Therapy for Guys

In this episode, I share why I've decided to step away from the podcast—at least for now.After five years of meaningful conversations and connections, I've been reflecting on the more complicated parts of creating publicly: anonymous feedback, declining ratings, my own sensitivity, and the ways I sometimes shaped my responses to remain in another person's favor. I also explore my decision to leave social media and my desire to read and think for nourishment rather than continually turning everything into content.This isn't a judgment of anyone else's choices, nor is it necessarily a permanent goodbye. It's an attempt to make more room for my family, my private practice, and whatever creative project might come next.To everyone who has listened, subscribed, shared an episode, or reached out with encouragement: thank you.

One of my favorite passages in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is his reflection that he had to become a fool before he could truly awaken. It echoes the Prodigal Son and countless myths and fairy tales that suggest we often have to lose our way before we can genuinely find ourselves.In this episode, I explore why failure, despair, and disillusionment so often become the soil from which wisdom grows, while wrestling with a paradox I can't quite resolve. Our mistakes inevitably leave scars—not only on ourselves but sometimes on the people we love. While I believe redemption and transformation are possible, I don't think the pain we cause can simply be justified because something good eventually came from it.Drawing on Hesse, Carl Jung, and my own work as a therapist, this episode reflects on responsibility, grace, and the difficult question of how we can acknowledge the necessity of failure without ever glorifying it.

In this episode, I'm reflecting on love, polyamory, jealousy, projection, and the strange multiplicity of the human psyche.This is not an episode arguing that polyamory is better than monogamy, or that everyone should rethink their relationship structure. I'm more interested in what polyamory opens up as a psychological image: the idea that we are not always as unified as we pretend to be. We are full of different longings, fears, desires, wounds, and contradictions.I also spend time with jealousy and compersion, and how love can reveal both the most generous and the most possessive parts of us. Ultimately, this episode asks whether love — in whatever form it takes — can help us become more honest, more conscious, and more responsible.

In this episode, I explore Jung's complicated relationship to monogamy, sexuality, and love. Jung's own life with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff seems to resemble what we might now call a vee relationship, similar in some ways to the painful arrangement between theologian Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum.I also bring in Otto Gross and the provocative idea that conventional monogamy might suffocate the soul — even the troubling claim that a mistress could be necessary for psychic vitality. Rather than romanticizing this, I try to sit with the tension: Jung saw sexuality as something that could become hallowed when expressed through love, but his own life also shows how easily depth, eros, and spiritual language can be used to justify real human harm.This is not an episode offering easy moral conclusions. It is an attempt to think with Jung without worshiping him, to take eros seriously without excusing betrayal, and to ask whether love, once named as sacred, still has to answer to the wounds it leaves behind.

In this episode, I reflect on Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, psychotherapy, and the double-edged sword of introspection. Drawing from an essay on Hesse and a concern raised by JF Martel on Weird Studies, I explore how the search for authenticity can become either a path toward responsibility or a trail of tears for the people around us. As a Four on the Enneagram, this tension speaks deeply to me: the longing for depth, beauty, and self-understanding is real, but so is the danger of turning inwardness into self-absorption. This is a reflection on shadow, therapy, narcissism, and why true self-knowledge has to return us to love, repair, and responsibility.

In this episode, I reflect on a section from Herman Hesse's Demian where Emil Sinclair says that Novalis touches him more deeply than almost any other writer, maybe even more than Nietzsche. Since I've already known how important Nietzsche was for Hesse, this made me curious about Novalis and his strange, beautiful idea of magical idealism.I explore Novalis as a poet, philosopher, mystic, and thinker of imagination, love, illness, and healing. Rather than treating imagination as an escape from reality, Novalis helps us see imagination as one of the ways reality becomes meaningful and alive. I connect this to Demian, depth psychology, dreams, individuation, and the difficult task of becoming more whole without losing our grip on the world.

In this episode, I reflect on the strange and unsettling figure of Abraxas — the god Hermann Hesse brings into Demianand Carl Jung explores in The Red Book and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Abraxas names something deeper than a simple “good versus evil” split. He becomes an image of the mixture of reality itself: light and shadow, creation and destruction, spirit and instinct, the sacred and the terrifying.I use Miguel Serrano's Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships as a starting point, especially his reflections on Jung, Hesse, and Abraxas as a symbol of the total human being. But I also include a necessary warning about Serrano himself, whose later esoteric Hitlerism and fascist sympathies show how dangerous these symbols become when they are detached from humility, ethics, and compassion. Abraxas is not an excuse to worship darkness, violence, hierarchy, or purification. If these ideas lead us toward hatred or the eradication of other people, we are not doing depth psychology — we are being possessed by the shadow.This episode is about trying to think carefully and responsibly with dangerous symbols, and asking whether wholeness means becoming pure, or whether it means becoming conscious enough to face the terrifying mixture of being human.

In this episode, I reflect on Stanton Marlan's reading of Jung's black sun and the Self as a way of challenging the common psychoanalytic caricature of Jung as a thinker of easy wholeness or spiritual closure. Putting Jung into conversation with Hegel, especially the idea of the Absolute as contradiction rather than harmony, I explore whether Jung's Self might be read not as the place where contradiction disappears, but as the symbolic form contradiction takes in the psyche.This is an episode on Jung, Hegel, alchemy, psychoanalysis, the black sun, and the possibility of a darker, more dialectical understanding of individuation. Wholeness, in this reading, is not the fantasy of becoming undivided. It is the difficult work of bearing the split.

In this episode, I reflect on the conclusion of Jay Sherry's Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative and the uncomfortable question of Jung's failures during the Nazi era. Sherry helps us see Jung not as a timeless sage floating above history, but as a brilliant and deeply flawed thinker whose mythic imagination sometimes became an ethical liability. Jung's language about the German psyche, Wotan, collective forces, and historical fate allowed him to interpret Nazism as an archetypal eruption rather than clearly and immediately naming it as a criminal political reality. His stereotyped views of Jews, modernity, and mass society, along with his Romantic ideas about national or ethnic “folk souls,” created dangerous openings in his thought.This episode is about Jung's failure to heed his own warning voice, his later attempts to distance himself from German nationalist networks, and the postwar efforts to protect or sanitize his reputation. But it is also about resisting overly simple verdicts. Jung does not need to be reduced to his failures, but he also does not need to be rescued from them. A more honest Jungian approach means letting Jung have a shadow, refusing both cancellation and idealization, and asking what it means to love a thinker without turning him into an idol.

In this episode, I reflect on starting to reread Gregory Shaw's Theurgy and the Soul and the strange, painful tension of admiring a scholar of Iamblichus while discovering he is currently involved in a contested legal case where a woman is accusing him of stealing over 80k from her on a dating website . This is not a verdict, a defense, or an accusation. It is a meditation on projection, spiritual idealization, moral humility, and our desire to believe that people who study the sacred somehow rise above the mud of human existence.Through Iamblichus, theurgy, psychoanalysis, and the messiness of real life, I explore why genuine spirituality cannot be about escaping embodiment, failure, shame, or contradiction. Maybe the soul is not healed by finding flawless people to worship. Maybe it is healed by giving up the fantasy of flawless people altogether.

In this episode, I reflect on finally watching Robert Eggers' The Witch—with full spoilers—and why the film feels like such a devastating psychological and theological horror story.I explore Thomasin, Puritan fear, original sin, repression, the shadow, and the dark parody of individuation at the heart of the film. Drawing loosely from Jung and depth psychology, I think about what happens when a religious world has no room for desire, embodiment, grief, or becoming—and how the parts of the psyche we refuse to face often return in monstrous form.The Witch is not just a story about the Devil in the woods. It is a story about what happens when a family, a theology, and a whole moral universe cannot metabolize their own shadow.

In this episode, I reflect on Midsommar after a client recommended I watch it and the film really gripped me.Spoiler warning: I talk openly about major scenes in the movie.What stayed with me most was the tension between modern individual alienation and the seductive pull of collective religious belonging. Midsommar is disturbing because the horror is wrapped in beauty, ritual, shared grief, and the promise of family. Dani's pain is finally witnessed, but it is also used.I explore the film through psychoanalysis, cult dynamics, and the post-secular question of whether we can create rituals that hold grief, transition, and longing without violating our freedom or individuation. I also reflect personally on my own suspicion of high-control religion, especially the ways these environments can stunt individuality while calling it belonging.

In this episode, I reflect on Rudolf Otto and Carl Jung's idea of the numinous — the sacred as something that terrifies and fascinates, wounds and heals, interrupts and transforms. Since beginning The Crossing, especially Billy Parham's journey with the she-wolf, I've found myself returning to this older language for the sacred: not as clean doctrine or easy comfort, but as mystery, awe, dread, beauty, and psychic depth.This is a reflection on Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans, Jung's psychology of archetypes and God-images, and why numinous experience still matters for therapy, dreams, grief, art, nature, and ordinary life after certainty.

In this episode, I return to one of the most devastating scenes in All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole lying under the stars after seeing Alejandra for the last time. They love each other, and yet they cannot be together.I explore this moment as one of McCarthy's clearest expressions of tragic religious philosophy — a world where love is real but not always powerful enough to save us, where beauty and suffering remain bound together, and where the soul's warmth is both what makes us alive and what makes us vulnerable:“He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.”This is an episode about heartbreak, adulthood, pain, and the terrifying possibility that there may be no limits to what the human soul can suffer — but also no easy limits to what it can bear witness to.

In this episode, I sit with one of Alfonsa's most devastating lines in All the Pretty Horses: “Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”I explore this through Freud and psychoanalysis — the movement from childish wishing into the painful terrain of reality, mourning, and adulthood. John Grady's love for Alejandra is not dismissed as fake or foolish. The longing is real. The beauty is real. But McCarthy shows us that desire always has to pass through the world: family, history, class, gender, violence, loss, and forces outside our control.This becomes an episode about heartbreak, fantasy, regret, and the impossible “might have been.” Psychoanalysis helps us see that maturity is not the death of desire, but the painful transformation of desire into something human-sized. The wish remains, but it can no longer demand that the world obey it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, which I recently read in its dramatic form after watching the excellent and very faithful HBO adaptation with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Sitting more deeply with Professor White's despair brought me back to Eugene Thacker's Infinite Resignation and the idea that the only philosophy worth pursuing is one that poses questions without answers. This becomes a meditation on pessimism, faith, despair, and the strange sacredness of staying in the room when no clean answer arrives.

Having finished All the Pretty Horses, I keep returning to John Grady Cole's conversation with Dueña Alfonsa as one of the keys to the whole novel. Alfonsa is not just the woman standing between John Grady and Alejandra. She is history speaking to youth, the old world speaking to the dreamer.In this episode, I explore Alfonsa's vision of hidden strings, blood, sacrifice, freedom, honor, and love — and how John Grady's journey teaches him that nothing beautiful in McCarthy's world stays untouched. Alejandra, Blevins, the prison violence, and John Grady himself all become part of this larger tragic pattern where the world demands blood before it believes.This is an episode about innocence after it has been broken, love after it has failed to save us, and the possibility of carrying the wound without making blood your god.

In this episode, I take a short detour from All the Pretty Horses into Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited, the HBO film adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. I reflect on Professor White and Mr. Black, despair and faith, nihilism and sacred obligation, and why I find myself living somewhere between them as “Mr. Gray” — drawn to the dark clarity of pessimistic philosophy, but still unable to escape the sacred call to be there for another human being.

Before I jump back into All the Pretty Horses, I wanted to offer a shorter reflection on a line I recently found from Cormac McCarthy's unpublished screenplay Of Whales and Men: “I believe that we are arks of the covenant… and our true nature is longing.”In this episode, I explore McCarthy's vision of longing alongside psychoanalysis, James Hillman's notion of pothos, and Augustine's famous line that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But maybe God is not simply where restlessness ends. Maybe God is the restlessness at the core of our being.This is a meditation on desire, nostalgia, melancholy, sacred ache, and why longing may not be something to cure, but something to honor.

In this episode, I reflect on a dream that woke me up in terror and left me sitting with images I still don't fully understand: my childhood bedroom, my father reading Cormac McCarthy, Child of God, cherry cola concentrate, spiders, and my mother pulling an endless clear line from my throat. Rather than trying to decode the dream or claim one final interpretation, I use it as a way into McCarthy, the unconscious, and dream work as part of my own post-secular spirituality — a way of honoring symbolic life without reducing it to certainty, doctrine, or simple explanation.

In this episode, I explore All the Pretty Horses through the image of “a boy is a gun,” drawing on Lacan to think about masculinity, lack, fantasy, and the desperate need to be recognized.John Grady Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins are boys trying to enter the symbolic world of men, but McCarthy shows how dangerous that passage becomes when masculinity is tied to humiliation, violence, and the need to prove oneself. Blevins becomes the clearest tragedy of this, while John Grady reveals something more complicated: a masculinity that is beautiful, tender, courageous, and still deeply marked by blood.This episode is about boys, guns, horses, desire, shame, and the question underneath so much male suffering: do I have to become dangerous in order to be seen?

I finished All the Pretty Horses, and before moving into The Crossing, I'm staying a little longer with John Grady Cole.In this episode, I explore one of the most devastating moments in the novel: John Grady's killing of the cuchillero in prison and the strange new life that begins afterward “breath to breath.” This is not adulthood as triumph or toughness, but adulthood as wound, survival, and the loss of innocence.I reflect on how John Grady struggles with the fact that he has killed someone, even in self-defense, and how McCarthy refuses to make violence clean or heroic. Instead, he shows us the unbearable pain of life, the danger of being consumed by sorrow, and the fragile courage of continuing to live one breath at a time.

In this episode, I'm reflecting on one of the darkest sections of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are taken to Saltillo and the romantic dream of Mexico collapses into violence, corruption, and prison.I spend time with Pérez's chilling claim that evil is not merely something inside a person, but “a true thing” that goes about on its own legs. From there, I explore McCarthy's dark philosophy of evil: evil as visitation, as atmosphere, as something personal and impersonal at the same time.This is an episode about innocence, violence, adulthood, and what it means to keep carrying some wounded form of goodness through a world where evil is real.

In this episode, I reflect on the end of section two of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady Cole is exhausted, heartbroken, and unsure of what has happened after Alejandra leaves the hacienda. What stood out to me was a small but powerful moment with Rawlins, where male friendship shows up not as some grand emotional speech, but as presence.I explore the fragility of male friendship in Cormac McCarthy, the limits of stoicism, and the way men often long for connection without knowing how to say it directly. I also connect this to my work as a therapist with men, where so much of the work is helping men practice vulnerability, build real friendships, and find fragile bonds that can help them bear the difficulty of existence.

In this episode, I explore Cormac McCarthy's dark, postsecular vision of the sacred alongside Carl Jung and David Tacey's idea of the “darkening spirit.” I reflect on the sacred not as something safely contained by institutional religion or reduced to comfort, goodness, and light, but as the numinous: beautiful, violent, disruptive, terrifying, and transformative.Drawing on Jung's provocative claim that organized religion can protect us from a direct experience of God, I think through McCarthy's landscapes, violence, longing, animals, grief, and mystery as places where the sacred returns after the collapse of easy belief and easy unbelief. This is not an anti-Christian reflection. I share how deeply I've been shaped by Christian symbols while also wrestling with why I can no longer affirm a vision of the divine that cannot face evil, shadow, and violence as real powers within the greater whole.

In this episode, I reflect on All the Pretty Horses and the moment John Grady Cole meets Alejandra — not just as a love story, but as a beautiful and tragic opening into adulthood.I explore how young love, desire, fantasy, emerging sexuality, heartbreak, and betrayal become formative terrain for adolescent boys. Through McCarthy's world of light and darkness, I think about how longing can illuminate us and blind us, awaken us and wound us, and how therapy can help young men suffer honestly without turning pain into cruelty, cynicism, or contempt. As McCarthy puts it, “the world's heart beats at some terrible cost,” and much of growing up happens in that painful space “between the wish and the thing.”

In this episode, I reflect on a strange and haunting scene in All the Pretty Horses where John Grady Cole plays pool with the hacendado in what used to be an old chapel. What seems like a small moment opens into something much bigger: the sacred, institutional religion, reason, violence, memory, and the strange ways God may linger in places we think have been emptied out.I explore McCarthy's idea that “what is sacred is sacred,” and how the holy may exceed the control of priests, institutions, and rational explanation. This becomes a way into thinking about the post-secular sacred: not a simple return to religion, but also not a flat, disenchanted world where mystery disappears.Along the way, I also wrestle with the hacendado's critique of reason, his fear that reason can become monstrous when it tries to master everything, and McCarthy's larger vision of the sacred as beautiful, violent, terrifying, and impossible to fully control.

In this episode, I reflect on one of the most haunting lines I've encountered so far in All the Pretty Horses: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”As John Grady Cole and Rawlins arrive at the hacienda and begin working with horses, the old man Luis offers this dark, beautiful meditation on war, memory, and the souls of men and horses. I explore how McCarthy complicates any easy nostalgia for the old cowboy world. The horses are beautiful, almost sacred, but they are not innocent. The past is alluring, but it is not pure. And progress does not necessarily mean we have become less violent.This episode is about horses, war, masculinity, beauty, violence, and the unsettling possibility that human beings may not simply learn war from the outside. Maybe something in us already recognizes it. McCarthy gives us romance without illusion, beauty without innocence, and a vision of the human heart that continues to haunt me.

Cormac McCarthy is often caricatured as a conservative writer, and maybe there's something to that, but that claim gets reductionistic fast. In this episode, I explore Chapter 7 of Patrick O'Connor's Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned, “A Maelstrom of Doing and Undoing: McCarthy's Political Imaginary,” and think through McCarthy as a political writer whose work can't be easily mapped onto our usual categories.Rather than giving us a clean ideology, McCarthy forces us to sit with the tension between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, community and exclusion, freedom and violence. I reflect on Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper, The Stonemason, Tocqueville, technocracy, fragile dwellings, and the strange dignity of making a world even as it comes undone.This is McCarthy's politics: not a platform, not nostalgia, not utopia, but tragic attention to the people and places buried beneath the official story of progress.

In this episode, I use a question Rawlins asks John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses as a doorway into the feeling of being ill at ease in the world. I bring McCarthy into conversation with Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Peter Zapffe, and Thomas Ligotti to wrestle with the strange burden of consciousness, the ache of modern ennui, and the palliatives we need to cope with the sheer difficulty of existence.This is not an episode about finding a neat cure for the human condition. It's about asking what it means to live honestly inside discomfort, to recognize that civilization both shelters and wounds us, and to find forms of friendship, art, ritual, love, humor, and courage that help us keep the fire going against the dark.

In this episode, I reflect on Vereen M. Bell's essay “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy” and use it as a way into one of the biggest questions that haunts McCarthy's work: is McCarthy simply a nihilist, or is something more complicated happening?I explore how McCarthy strips away easy meaning, cheap hope, and sentimental moral order, while still leaving us with beauty, attention, witness, mystery, and the fragile possibility of carrying something human through the darkness. This episode moves through McCarthy's brutal landscapes, his refusal of easy answers, and the strange moral power of looking at the world without lying about it.Ultimately, I think McCarthy does not give us nihilism as a final answer. He gives us a passage through nihilism, asking what remains when the old guarantees fall apart — and whether, even then, we can still carry the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on rereading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as a coming-of-age novel and bring it into conversation with one of my favorite books from high school, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. I explore the tragic and beautiful passage into adulthood — the loss of innocence, the grief of seeing the world more clearly, and the difficult courage it takes to keep loving, working, and showing up anyway.I also connect these themes to my work as a therapist with adolescents and young adults, where therapy can become a kind of initiation space — a place to grieve what is lost, discover what is gained, and learn how to care less about the crowd while caring more about the right people. Along the way, I bring in the idea of la lucha — the struggle, the fight, the refusal to let the bastards get you down — as part of what adulthood asks of us.

In this solo episode, I put Carl Jung and Cormac McCarthy into creative conversation around the idea that life is a battleground of opposites: good and evil, beauty and violence, devotion and despair.I reflect on Jung's quote from Man and His Symbols, Petra Mundik's reading of McCarthy and “diverging equity,” my current rereading of All the Pretty Horses, and why I still have this fantasy of one day teaching a course on the gnostic spirituality of Cormac McCarthy from a depth psychological perspective.I also bring in the series finale of Euphoria, which felt to me like a Cormac McCarthy short story in TV form: devastating, mythic, violent, and yet still holding onto a fragile glimmer of human goodness.This episode is less about giving answers and more about staying with the tension: if evil may be greater, what does it mean that there is still possibly some good?

In this episode, I reflect on Matthew Potts' Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, especially chapter 2, “Fate: Nietzsche against Holden.” Potts is quickly becoming one of my favorite readers of McCarthy because he brings a deeply theological imagination to the novels without reducing them to easy Christian answers.I explore Potts' reading of fate, Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, and the fragile possibility of something beyond violence. At the center of the episode is Hannah Arendt's powerful emphasis on forgiveness and promise: forgiveness as the answer to the irreversibility of the past, and promise as the answer to the uncertainty of the future.This is an episode about McCarthy's darkness, but also about the small signs that still matter: a wife's hand, a stone trough, a father carrying fire, and the possibility that even in a world of blood and fate, human beings may still be capable of beginning again.

In this episode, I reflect on D. Marcel DeCoste's Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment, but I'm not approaching McCarthy from a Catholic confessional perspective. Instead, I'm interested in DeCoste's insight that McCarthy may raise all the right religious questions without necessarily giving us clear or easy answers. I explore how McCarthy's darkness, ambiguity, and moral seriousness connect to the crucible of therapy, where people often have to struggle with the question rather than have the answer handed to them too quickly. I also bring in a moment from Apple TV's Shrinking, where Paul warns against meddling and solving clients' problems for them, because doing so can rob them of the dignity of their own struggle and discovery.

In this episode, I reflect on the recent Vanity Fair article, “Cormac McCarthy's Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence,” and the complicated story of Augusta Britt, the woman who appears to have haunted and shaped parts of McCarthy's fiction. Rather than idealizing McCarthy or reducing the story to a simple moral category, I try to sit with the tension: art and exploitation, rescue and possession, genius and harm, the romance of the muse and the reality of a vulnerable young woman whose life became part of a literary mythology. This is an episode about reading McCarthy without innocence, without worship, and without losing sight of the human being behind the myth.

In this episode, I reflect on Petra Mundik's A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy and the way her reading has deeply shaped my understanding of McCarthy's underlying philosophy and spirituality.While McCarthy once described himself as a materialist, his fiction never feels flat or reductionistic. It feels charged, haunted, and almost sacramental in its attention to blood, fire, evil, mystery, and the strange persistence of goodness. I explore Mundik's reading of McCarthy through Gnosticism, mysticism, Buddhism, and the Perennial Philosophy, while also being careful not to collapse McCarthy's own beliefs into the voices of his fictional characters.I also share how conversations with my own therapist — who brought together analytic psychology and religious studies — opened me up to a very different understanding of Gnosticism than the one I had received in seminary. Rather than seeing it only as heresy, I began to see it as a powerful imaginative response to suffering, alienation, evil, and the feeling that this world is not quite our home.This episode is about McCarthy's darkness, but also about the fire that remains inside it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's only published nonfiction essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves.I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian depth psychological lens. From there, I explore why dreams may matter—not because they give us easy answers or mystical certainty, but because they can sometimes carry emotional realities that ordinary language has not yet found a way to hold.I also think about this through my work with men in psychotherapy, especially men wrestling with anger, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the difficulty of naming what hurts. Sometimes a dream becomes a doorway. Sometimes an image arrives before the words do. And sometimes the unconscious may be trying to reconnect us with parts of ourselves we have lost contact with: joy, freedom, grief, longing, vitality, and the deeper life beneath our explanations.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy's dark and haunting vision of the world through the lens of a recent Substack essay on his “gnostic conservatism.” Rather than treating McCarthy as a political writer in any simple sense, I explore his deeper existential concerns: violence, fate, evil, tenderness, and the fragile mystery of goodness in a fallen world.I think about Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road as works that refuse easy optimism while still leaving room for something like hope. McCarthy's world is often brutal, cold, and morally terrifying, but again and again there is also the image of fire: something fragile, humane, and sacred that must be carried even when there is no guarantee it will prevail.This episode is about darkness without despair, hope without sentimentality, and what it means to keep carrying the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy's novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional repression, and inherited versions of masculinity that have cut them off from tenderness, grief, intimacy, and their own inner lives.Through No Country for Old Men and The Road, I think about masculinity not simply as something to condemn or defend, but as something that can mature or fail to mature. McCarthy gives us men who are brave, capable, haunted, violent, loving, terrified, and often unable to speak directly about what is destroying them. And in that world, “carrying the fire” becomes a powerful image for a different kind of strength: not domination, not invulnerability, not control, but the ability to protect something vulnerable without destroying it.This episode is about fathers and sons, old myths and new possibilities, therapy as a different kind of initiation, and the hope that even in the dark, men can learn to become more fully human.

In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology.At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that conference cracked something open in me. I heard reflections on Johann Baptist Metz's idea of memoria passionis, the memory of suffering, and encountered John Caputo's emerging work on the weakness of God, which later became deeply important to me.I reflect on how Caputo's vision of weakness, vulnerability, compassion, and responsibility helped begin a long process of deconstruction—not as destruction, but as a way of becoming more honest, more human, and more open to the suffering of others.I also share a story that has stayed with me for years: hearing Caputo's former female support staff talk about how he actually lived his philosophy, including taking a pay cut so they could be paid more fairly. That testimony still moves me because it raises the deeper question: do our beliefs make us more compassionate, more generous, and more responsible, or do they simply make us more sophisticated?This episode is about political theology, weakness, memory, vulnerability, and the strange grace of those moments that quietly begin to change us.

In this episode, I reflect on theopoetics as a way of returning to Christian theology without returning to literalism, dogmatism, or the need to win theological arguments.As I've been rereading Christian theology, I've found myself drawn again to the strange, wounded, imaginative heart of religious language. I don't take these ideas literally in the way I once did, but I do still find myself moved by them as metaphors, symbols, wounds, and invitations.I explore Stanley Romaine Hopper, Death of God theology, and John Caputo's weak theology as different ways of thinking about what happens to God-language after certainty. This episode is not about debating belief or unbelief. It is about asking what theology can still do when it becomes poetic, imaginative, weak, ethical, and open to the future.

In this episode, I reflect on René Girard's I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, especially the chapter entitled “Satan,” and explore how Girard's understanding of mimetic desire opens up a powerful way of thinking about Christianity, violence, scapegoating, and the dangerous comfort of accusation.Girard helps us see that desire is not as original as we imagine. We learn what to want through others, and the people who shape our desires can quickly become our rivals. From there, rivalry spreads, communities become anxious, and peace is often restored by finding someone to blame. This is where Girard's reading of Satan becomes so provocative: Satan is not simply a cartoonish figure of evil, but the power of accusation, contagion, and false unity through a victim.I also bring Girard into conversation with contemporary Christian nationalism, especially the way it often identifies immigrants, outsiders, and those who do not fit a narrow heritage vision of America as threats to Christian civilization. But Girard invites a reversal. The satanic is not found in the vulnerable outsider being accused. The satanic is found in the mechanism of accusation itself.This episode is an attempt to think with Girard, not as an expert, but as someone newly struck by the force of his vision, and to ask what it might mean if the cross does not bless our accusations, but exposes them.

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo's After Christianity and his provocative reading of Joachim of Fiore, secularization, and the possibility of a Christianity after metaphysics. Vattimo helps us imagine secularization not as the simple disappearance of faith, but as one of Christianity's own historical effects — a weakening of domination rooted in the incarnation and the self-emptying of God.I explore Joachim's vision of the age of the Spirit, where faith is no longer secured by literalism, fear, or institutional control, but opened through interpretation, freedom, and charity. For Vattimo, the limit of interpretation is not rigid dogma or an outdated metaphysics of nature, but love itself — ama et fac quod vis, love and do what you will.This episode is about what remains after the death of the metaphysical God: not nihilism, but a more fragile and generous Christianity, one shaped by weakness, hospitality, spiritual reading, and the possibility that the Spirit still breathes where it wants.

In this episode, I explore Heraclitus through James Hillman's beautiful foreword to Heraclitus' Fragments, especially the idea that the psyche is not something fixed, stable, or easily explained, but something always in motion, always in tension, always touched by contradiction.Heraclitus gives us a way to think about psychotherapy beyond neat explanations and rigid identities. The self is not a finished object. It is a river. It is fire. It is the strange truth that “I am as I am not.”I also bring in Borges' short story “The Other” as a way of thinking about the divided self across time—the younger self, the older self, the wounded self, the becoming self—all meeting beside the river without ever fully resolving into one simple identity.This episode is about therapy as a place where contradiction can be held, where symptoms can be listened to as signs, where dreams and fragments matter, and where change is not just something we seek, but something we already are.

In this episode, I explore the fantasy of the inner circle — that persistent feeling that somewhere, just beyond where we are, there is a more exclusive room, a deeper friendship, a more serious group, a hidden circle of people who really know, really belong, and really matter.Building from C.S. Lewis's essay “The Inner Ring,” I think through why the desire to belong can so easily become a desire to be inside because others are outside. I also bring in the image of the temple and the Holy of Holies as a way of asking whether even the innermost room would ever be enough, or whether we would simply begin searching for another room beyond it.From there, I move into psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory, especially the idea that there is a lack or gap at the center of human life that no group, friendship, artistic recognition, or achievement can finally fill. I also reflect personally on my own friendships and the subtle ways this fantasy can still show up even when we are already loved and already belong.Throughout the episode, I share a clinical reflection about an anonymous client, a college student on the autism spectrum, whose growing life as an artist has brought with it the fantasy that fulfillment will come only when he is accepted into the “real” inner circle of artists. His story becomes a way of thinking about the difference between genuine belonging and fantasy completion.This is an episode about exclusion, desire, art, friendship, therapy, and the difficult but freeing possibility that the life we are looking for may not be waiting behind some hidden door.

In this episode, I continue working through New Perspectives on Henry Corbin by focusing on Joan Copjec's chapter on Corbin, Lacan, Kiarostami, and the Cloud.What surprised me most was seeing someone from the world of Lacanian theory take Corbin seriously — not as an odd mystical detour, but as a thinker who might help us rethink psychoanalysis, politics, cinema, and reality itself. Copjec brings Corbin's Islamic neo-Gnosticism into conversation with Lacan's Real and Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case to explore what makes resistance possible when power wants everything visible, teachable, governable, and controlled.I reflect on Copjec's idea of the Cloud as a hidden dimension inside reality, her distinction between nihilism and apophatic theology, and the radical political force of a God who cannot be possessed by the state, religion, ideology, or authority. This is not a politics of easy re-enchantment, but a politics of keeping the world open.I also talk about Copjec's recently published book Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, where she develops these themes further through Kiarostami, Corbin, and Lacan — a book I'm hoping to read soon.At the heart of this episode is a question that feels urgent right now: What happens to politics, therapy, religion, and the person when there is no longer any hidden remainder, no unborn dimension, no Cloud, no Real — nothing that escapes power? And what kind of listening might help us hear the unlocated sound that keeps the world from closing?

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.