by filming and quickly turning around a set of supplementary video interviews, loosely adjacent to the themes of the Introduction.

Instead, I opened a bag of Aeolian winds just as the destination came into view.

For one thing, video editing proved a thoroughly Circean distraction. I’ve taught myself an unreasonable number of new skills—skills I now want to share with the audience. As a result, Book Three will become a genuinely multimedia project, and the eventual Book Four will take the form of a fully video-based documentary. The first of these videos—featuring a demanding interview, preceded by a video essay that also documents the very odyssey that delayed me—will be released soon.

Another diversion, the Laestrygonian, came in the form of current affairs. Public events unfolded in ways that made the Introduction’s very intentional meta-awareness of current affairs feel almost uncomfortably on the nose—perhaps even in questionable taste. Once you begin parsing such resonances, however, escape becomes difficult. On the publicity tour for his American Revolution series, Ken Burns has spoken¹ directly to this danger, insisting that one cannot allow it to become paralyzing. So, following Burns’s sage advice, I just have to get back on board with the Introduction, come what may.

But I cannot get back to Ithaca until I’ve confronted my hamartia.

So I owe you a another explanation—not an apology exactly, but an orientation. Up to now, I’ve practiced a kind of strategic silence about my Roman Catholic faith in A Million Little Gods. This isn’t coyness, and it certainly isn’t embarrassment. It is a deliberate choice, and one I still think has been partly justified.

There are two goods I have been trying to preserve. First, silence has allowed me to speak across differences without triggering the kind of reflexive dismissal that sometimes greets explicitly religious voices in philosophical or cultural conversations. I want to talk with people who believe differently—or not at all—without having my arguments waved away as secretly catechetical. That’s not paranoia; it’s a sociological fact about how ideas are often received.

Second, silence has given me stylistic freedom. I’ve tried to write and speak in ways that remain deliberately slippery, indirect, even apophatic at times—because I think ultimate reality really is that way. If the world is finally resistant to clean capture, then our language about it probably should be as well. Silence, here, isn’t evasion but method.

Both of these strategies have served me reasonably well. And yet, silence has a cost. Over time, it can begin to feel less like a tactic and more like a compartment: One self for public philosophical conversation, another for parish life, prayer, and explicitly theological reflection. To be clear, I don’t think compartmentalization is always dishonest. Historically, it has often been a condition of survival. But I’ve come to feel that, for me, it’s beginning to limit rather than liberate. So I want to experiment with loosening that boundary—not abolishing it, but making it more permeable.

Part of what’s pushed me here is a broader pattern I’ve been thinking about—a feedback loop many of us now abide in. We live in societies with strong formal protections for privacy and belief.² That’s a genuine moral achievement. At the same time, our workplaces, platforms, and cultural spaces increasingly reward voluntary transparency. You don’t have to disclose who you are—but you’re often expected to. When people hesitate, when they hold something back, the response is rarely formal punishment. It’s more subtle: Exclusion from conversations, from trust, from the informal flow of meaning—ostracism without a paper trail. I’ve certainly felt that way at places of work over the years.

As we all know so well, this dynamic intensifies online. On social media and comment threads, everything is visible, everything is archived, and inconsistency is read as bad faith. The safest response becomes silence or carefully bifurcating your self—one voice here, another there. I’ve been playing that game too—consciously, thoughtfully, but still playing it. And here’s the irony: The more silence becomes a strategy for speaking to everyone, the more it risks speaking fully to no one.

One thing that’s helped me rethink my approach is returning to older models of how faith and general reasoning relate. Thomas Aquinas is an obvious reference point here—not because he collapses faith into reason, but because he refuses to confuse them. He distinguishes truths known by revelation from truths accessible to reason, and then insists that reason should be allowed to run as far as it can, on its own terms. You don’t have to announce your theology every time you make a metaphysical argument—but neither do you need to pretend it doesn’t exist.³

Averroes (a.k.a. Ibn Rushd), from the other (Muslim) side of the medieval Mediterranean, makes a strikingly similar move. Philosophy and revelation, he argues, address different audiences, using different languages, and at different levels of abstraction, but they need not contradict one another:

[T]he natures of men are on different levels with respect to [their paths to] assent. One of them comes to assent through demonstration; another comes to assent through dialectical arguments, just as firmly as the demonstrative man through demonstration, since his nature does not contain any greater capacity; while another comes to assent through rhetorical arguments, again just as firmly as the demonstrative man through demonstrative arguments.⁴

The task of communicating with those who start with differing assumptions is a kind of translation, not conquest. And as any translator knows, the guiding principle is fidelity without rigidity.

Simone Weil pushes Averroes’s point even further (maybe even further than he would have liked, but still). She was intensely spiritual but deeply resistant to religious labels. Her emphasis on attention and the discipline of “emptying oneself” (both a moral and epistemic discipline) is not presented with an insistence that you accept her creed. But it is also not religiously neutral—she insists that certain forms of truth and goodness become visible only through a kind of spiritual attention:

The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: “I am the Truth.”

Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.⁵

And then there’s Rawls. His idea of public reason doesn’t ask citizens to abandon their deepest convictions; it asks them to offer reasons that others could accept, even if they don’t share the same sources.

Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason.⁶

That’s not a denial of faith. It’s a discipline of address.

Finally, Cardinal John Henry Newman helps me hold all this together. He understood that belief is rarely the result of a single argument. It emerges from what he called the “illative sense”—a convergence of experiences, intuitions, practices, and reasons. We’re more than any of our sound logical conclusions:

[I]n no class of concrete reasonings, whether in experimental science, historical research, or theology, is there any ultimate test of truth and error in our inferences besides the trustworthiness of the Illative Sense that gives them its sanction; just as there is no sufficient test of poetical excellence, heroic action, or gentleman-like conduct, other than the particular mental sense, be it genius, taste, sense of propriety, or the moral sense, to which those subject-matters are severally committed. Our duty in each of these is to strengthen and perfect the special faculty which is its living rule, and in every case as it comes to do our best.⁷

So here’s the change I want to try. I’m not turning A Million Little Gods into a catechism. I’m not abandoning stylistic indirection or philosophical hospitality. I still care deeply about speaking across difference, and about letting questions breathe. But I am going to allow myself, at times, to speak more explicitly from where I stand.

Practically, that may mean occasionally sharing or adapting material I write for my Catholic parish’s newsletter—pieces that wrestle with doubt, belief, practice, and the strange work of living faithfully in a world that chooses to be disenchanted—not as proclamations, but as contributions to a larger conversation. Think of this change less as “revealing the hidden theology” and more as relaxing a long-held tension.

Silence has its virtues. But so does speech, offered without coercion and without apology. If this experiment works, it won’t be because everyone agrees. It will be because the conversation becomes a little more honest—about how people actually think, believe, doubt, and live.

As always, thank you for reading and listening.

1. 36:49–41:33

2. I live in a society where those rights and laws were particularly hard won: The Nazi regime used census and registry data to hunt down, persecute and finally murder citizens. In the now-defunct German Democratic Republic, the secret service, known as the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi), comprehensively monitored and controlled the East German population through an enormous network of employees—official and unofficial—in order to suppress opposition, using methods such as wiretapping, spying, subversion, imprisonment, torture, and, yes, sometimes murder. Thus here in Germany—more explicitly than in my home country, the United States—privacy has become a civic virtue tied to dignity (Menschenwürde). In the U.S., that civic virtue is looked at with skepticism. Far more value is placed in the freedom of expression. (Of course, that virtue isn’t faring very well at the moment either.)

3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 2, trans. Anton C. Pegis, accessed December 16, 2025, https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/ContraGentiles1.htm

4. Averroes (Ibn Rushd), On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. George F. Hourani (London: Luzac & Co., 1961), chap. 1, 44–45, accessed December 16, 2025, https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harmony-of-religion-philosophy.pdf

5. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), 112.

6. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 137. Political Liberalism (PL) is often read as hostile to religion. While I’ve got my own set of problems with Rawls, I think that’s a misreading. PL is better understood as a statement of theory about how to speak in pluralistic spaces, not about what you’re permitted to believe.

7. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, chap. 9, sec. 3, p. 360, accessed December 16, 2025, https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter9.html#section3