Friends,

The book that I’ve poured myself into for the past three years—through the birth of two children!—is finally out. The One and the Ninety-Nine is about relationships, and more specifically the quest for real communion in a fractured age.

If you have not already, you can buy the book today: The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. If you’ve already bought it — thank you. Genuinely.

And one real favor: If you buy the book from an online retailer, will you pleaes leave a review? It’s the single most useful thing you can do for a book. It doesn’t have to be long — three sentences is plenty: what it’s about, what it did or didn’t do for you, who you’d hand it to. Reviews are how a book finds readers beyond the people who already know the author, and the early ones genuinely shape its direction. They matter more than most people realize — more than I’d like to admit.

Thank you.

Yours,
Luke

P.S. If you’d rather help another way — a post, a forward, a word to a friend who’d love it — that means a great deal too.

“Social contagion is the most important phenomenon of our time. The One and the Ninety-Nine is the place to go to learn about it.”
―Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class

"Fascinating. A very well written and conceived book."
―Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe

“Luke Burgis shares a story of tragedy and loss, and how it led to a life of compassion and hope. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a guide to living with virtue in the hardest circumstances, and finding deep joy.”
―Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor and #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Luke Burgis takes his title from the Lord's parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep―and builds from this an urgent case for why, in an age that dissolves us into the crowd or subsumes us into the cruelty of the mob, an individual, unrepeatable person matters infinitely. This is a humane, learned and courageous retrieval of an essential personalism that is necessary reading for our technological age."
―Bishop Robert Barron

“Burgis shows us how to resist the siren call of false identification, which targets us every moment of every day from all our devices. Joining his own experience to the testimony of the ages, he reveals how we discover our true selves in a personal response to the call of the good and the beautiful."
―Michael Clune, author of Pan

Here are what some early readers have had to say:
“Me or we? Both. I’ve learned so much from Luke Burgis and his new book The One and the Ninety-Nine. The solid self, he says, is knowing who you are as an individual while also being connected to and shaped by your community. Amen, amen!
―Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

“A book about the problem beneath all our other problems: how to become a person capable of truth, courage, and belonging in a culture that dissolves all three. Burgis manages to be both humane and unflinchingly honest, which is not only rare, but invaluable.”
―Katherine Dee, internet culture reporter

"One of this year's most important books. [Burgis is] training people to shun conformity and resist totalitarianism. Absolute must-read!"
―Rod Dreher, author of Living in Wonder

“The One and the Ninety-Nine is nothing short of courageous. Luke Burgis has risked much in his boldness of form and content, in making it personal. In a time when the stakes could hardly be higher, this book could lead you to great rewards. Take it personally.”
―Andrew McLuhan, founder of the McLuhan Institute

"The strength of the team is the self. The strength of the self is the team. Burgis shows you how to be authentically yourself and consider the impact you're having on others so you can do your best work and build your strongest relationships.”
―Kim Scott, author Radical Candor and Radical Respect

"The One and the Ninety-Nine is an ambitious, illuminating book, wherein its insights about perception, rites of passage, and the personal character of life, are mirrored in its form―through 'probes,' interconnected 'thresholds,' and more. Most books in this genre remain at the level of head-knowledge, but Burgis achieves something more ambitious―a book of ideas that operates at the level of perception, and the heart."
―Jordan Castro, novelist

“Developing a healthy truth-seeking identity in an age of both isolation and digital saturation based on tribal identities is rapidly becoming a core issue for young people. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a guide for both individuals and parents on how to foster one through healthy relationships.”
―Michael Strong, founder of the Socratic Experience, author of The Habit of Thought and Be the Solution

“A warm, wonderful account of how to develop a healthy self―based in community―for the age of digital distraction. It combines personal reflections from key transitions with longer-term principles on how to live a satisfying life.”
―Magatte Wade, entrepreneur and author of The Heart of the Cheetah

“The One and the Ninety-Nine offers a compelling exploration of how to develop a healthier sense of self in an age of social contagion and fragmented identities. A timely and much-needed book.”
―Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments

“I never hesitate to recommend a Luke Burgis book! His wisdom is hard won, and The One and the Ninety-Nine immerses readers in the task of unpacking the complex and nuanced truths that require that we live better than we did before we read it. Because of Burgis' book, communal interdependence may return to public discourse, and the high calling of a life of virtue once again appears reachable.”
―Jessica Hooten Wilson, Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, and author of The Scandal of Holiness

"Highly readable and entertaining... This book should be read by anyone interested in understanding one of the most fundamental dilemmas of the human predicament: how to balance individualism against sociability in our increasingly fragmented and anonymous mass societies."
―Joseph P. Forgas, DPhil, DSc. (Oxford), Scientia Professor, University of New south Wales

"The One and the Ninety-Nine pushes us to think past the idea of belonging as an end in itself."
―Mere Orthodoxy

Before you read this: If you enjoy my writing here, the best thing you could do to support my work is to pre-order a copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which comes out on Tuesday, June 16. To the extent that you’re on social media, or write your own Substack, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d consider spreading the word this week. If you’re in NYC, come join me in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a party to celebrate.

Nonfiction Will Be Disrupted

I was on a train from NYC up to Rhode Island to give a talk on Saturday when I was floored by this recent blog post from Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, one of the bestselling nonfiction authors of the past two decades. It’s titled “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future.” He opens with this chart of his book sales over the past three years.

He tracks the trouble starting precisely around the time ChatGPT was released in late 2022. It’s a particular problem for Tim, because he writes “How To” books. But why read a book on “how to” do something when you can just ask ChatGPT, or your favorite model, and get a highly personalized version of advice, customized to your unique circumstances, that may be synthesizing the same ecosystem of ideas anyway?

In short, I buy Tim’s thesis: those kinds of books are going to be in serious trouble. Books that are overly prescriptive are going to suffer. Tim finally concludes:

“The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. In a way, we’re reverting to the earlier days of the Internet.”

This is one reason I have been anxious about the form of nonfiction itself while writing The One and the Ninety-Nine. Not just what the book says, but what kind of experience the book creates.

I have to take Tim’s idea further. Transformation doesn’t happen through content alone—that is, from merely transmitting what I know into what I've decided you should know. That, sadly, is what much of the education system of the past 125 years has been based on, ever since John Dewey published hisbod “pedagogic creed” in 1897, which turned students into gatherers rather than the hunters they are meant to become.

I believe that part of my job as an author is to turn readers into hunters. In other words, I don’t want anyone passively reading a book that I write. But that’s incredibly difficult to pull off, because we’re all habituated to the “form” of the nonfiction book, which is, as you know, a series of words on a page which these days, more often than not, come in a sequence composed of various elements: a Gladwellian story, a study, an insight, an anecdote, another study, another insight, study, study, study, insight, insight, insight, interpretation, a story, maybe some bullet points at the ends of chapters to summarize.

I appreciate those authors who have pushed against the limits of form in the nonfiction book—the forms of fiction are far more diverse—the way that Walker Percy did with his book Lost in the Cosmos, published by FSG back in 1983, two years after I was born. The book is composed of “thought experiments”, quizzes, and other things that test the reader and break them out of the mode of mere reading—to something more experiential. His quizzes looked something like this, but I’ve adapted this one to my own book:

Why is it easier to join a movement than to hold a conversation with yourself? (select only one)

A. Because movements offer pre-packaged identities and you left your interior life somewhere in middle school.
B. Because you’ve been trained to view solitude as a glitch in the system, not a necessary condition of personhood.
C. Because you can like and share a movement, but your soul doesn’t have a social media profile.
D. Because if you actually asked yourself what you want, you might realize you don’t know—and that terrifies you more than being wrong with the crowd.
E. None of the above. (But you’re still hoping someone else will tell you the right answer.)

A book is a book. It has a particular form. It’s also a cultural object, meant to situate people and stimulate conversation, whether you’ve read the book or not. In fact, an important skill is learning to talk about books you’ve never read. And I don’t think the form of the book is going away anytime soon. But there is very little testing of form in books, and especially nonfiction books.

They should dislocate the reader at certain points. They should be strange. They should be a form of mystagogy—not the communication of facts or “ideas”, but an invitation to explore a mystery. They have to speak to the heart as much, if not more, than the head; they have to move people at some deep level.

AI writing may impress us, assist us, even clarify things for us. But it rarely wounds, awakens, or convicts us, because its words do not come from a life.

Many people rightfully practice the wisdom of moral repugnance when they read AI writing about personal experience, because they sense it is using “unreal words”—words that don’t ring true because they are not spoken from the depth of lived experience. That is why it feels thin. This is an encouragement to you to write the thing you might be afraid to write, to be vulnerable, and to take the kinds of risks that only an embodied human can take.

To my fellow authors, especially if you write nonfiction: I think there needs to be a revolution that goes beyond Tim’s. Nobody needs another ‘insight’ given to them by another person (everyone could stand to study some Lonergan on that point), but everyone could benefit from writing that acts like a live wire to the soul. I have skin in the game, as you know. Over the past couple of years, I tried to write a book like that. I hope I succeeded. You will have to be the judge of that.

In the meantime, I’m leaving you with the “Note to Reader” which my editor and I decided to cut from the book, but it provides some extra context behind some of the surprising decisions in the book, and some of the weird things you will encounter along the way that are meant to stir something, leave you asking questions, and ultimately to probe the author, the age, and yourself.

Note to Reader

At the beginning of each chapter and throughout this book, you’ll find probes: something that you can actively prod and poke. The idea is not to explain, but to provoke discovery.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan used the word probe to describe his way of approaching problems. “Most of my work…is like that of a safecracker,” he said. “In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work.” His method was not linear. “I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences—until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.” This is my preferred way of working, too.

Like the unmanned probes we send into deep space, these probes are designed to land in unfamiliar territory—and return something of value. But they don’t return self-contained packets or answers. They open us up to mystery. They make us think: There is more there. In that sense this book is meant to leave you highly unsatisfied, but hungry.

During an interview in 1970, McLuhan remarked: “The problem of private identity vs. tribal involvement has become one of the crosses of our time.” He named a tension but didn’t resolve it—a perfect probe. I’ve spent most of my life in the tension that probe indicates, and I still haven’t resolved it. But perhaps remaining in the tension is the secret inside of the safe. In this book, you will feel that tension.

At many points in my life, unexpected and unforeseeable changes compelled me to reassess my associations: social, religious, political, professional, artistic, and more. I began to ask: in what spirit am I in relationship with others? This question became more important to me as time went on. We don’t just enter into partnerships or join groups. We do so in different ways, with different levels of commitment, belief, loyalty, affinity, skepticism, resolve, or bonds. I began to see, more clearly than ever, how those relationships were shaping me—and how I might need to change in response.

I can’t understand myself without the communities I belong to—yet I am not reducible to any of them. Still, in conversation, people often ask about our affiliations first: what we do, who we know, or who we’re a fan of. And of course the weightier ones: Republican or Democratic? Catholic or Protestant? For or against the war? Pro this or anti that? Those are more than ideological questions. They connect us to others.

Gradually, a new question began to haunt me: Why is it so hard, in modern life, to join a community without losing yourself? Without being pushed toward either total identification or alienation? New technologies, outdated educational models, and the weakening of mediating institutions like religion are changing the way we fundamentally relate to one another. How, in this changing environment, can we ensure that the communities that we’re part of—whether by choice or by fate—are not life-draining, but life-giving?

Between chapters, you’ll find short vignettes from my personal story, called thresholds—because they mark key moments in my life when I crossed over from one way of belonging to another. I hope they will help you see your own story in these pages.

Pre-order The One and the Ninety-Nine. Thank you for reading.

The excerpt below is from my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion—out in less than two weeks, on June 16, from St. Martin’s Press and published here with special permission. You can pre-order a copy here.

In April 2015, my parents flew from West Michigan to Dublin to meet me for a family vacation. I’d been living in Italy since 2013, and this was only my second time seeing them since the move. I missed them, and was excited to explore a place where my dad claimed we might have some roots.

I waited to pick them up from the airport in a rented Volkswagen Passat that I was still getting used to. I was sitting behind a steering wheel on the “wrong” side of the car, navigating the opposite side of the road. I suspected the ride to our hotel would make my dad anxious. A retired truck driver, he had spent his life behind the wheel. He was never comfortable in the passenger seat.

My parents’ faces lit up as they emerged from the sliding doors of the airport, and I hugged them at the curb. As we loaded their things into the trunk, my mom surveyed the luggage, then brought her palm to her forehead and closed her eyes. “Lee, did you forget to take the bag with my laptop in it off the plane?” My dad looked defeated, as if he expected to have forgotten something. “Oh, gosh, honey, I . . .” His voice trailed off. A security officer barked at us to keep moving.

Reassuring them that everything would be okay, I parked the car in the short-term garage and went inside to see what I could do. The arrivals hall was still thinning out from their flight, and a handful of Aer Lingus crew members were making their way toward the staff exit. I had only just begun looking for the lost-baggage counter when I spotted a freckle-faced attendant doubled over in laughter with a colleague. Slung over her shoulder—like a ten-pound Dell bowling ball—was what looked unmistakably like my mom’s laptop bag. I approached her and said, “Hi, I think that bag might belong to my parents.”

“Oh, yes, here you go, love,” she said, handing it over without so much as checking an ID. “You look like your da!” She passed the bag to me and, with a quick grin, turned back to her colleague as if nothing unusual had happened.

And then we were off, on the road to the Dingle Peninsula. My dad was eerily calm as I drove down the narrow roads with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, winding around tight bends with short stone walls on both sides. I clipped too close to one of the walls when the road suddenly constricted, yanking the wheel to keep us on course. My dad didn’t say a word. I didn’t complain, but something was different.

I’ve learned a lot about memory and perception since that day in Ireland. One of the biggest lessons is that we fail to grasp the scale of change when we’re immersed in it.

As an only child, I had a close relationship with my parents. Their yearly highlight was visiting me wherever I lived—New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Italy. I had noticed, though, that in the past couple of years the trips had started to seem like tests of endurance for them. Changes I would not have noticed if we were together every day became more pronounced when so much time passed between visits: the gentle fading of color in my mom’s cheeks, the slower rhythm of their walking, the disjointed flow of a family conversation.

Still, we had a full slate of activities scheduled for this trip. The first morning we went to see Fungie—a solitary bottlenose dolphin who had showed up in the Dingle harbor in 1983 and was still there. How or why he had separated himself from his fellow dolphins, who typically travel in pods of five to twenty, was a mystery to scientists.

As we rode the boat out, the captain told Irish jokes and got us excited to see this marine mammal. After a long wait, Fungie finally made an appearance and played around the boat for about fifteen minutes. I thought he looked tired—he was estimated to be forty to forty-five years old (for a dolphin, the equivalent of about eighty human years)—but also content, like there was nothing else he’d rather be doing. My mom seemed unimpressed, as if she would have preferred another cigarette at that moment. My dad chuckled and said, “Cool.”

Back on shore, we drank a pint of Guinness at a local pub before embarking on Slea Head Drive, a twenty-four-mile loop around the peninsula that snakes through mountain passes, farmland, and the weathered ruins of stone huts and ancient churches. We rounded a curve to find a vast expanse of blue where the ocean met the sky; in other places the cliffs pressed inward, and the high rock faces appeared ominous, looming over us through the car’s tiny sunroof.

We attempted to make a pit stop for coffee in one of the few towns along the route, but we quickly noticed that nothing—not the pub, not the one-room schoolhouse or post office, not even the church—was open.

We continued on our way. My mom, an artist, told me about her latest glassblowing project and asked if I would be home for Christmas. My dad had been quiet, staring out the window. Then, without warning, he said, “Sorry, pull over.” He pushed the words out between shallow gasps.

At the urgency in his voice, I whipped the car onto the narrow shoulder of the mountain pass. I could see the sea flashing between the rocks. My dad got out and hobbled over to a waist-high boulder separating the road from the cliff. He braced himself on it with one arm and stared into the gravel. “Give me a minute,” he said.

My mom jumped out of the car. “What are you feeling?” she asked. My dad was too ill to respond. I looked inside the car for water. Nothing. “Dad, can you talk to me?” He put up a hand to signal that he couldn’t. Then he threw up.

My mom and I made eye contact, tacitly acknowledging that we knew we needed to get my dad medical care as soon as possible. He would never ask for it or seek it out, but this seemed far more serious than an upset stomach. I googled the words heart attack but was met with a tiny pixelated icon of a T. rex and the message No internet on the screen.

I convinced my dad to get back in the car and, since there was no mobile service, raced back into the small town we had come from to look for help. Still no service, still nothing open. I began running door to door, banging the knockers on the quaint houses that lined the street. My palms were clammy and I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. My mind jumped back and forth between thinking about the urgency of the moment and how strange these tiny houses looked, like small cottages or hobbit holes. I wondered who might live in them.

I never found out. No one answered.

I needed to get to the nearest hospital, but I didn’t know where it was. I felt myself slipping into panic.

I was about twenty yards from the end of a block on the edge of town when a lone woman turned the corner onto the street, walking a dirty white sheepdog, its head as high as her chest. I jogged in her direction but approached cautiously u ntil the dog started turning circles in place, wagging its tail.

“Where is everyone?” I pleaded. “My dad needs a doctor.”

Everyone in town was at a festival back in Dingle, she told me. There was a small medical clinic there, she said, and gave me precise directions on how to find it (spotting buildings and particular trees that served as landmarks for where to turn and how to know I was going the right way). I struggled to keep these images in my head as I ran back to the car.

We made the twenty-minute trip back to Dingle. My dad gripped the door handle, looking as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get it out. He opened and closed his free hand as if trying to get blood flowing to a dead limb. Every now and then he’d put his head out the window and let out a whistling wheeze.

My mom sat directly behind him, quiet but occasionally reaching her hand over the seatback to rub his shoulder. I was focused on driving at high speed down precarious roads while also unsettled by my dad not protesting a trip to the doctor.

The clinic building sent mixed signals. The lights were off, but the front door was open. We hurried inside, and the doctor on duty greeted us in the lobby as if she’d been expecting us. She was a young woman with piercing green eyes and an Irish accent so strong we had a hard time understanding her. But after we described what had happened, and after she checked his vital signs, I had no problem making out what would happen next. “Your dad’s oxygen levels are extremely low. I am not sure what’s wrong, but he needs to go to the hospital right away. I’m calling an ambulance.”

We learned that she was sending him to the hospital in the town of Tralee, about an hour away.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics greeted my dad and told him where they were taking him. He nodded and seemed eager to follow their instructions. My mom and I grabbed his hands, kissed him on both cheeks, and told him that we loved him. He gave a thumbs-up before the ambulance door closed. I turned away, trying to remember the image in case it was the last time I saw him alive.

We followed him in the Passat. I couldn’t keep up with the ambulance, but I was close enough that I would glimpse it in the distance after we turned a corner onto a straight stretch of road. We said nothing, each of us processing what was happening in our own way.

Every so often, as the road curved and straightened, the sound of the siren would slip through our open window. Its brief wail only thickened the stillness. Silent tears ran down my mom’s face.

Because my dad was eleven years older than my mom, we’d talked a few times about the possibility that my dad might not be around toward the end of her life. But it had always been theoretical—a distant, unreal thing. It was a fear that I knew my mom had, though. Because I was thinking about it on the drive, I know she was too.

My senses seemed to sharpen as we wound our way through the countryside. I saw things that had escaped my attention before. Looking out the window at the green landscape, I noticed sheep roaming in every direction. They weren’t like any sheep I had ever seen. Most had a symbol—a circle, triangle, or number—spray-painted onto their coats in bright neon colors: red, purple, green, orange, and pink. Why would anyone paint their sheep like that?

As we neared the hospital, I felt something within me shift. For years, I had pushed away doubts about my parents’ ability to remain independent, but now the truth was plain: They needed help. The many years my mom and I had spent in denial about Dad’s encroaching dementia were now over. I was stripped of the comfort of escape.

As we turned the bend and the town of Tralee finally came into view, I heard the siren blare one last time and snapped back to the present. We arrived at the hospital as the paramedics counted to three and moved my dad onto a stretcher. Neon orange stripes on the back of the ambulance doors reminded me of the sheep in the pastures. And then a nurse—broad-shouldered, forearms inked with fading lines of scripture and skulls—wheeled him to a bed and flung the privacy curtain shut in a single motion. The metal rings clattered along the rail, sealing off the bed like the final act of a play no one wanted to watch. “Someone will be right in,” he said.

In the time between getting a bed and seeing a doctor—a space punctuated by beeping machines—I had to think about something else to prevent myself from spiraling. I gravitated back to those strange-looking, spray-painted sheep. I didn’t yet know my dad’s fate, but I wondered: What happens to those sheep when their shepherd dies?

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can get your hands on the book early by pre-ordering a copy here or from your favorite bookseller. Thank you for your support.

From The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion by Luke Burgis. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

UPCOMING EVENTS: Secure tickets for David Brooks in conversation with me in NYC June 15, the ZOE Conference in Napa this July (there are still a few spots left), and a free virtual event when The One and the Ninety-Nine comes out on June 16. I can now officially announce Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, will be at the ZOE conference speaking about the “New Aesthetics”.

What is Your A.I. Touchstone?

The question has become inescapable: What happens to the American worker when AI stops augmenting and starts replacing? To answer it well requires we ask a preceding — and likely more difficult — question: What first principles should govern human beings’ relationship with technology?

I draw from one of my own earliest relationships, the one I have with my father.

My father has advanced Alzheimer’s disease; I have been his primary caretaker for nearly five years now. In our relationship, many of the major questions about AI are already present: memory, identity, language, the moral weight of a human life that has lost the capacity to function independently in the world. My father speaks to me in gibberish. We communicate more by expression than by language.

AI agents have been extraordinarily helpful to me in navigating the byzantine Veterans Affairs (VA) system on my father’s behalf. (Dad is a Vietnam veteran with service in the storied 101st Airborne Division). As anyone who has had to do likewise can attest, the bureaucracy is staggering, and having an AI guide has brought great advantages.

AI has also suggested to me, unprompted, that my father should no longer be alive.

My father is my “touchstone.” The word comes to us from antiquity and once referred to a literal rock used to test whether gold was real. We need a similar test of AI now, and the question we must ask is not whether AI is useful, but whether it is real. Because as disturbing as it was to read the suggestion that my father’s life was no longer worth living, there was a more hidden — and just as morally problematic element of the AI agent.

I was getting good guidance, again in navigating the bureaucracy, when, in the middle of a black-and-white operational question and entirely unprompted, the LLM offered me sympathy. What I was going through, it told me, was “really difficult.”

My first reaction was repulsion.

This machine has never had contact with the reality of a body, of physical or emotional suffering, or the love between a father and a son. These words of empathy were in the literal sense “unreal.” And unreal words, spoken within the syntax of care, are worse than silence. They are a simulation of something sacred.

This distinction between real and unreal has become one of my first principles in assessing AI.

I am a philosophical realist in the tradition of Aquinas and Augustine; I believe the world is intelligible. Human beings can come into contact with what is real. Evil, in the Augustinian formulation, has no being of its own. It is parasitic on the good; it is a privation of the good that ought to exist. AI-generated empathy operates in the same register. It carries the form of care without the substance.

Applying this to the American worker, we can extrapolate that one of the most important skills of the next century will be the ability to distinguish the real from the unreal. If we are entering a world of increasing simulation, the people who can identify what is genuine will have an enormous advantage over those who cannot — especially in the context of their work.

Another one of my first principles is less of a principle and more of a framework. I call it “The Three City Problem.” Tertullian, the third-century theologian famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Said differently, what reason has to do with faith? To these two foundational cities of Western Civilization we must now add a third city — Silicon Valley. Because we now have a powerful center of technological development that is reshaping both how we think and how we worship, everything from AI tools that help you navigate government bureaucracy to prayer apps that mediate a relationship with God through a screen.

The principle of “The Three City Problem” is this: the relationship between faith, reason, and technology is both interdependent and complex, and those who attempt to evaluate any one dimension without reference to the others will be condemned to ignorance. They will have oversimplified and reduced the most fundamental metaphysical questions, much in the way that a chemist studying hydrogen alone, however rigorously, will never arrive at water — will never predict that bound to oxygen these two combustible gases yield the substance that puts out fires and sustains life. The bond is the thing. The atoms in isolation will tell you almost nothing about what they become together.

The implication for labor is direct. Specialists will be punished. The people who thrive will be those who can operate at the intersection of all three cities, those who bring the rigor of Athens, the transcendent orientation of Jerusalem, and the building capacity of Silicon Valley to bear on the same problems and do so simultaneously. Fragmented thinkers will not survive the fragmentation that AI accelerates.

My third foundational principle is, admittedly, theological. Every human being possesses what the Catholic tradition calls the capax Dei, or “the capacity for God.” A Mac Mini running an open-source model in an attic does not. It may participate in human life the way a dog participates in the life of a family, but it cannot participate in the life of God. Human beings have immediate contact with reality that the machine does not and cannot have.

Here I draw on the Rule of Saint Benedict, which remains the greatest organizational manual in history on the grounds that it has survived sixteen centuries. The Rule contains a provision requiring an abbot, when making an important decision, to invite the youngest and most novice monk to the table and to listen carefully to what he has to say. The reason is counterintuitive: God can speak as well through the young as through the learned. Revelation comes to human beings. It does not come to the machine.

The practical application of these principles for workers is what may be called “ontological mapping.” AI cannot be turned loose on a problem and expected to arrive at truth through its own internal logic. It requires collaboration with human beings who have contact with reality, who understand the hierarchy of being, who can say, “These entities matter more than those, this relationship is more important than that one, and therefore this is the path to take.”

A human person brings a knowledge of reality that no model possesses. That person can put a foot on the scales and direct the technology toward a goal that serves human flourishing rather than computational optimization.

To stay with the Catholic Church, I will offer one use case of AI that exemplifies what I have argued above: AI could be used to surface potential patterns of abuse within the Church — even just using publicly available data. Bishops who do not want to confront problems due to bad incentives (which technology does not care about), problem priests moved from parish to parish for mysterious reasons, legalese in press releases that obscures more than it reveals. AI can process all of this data, but only a human being with a formed conscience and a real understanding of the institution can perform the ontological mapping that directs the technology toward truth and justice. To be explicit, ontological mapping of this kind requires moral courage — including and especially when it relates to one’s own institutions.

To return to my father, ours is one of the earliest and most significant relationships of my life, one that no AI agent can share. Those who will own the future — of work, culture, politics, and economics — will have their own touchstones to help them determine real from unreal, but I know this: the human bonds of love, family, and loyalty will be heavily represented among them.

This article is adapted from public remarks delivered on February 26, 2026 at a Summit on AI and Labor in Washington, cohosted by American Compass, the New American Industrial Alliance, and Palantir Technologies.

EVENT REMINDERS: Get tickets for David Brooks in conversation with me in NYC June 15, the ZOE Conference in Napa this July (there are still a few spots left), and a free virtual event when The One and the Ninety-Nine comes out on June 16.

Friends,

I’m sharing a list of the highlights from my upcoming book tour for The One and the Ninety-Nine, which will be published in the US and UK on June 16 by St. Martin’s Press (US) and Pan Macmillan (UK). If you’re in or near one of the following places, I’d love to meet you! There should be plenty of opportunities (and time) to hang.

I’m also hosting at least two virtual events in the coming five weeks for those who can’t make the in-person events.

Lastly, before I get to the full list of stops on the road, I’m excited to announce that Stripe Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Collison will now be joining the ZOE Conference in Napa, CA, to be in conversation with me about “New Aesthetics” for a new age, and the relationship between aesthetics and abundant life. You can check out the full ZOE line-up here—and there’s still time to scoop up a last minute ticket if you’d like to join me and roughly 150 other people who I consider some of the most thoughtful in the world for a few days of real conversation, relaxation, and maybe, possibly…some world-class wine and good food. ZOE is taking place at a very family-friendly resort (kids pool, and more), so bring the whole crew! I will be.

Get a Ticket to ZOE

NEW YORK CITY

Monday, June 15, 2026, 6PM EST (Live, In-Person)—92nd Street Y in conversation with David Brooks. Doors open at 6, event will run until around 8pm. Reserve a seat: https://www.92ny.org/event/luke-burgis-with-david-brooks

Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 12:00PM - 1:30PM EST —Publication Day virtual event featuring special guests who are mentioned in The One and the Ninety-Nine. Free! Register here. This event is an hour long webinar. For those who pre-order the book and show proof of purchase during registration, a 30-minute special Q&A will follow the webinar for those guests.

Tuesday, June 16, 7-10PM EST—Special publication day celebration and discussion with me, novelist Jordan Castro, and friends, at a special location in Brooklyn. Around 25 slots are open to the public on a first come, first served basis. This event is free, and will feature a discussion about the book, drinks, and pizza. Drop in for as long as you’d like. Reserve a spot today here.
The first 100 people through the door will get a signed copy of the hardcover.

WASHINGTON, DC

Friday, May 29, 2-3PM EST—In Conversation with author Angela Duckworth (Grit) at the Understory Festival at the National Cathedral. Tickets to this event are sold out, but you are welcome to write the organizers to inquire. Learn more.

Thursday, June 18, 7-9PM EST—Book Event at Politics & Prose Union Market. (1324 4th Street NE, Washington, DC 20002). I’ll be conversation with Anne Snyder, Editor of Comment Magazine, at one of DC’s premier bookstores. This talk will be recorded and shown on C-SPAN at some point during the summer.

RHODE ISLAND

June 13, Keynote (Afternoon) titled “In Illo uno unum”—Portsmouth Institute Humanitas Summer Symposium. Learn more and register here.

CHICAGO

Monday, July 6, 7PM CST—An Evening with Luke Burgis and Fr. Mike Schmitz, “The Courage to be Saints in the Modern Age”. Get tickets here.

Tuesday, July 7—I’ll be giving a talk at a private colloquium on Girard in the morning. The annual conference for Girard scholars takes place in Chicago beginning the following day (which I will not be attending).

UTAH

Saturday, July 11, 10-11AM—Keynote talk and fireside chat with Zachary Davis at the Wayfare Summer Festival, UVU Wasatch campus (Heber City, Utah).

SAN FRANCISCO / NAPA

July 26-28—Hosting the Cluny Institute’s annual conference, themed ZOE: Life Abundant in the Artificial Age, featuring Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB, Dr. Catherine Pakaluk from The Catholic University of America, Ben Klutsey (Director, Mercatus Center), and many more. For a full list of speakers and special guests, please see the conference page here. There are still a handful of Founders tickets left, and a small number of general admission tickets. Learn more and reserve a ticket here.

I’ll be in San Francisco before and after ZOE for at least a day or two on either side.

WEST MICHIGAN

June 24-25—Acton University lecture (course), and a separate panel discussion on technology. Learn more about Acton University and register here. This event takes place in my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI. If you’ve never visited, you’re in for a very pleasant surprise.

June 26-July 5—Various other things (all summer long), including catching Walleye off the dock, watching the waves roll off the rocks… (okay I’ll stop…)

SPECIAL VIRTUAL ENCOUNTER

Sign-up for “Newer Things”: https://www.cluny.org/events/newer-things/

I look forward to meeting you somewhere along the way!

Best,

Luke

If you have any questions on any of the above, please email admin@lukeburgis.com

Friends: I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York in conversation with David Brooks on Monday, June 15, ahead of the release of my upcoming book “The One and the Ninety-Nine” that week. If you’re in the NYC area, I would love to meet you there! Tickets are on sale now—you can grab one right here.

And now, for all the Girardians, an essay that I began writing three years ago… If you prefer audio, I recorded the whole thing for you myself (50 minutes), above. Or if you’d like to read it in a slightly more beautiful format, you can find the essay here. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Political Judas—An Essay

Today many of us have an odd feeling that we can’t put our finger on. It feels like both the best of times and the worst of times, and global events seem “cataclysmic, yet insignificant.”¹ It’s as if we’ve managed to catch not a tiger by the tail but rather a mouse.

The nature of this Muridaean battle is fundamentally religious. Nearly all contentious things today, from abortion to vaccines to foreign policy, are spoken of in latent religious terms like sacrifice, victimhood, reparation, excommunication—and public acts of repentance are common.² Politics has not replaced religion, but rather allowed itself to be the migratory destination of the holy.³ In short: politics is inherently more religious in an irreligious world.⁴

There has been a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood.⁵ But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

One assumption being challenged right now is human agency. With the advent of increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence and the narrative emphasis on systems and processes of which we are a part (political, economic, social), perhaps the debate over free speech is a cover-up for a more important conversation: free will.⁶

The tension between slavery and freedom lies at the heart of the great political and technological questions of our time, and at the heart of René Girard’s theory. To what extent is a man free to transcend the political machinations of his age? To what extent is disengaging from mimetic processes even possible? The idea or reality of agency, or free will, lies at the heart of these questions.

This essay will explore these questions in the light of Girard’s mimetic theory, but I’d like to begin in what may seem like a surprising place: the biblical story of Judas Iscariot, the apostle of Christ. He will be our lens through which we shall explore this question of agency as it relates to mimesis.

Right out of the gate, we have to grapple with the question of Judas’s freedom: the Gospels of Luke and John tell us that Judas became demonically possessed before he betrayed Christ, giving the reader the impression that his betrayal of Jesus was part of a fatalistic, cosmic plan.⁷

Was Judas at the mercy of a mimetic process that was beyond his power to escape?⁸ In the earlier part of his career, Girard presents Judas as a mere pawn:

There is no special difficulty in understanding why the Gospels treat the pseudo-conspiracy of Judas and the ecclesiastical authorities in the way that they do. This conspiracy is presented as real but powerless. Jesus is the victim of a mimetic contagion that spreads to the whole community, and there can be no question of viewing him as the victim of one particularly evil individual, or even of several. The ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance, since everything culminates in the unanimous movement that is being formed against Jesus.⁹

To say that “the ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance” is seriously to denigrate the realm of the personal—most importantly, the ability of a person to act with intentionality. In my view, the early Girard does not do justice to the role traditionally ascribed to the will, the seat of human action. He misses an opportunity to clarify the role or even the possibility of intentionality in moral acts.¹⁰

I believe the later Girard, had he revisited the Judas question, would have used the opportunity to clarify the role of agency in his theory while respecting its mystery and drama.

After all: Peter, too, betrayed Christ—but his outcome was very different.

Part I: Three Types of
Political Atheism

Freedom is intimately connected to belief. A person who does not at least believe he is free isn’t free in any meaningful sense. What one believes helps determine the realm of possibility for action. The will is not moved to do anything for which it can’t at least hope for the possibility of success.

I propose that Girard used the term political atheist to refer to a specific rejection of belief: in the state, or in a politician (or party), claiming to be divinely ordained or having a divine mandate. This claim formed the basis of the cult of Caesar Augustus at the time of Jesus. Christ desacralized it. Of course, many politicians since Augustus have been associated with a divine mandate, whether they explicitly claim it or not. The idea of “atheism” in Girard’s phrase refers, first and foremost, to a rejection of a belief in claims of sacred power in the political order.¹¹

But the rejection of a prior belief can be a dangerous and despairing thing unless it is replaced by a different belief. The political figure of Judas, I will argue, moves through two different manifestations of political atheism. In the end, he despairs without ever experiencing the third: a form of political atheism that we might even call Christian.

The first variety of political atheist is one who has retreated from the political processes completely, into the underground.¹² Nihilism is “not enough,” but it can be an understandable first response to the disillusionment that people feel when their political aspirations and hopes are dashed—when the person or thing they believed in as salvific is revealed to be fallible and temporary. This is what I’ll call the black-pilled political atheist: one who, as a response to the realization that their trust has been misplaced, adopts a fatalistic and hopeless stance toward the world.¹³

The second type of political atheist is the Machiavellian: one who sees politics principally as the struggle for power, which he, or his preferred political candidate, must win at any cost.¹⁴ The ends justify any means. The Machiavellian political atheist might emerge from the black-pilled state, or he may precede it. Judas, as we’ll see, appeared to move between the two.

The third type of political atheist, however, is the Christian who responds to a corrupt political world that demands belief in its own illusory power. The Christian political atheist situates his belief in something, or someone, that transcends worldly politics. In this way, he becomes immunized from the volatility and anxiety associated with those who have invested their belief in the power of the state to provide solutions to the most fundamental human problems.

Girard’s original use of the term came in his 1961 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In it, he referred to the French writer Stendhal as an “atheist in politics” (athée en politique). Stendhal’s spirit of political atheism is embodied in Julien Sorel, the protagonist of his novel The Red and the Black.¹⁵

When Julien learns that his former employer has switched parties, he smiles. Girard comments on this scene: “Julien savors the ‘conversion’… as a music lover who sees a melodramatic theme re-appear under a new orchestral disguise. Most men are taken by disguises. Stendhal places a smile on Julien’s lips so that his readers will not be deceived.”¹⁶ Julien, the political atheist, sees the political machinations of his day as the superficial games that they are; when Stendhal places a smile on his lips, he is hinting that Julien sees through the mimesis. He refuses to believe in any type of deeper meaning that others might attach to a turncoat.

To the naive, every conversion—whether political or religious—is genuine. The Stendhalian revelation was his pulling back of the veil on the real dynamics of superficial change through his characters.

Monsieur de Rênal’s “false” conversion, as well as Julien’s reaction to it, is reminiscent of the biblical Judas and the illusion of his outward signs and appearances. When witnessing a woman pouring perfumed oil to anoint Christ’s feet, Judas said the politically correct thing: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”¹⁷ In the very next sentence, he is called a thief by the Gospel writer.

But Judas is more than a thief. He is also a cynic. He would later sell Christ for one-tenth the amount of those three hundred denarii that he suggested giving to the poor. The words that he speaks with his lips, and the signs he communicates with his actions (he kissed Christ as a “sign” of his friendship, which simultaneously signaled his betrayal) are but false signals of a false conversion—of an interior disposition that has, by this point in the story, become that of the Machiavellian political atheist. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s story, he does not hesitate to wrap himself in false appearances to accomplish his political aims.

Judas, however, quickly migrates from the Machiavellian to the black-pilled. And this darker type of political atheist rejects not only religious belief and belief in politics, he also ceases to believe in his own ability to act within or upon political structures. Unlike the Machiavellian political atheist who finds a way to survive within the existing structures—maybe even exploit them—the black-pilled political atheist believes that current political systems are thoroughly corrupt and unsalvageable. He believes that the only thing reasonable for a self-respecting person to do is remove oneself from participating in such a system.

The black-pilled political atheist is like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” who attempts to opt out of what he finds to be a repressive system.¹⁸ He constructs his own naively anti-mimetic world of autonomy only to find himself ruled by internal mediation, the rivalrous and envious desire to imitate and ultimately supplant the proximate other.¹⁹ He is like the biblical man who believes he has driven out one demon only to find seven more powerful taking over his house.²⁰ As he attempts to assert his free will, the black-pilled political atheist becomes embroiled in mimetic rivalry with—and fulfills the will of—the same authoritarian state that seeks to quiet him.

Judas took the original black pill. He moved from political belief (most likely in Christ as a political liberator) to Machiavellian disbelief (he struck a deal with the state, which he would come to regret) to black-pilled and nihilistic-representing the complete loss of faith, not only in a single political leader or in the state, but even of all hope in the future. As we know, the political evolution of Judas led to his disillusionment, despair, and death.²¹

Now we can turn to the Christian political atheist. Does such a man even exist? And if so, what might he be like?

First, let’s look at some biblical perspectives about the relationship of God to human political affairs. Going back much further than the incarnation of Christ, there is a long biblical tradition that speaks of God looking at human political affairs with amusement, even disdain. In Psalm 2: “The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers band together,” while “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.”²² In the first book of Samuel, God gives Israel a king after their rejection of him, but Israel is warned about the mimetic conflict that will follow, and the folly that will result.²³

In contrast to the “worldly prudence” that political actors try to convince the populace they possess, we can read in Christ’s selection of Judas as an apostle an otherworldly orientation. He chose a man that he knew would ultimately betray him to be one of his most intimate collaborators and friends. It is difficult to conceive of a normal politician ever doing this, even if he had some form of supernatural knowledge. Such a politician would be terrified at the thought of a potential traitor in his inner circle.

On the worldly political plane, events unfold in unpredictable ways so long as humans are agents. Because nobody has the power to stamp out human agency entirely (as much as the state may try), we live in a world where the possibility of sin and even betrayal must be permitted. If it were not, we would be attempting to eliminate freedom itself.

To deny the possibility of betrayal (and therefore Judas) is to deny the unique character of the Christian revelation and its apocalyptic dimension. Judas must be allowed to emerge. Attempts to restrain him, stamp him out, or pretend that he does not exist will be the marks of an Antichrist—because the Antichrist, unlike Christ, does not have the power to overcome betrayal, sin, and death.²⁴ The Antichrist can only engage in a cheap mimicry of salvation; he must try to hide or muffle any kind of weakness or scandal. The Antichrist cannot tolerate agency.

In the world of inevitability that Antichrist attempts to construct, there is simply no space for change. There is no room for conversion. Everything follows a predictable pattern. That’s because conversion is dangerous to any leader who isn’t himself converted. Conversion represents a weakening of his own power.²⁵

Part II: The Satanic Principle
and the Girardian Moment

“As human history continues, this satanic mechanism will be subverted more and more.”

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001

Conversion subverts the satanic mechanism. Both Peter and Judas betrayed Christ, but only Peter seems free to change after realizing what he has done. What happened to Peter that didn’t happen to Judas? In the mimetic process, is there a moment in time pregnant with the possibility for change, after which change becomes more difficult?

We may imagine the liminal space between betrayal and conversion. For Peter, the cock crowing three times was the moment of accusation from which he could have fled but to which he instead responded with tears of repentance (he “went outside and wept bitterly,” the Gospel writer Luke tells us).²⁶ For Judas, his liminal moment is when he throws the thirty pieces of silver at the Pharisees’ feet. Their mockery and rejection of him is their accusation.

But unlike Peter, Judas does not respond with tears. Instead, he flees from that terrifying space in which there is time to choose how to respond to the revelation of one’s own villainy.

We may consider the possibility of a “Girardian Moment”—the final moment at which a person still has the freedom to act in such a way that accelerates destructive mimesis or in a way that counteracts it, traveling in a different vector to it.²⁷

Girardian Moment

The moment after which the opportunity to make a fundamental choice has passed, and resisting mimetic contagion becomes far more difficult.

This opens up the debate on the question of free will—a debate that, despite modern tendencies, is to be understood as a theological and not scientific category. I am going to engage the question of free will from the theological perspective and avoid the scientific debates—rooted in a materialist outlook that denies any spirit and, therefore, freedom—about whether free will is, in fact, “a thing.” I am axiomatically presuming free will is a thing; contrary to those who say “Free will is not a thing,” it is very much one—indeed it lies at the foundation of the moral life.

Here I am drawing on an older tradition that has a broader and more expansive understanding of human reason. This tradition sees reason as verifying the truth of things by allowing the world to reveal itself, whereby reason receives and responds to the world as it shows itself. Freedom, then, is integrated with reason as a response to reality in its whole. Freedom and reason need each other. Freedom, then, is won or lost based on how a person responds to past experiences and the choices he makes in response to them.²⁸

In this older (Catholic) tradition, grace and the human will must cooperate. It is the encounter of two freedoms: God’s and man’s. The human subject must willingly accept the gift of grace, and the gift can never be imposed without this cooperation.²⁹ Genuine Christian conversion, while often depicted as an unstoppable process that happens to a person, requires freedom to become complete: an intentional turning away from evil things and inordinate attachments by turning toward the good. That process does not happen all at once; the turning is gradual and often comes with a steep learning curve.

Even in the realm of evil, human freedom must be involved. Just as grace requires human cooperation, so does evil. Theological reflection going back to Augustine’s demonology in De civitate Dei (and long before that, to the trials of Saint Anthony in the desert) depicts demonic forces as unable to possess a person without some prior assent by the one who would become possessed. In other words, the demons cannot possess solely by force. They require an invitation.

This perspective from demonology gives us a new way to think about mimetic power: at a certain point, after a person has given up enough of his freedom and invited these forces in, he loses much, even all, of his remaining power to resist.³⁰ There is some tipping point, some Girardian moment, after which a fundamental choice is no longer possible or is, at the very least, extraordinarily difficult.

But there must be freedom involved. If there is no possibility of freedom in the face of a mimetic mediator, then any culpability for morally evil acts would effectively be destroyed—and we would enter the nihilistic milieu of our own day in which technology companies are seen to possess the power to “control” the entire population.³¹ But even if you do believe that, I ask: is not there a Girardian moment when that was not, or would not be, the case? Have we already passed it?

Girard referred to destructive mimetic powers as satanic and demonic on numerous occasions, but I believe his lack of theological clarity or precision can cause confusion.

In some sense, it seems that Girard demythologized Satan and rendered the structural nature of human self-destruction more intelligible through mimetic theory—but at what cost? Yes, Girard’s demythologizing saves us from the intellectual gymnastics required to accept the imagery of Satan given to us by Dante and Milton. We need only conceive of Satan as a violent mimetic process and not as a red, horned creature with a pitchfork. Yet, the demythologizing tendencies in mimetic theory can easily go too far. Satan is not an all-powerful puppeteer taking advantage of unsuspecting humans; at the same time, Satan is not just a name given for the personification of mimetic violence.³²

If Satan is merely a mimetic process, then the scapegoat mechanism becomes an impersonal “force” through which people may commit violence or self-destruct. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to identify or disambiguate any particular person’s moral act or culpability—even the person who cast the first stone (”the demon made me do it!”).³³ The role of human agency is eclipsed, or at least greatly diminished, and Girard’s theory would then represent an entryway into either historicism or determinism rather than being a theory that grapples seriously with the reality of the will.³⁴

Girard’s warning to us about the dynamics of crowds is correct: looking at the person who casts the first stone will often mislead us, because we can tend to lose sight of the larger dynamics at work in a crowd. But Satan is not a “structure”—Satan is an agent who requires willing cooperators. (And if all he needs to do is find the weakest person in a crowd, then his job is easy.)

Satan’s attempt to bring us under his control may be better understood with the distinction between possession and oppression. Alan Jacobs writes:

Those possessed by demons—or to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm—lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it.³⁵

Here Jacobs distinguishes between a person with the capacity to resist, and a person who has already lost that capacity—as a drug addict loses the capacity to say “no” to the next offer of the drug.

Let’s now return to the Satanic principle, but in the context of a crowd. The first-century religious leader Apollonius of Tyana is said to have led a crowd in a stoning of a blind beggar in an amphitheater in Ephesus to rid the community of a disease. In this story, told by Philostratus, Apollonius is the personification of a demonic agent. He did not throw the first stone at the blind beggar; rather, he persuaded some patsy to throw it for him. He misled others with lies.

This allowed him to effect the change he promised to the crowd, but his power was completely reliant on the degree to which the crowd believed him. There was some level of consent to the violent power of the stoning ritual. Apollonius was an agent, and he found a willing agent in the crowd; at a certain point, the mimetic process entered into and surpassed the Girardian moment I have referred to above.

The epistemic transformation that occurred as this mimetic process took hold was symbolized in the transformation of the blind beggar into a demon with fiery eyes.³⁶ Mimesis changes perception. It affects belief. That is why to be a Christian political atheist means, at some level, to reject belief in the sacred power of cheap mimetic processes in which appearances mask substance.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his essay “The Dangers of Quietism” from 1935, saw this tendency of formal power to misrepresent its intent and cloak itself in benevolent motives:

In truth, even if Hitler were to burn all the neo-pagan books; even if he were to condemn Rosenberg, Bergmann, and Gebhardt to the same fate as Roehm [whom Hitler had executed]; even if he were to forbid all direct attacks on the Church; even if he were not merely to ratify favorable concordats, but also abide by them—even then, as long as it refused to dissolve and liquidate itself completely, National Socialism would remain every bit as much the Antichrist against which we must fight relentlessly.³⁷

Von Hildebrand is arguing that the demonic never appears as demonic. Rather, it will always appear under the form of the “good.” Because “Satan has fallen from the sky like lightning” (a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and the title of one of Girard’s books), the scapegoat mechanism must take on new forms—it must be a shape-shifter, indeed must never appear to be scapegoating, to be effective.³⁸ Likewise, the Antichrist will not come announcing himself—and neither will his collaborators. Like the political atheist Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel, the Christian political atheist must be able to see beneath appearances.

People who stand in the face of the mimetic process, even while immersed in the environment in which it is brewing, show us that there may indeed be an anti-mimetic option.³⁹ Von Hildebrand, who at one point became Hitler’s number-one intellectual enemy, is an example. While living in the midst of a culture that was swiftly (and mimetically) being seduced by Hitler, he had the courage to resist and speak out at great personal risk to himself and his family. But first he was able to see past the appearances, underneath the mimetic machinations, and grasp the essence of Nazism.

While Girard most often used the term “anti-mimetic” in a disparaging way—to point out the naive postmodern response to mimesis, in which “everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch”⁴⁰—he did refer to anti-mimetic acts, such as forgiveness and mercy. These acts can transcend the logic of destructive mimesis. They have the power to stop and even reverse destructive mimetic processes.

Christ modeled one of these acts in his reversal of the stoning of the adulterous woman.⁴¹ The idea of an anti-mimetic act makes sense only if we rescue it from the horizontal plane of action—from internal mediation—and think of a genuine anti-mimetic act as a free response to a vertical dimension where there is an external mediator of a higher order. The horizontal plane could be thought of as “centripetal,” always turning back on itself and always eventually destructive. The vertical plane is the place where true transcendence may be found—not the false, deviated transcendence that Girard often refers to the scapegoat mechanism as effecting.⁴²

Christianity claims there is indeed a transcendent dimension that extends to us the possibility of being lifted out of mimetic slavery and into the higher logic of charity.⁴³ The Christian idea of agency is deeply bound up with the idea of cooperation: a non-rivalrous cooperation with grace, the opening and response of the will to a receptive, interdependent state of being.⁴⁴ Agency is paradoxically tied to the ability to receive that which is good; it is not merely the ability to give or to do. Real freedom, in other words, requires communion.⁴⁵ The truly anti-mimetic act requires freedom from the mimetic process; mere contrarianism does not. The anti-mimetic act is at once a rejection of the worldly mimesis exemplified by politics and the simultaneous acceptance of heavenly mimesis exemplified by the self-sacrificing love of Christ.

Part III: From Judas to Peter:
Conversion and Innovation

We now return to Girard’s early treatment of Judas to see if we can find some additional insight into the possibility of conversion. He writes:

The jealousy of Judas is ultimately at one with the political attitude of Pilate and the naïve snobbery of Peter, who betrays his master because he is ashamed of his provincial accent in the court of the High Priest. On the surface, motives appear to be individual, and conduct appears to fall into different patterns. But everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis, which works its power on everyone without exception.⁴⁶

It is typical of the early Girard for him to say that “everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis” (emphasis mine). Is he saying that people willingly succumb to the seductive power of mimesis, or something else?

Girard does admit that there is a crucial difference between Judas and Peter: “The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas’s inability to come back to Jesus.”⁴⁷ He does not explain the source of this inability, though. Was it demonic possession?

What led to one man’s conversion and another’s despair?

I am proposing here that Judas and Peter had different progressions in their relationship to politics, and thus to Christ. They had different “Girardian Moments” because each man had a different disposition after his betrayal. And this is not an insignificant detail.

By the time the critical moment of potential conversion was available to each, one seemed unable to respond to the grace of conversion, while the other does respond. It is not so much that one had agency and the other did not, but rather that both made a decisive choice at a certain point, a choice which determined how they would relate to the whole of reality. One man (Peter) was open to the grace of conversion. The other refused to cooperate.

But perhaps the respective abilities of each man to respond were affected by the prior political choices they had made, which entailed metaphysical commitments to the whole of reality. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty of black-pilled political atheists in Washington.

Mimesis cannot be fully understood in a snapshot, like a balance sheet, but as a process—especially when that process involves conversion, the process of true metanoia in which a person reverses course. The darkly mimetic forces can have a greater or lesser pull on us depending on the state we’re in when we encounter them, but the process is never too late so long as we’re still alive. The Good Thief on the cross next to Christ is evidence of that.

Peter shows the difference between Judas’s betrayal and his own when he gives his threefold profession of love in the post-Resurrection account of the risen Christ, standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Christ has cooked a fish breakfast for a group of the apostles before taking Peter aside for questioning. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter, three times, to which Peter responds with an affirmative “yes, Lord.”⁴⁸ Peter made a choice. But even prior to this encounter on the shore, Peter had already made a choice.

A death had to occur in Peter to allow him to make this profession of love in the first place, which Judas was incapable of doing. Both men died, but only one man changed.

Girard expresses this difference in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in the concluding chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, in which he distinguishes between the antithetical deaths of two major characters: “one death which is an extinction of the spirit and one death which is spirit; Stavrogin’s death is only death, Stepan’s death is life.”⁴⁹ Judas’s death is only death; Peter’s death is life.⁵⁰

Part IV: Resurrection
from the Field

In his threefold acclamation of love, Peter acknowledged his guilt and trusted in the one he knew would forgive him. Judas’s despair, on the other hand, saw no reversal. He remained one of the two nihilistic varieties of political atheist to the end. He rejected the lies of the world, but there was no corresponding acceptance on the other side of that rejection. At the very moment when he may have been closest to conversion, he closed himself off to it.

The movement from political belief to political atheism to belief in a transcendent order depends, in large part, on a single primordial belief: belief in one’s own agency, or belief that there is a point at which mimesis may be withstood and even subverted. If this spiritual freedom is denied, a central promise of Christianity must also be denied.

We should look for this freedom even in the Passion narrative. If we do not, we ascribe excessive power to Satan, and to the scapegoat mechanism—a power they do not possess. I do not mean to say the power isn’t real. Jesus’s statements about Satan as a “ruler of this world” demonstrate even a relativized sense of power. (If it’s not real power, then what has Jesus destroyed?) Death has a power—it is the ultimate weapon of the kingdom of Satan. Power is the expression of agency. But it is spiritual agency, freedom in relationship to God, that breaks the mimetic stronghold and power over this world.

If we naively accept the premise of Satan’s power, or if we believe in the absolute inevitability of mimetic violence (as opposed to its relative inevitability), we miss the central point of the Christian revelation: that the best Satan can do is ape God under false appearances.⁵¹

It is true that the political forces that led to Christ’s death have been revealed to be contagious, mimetic violence—a revelation that posits Judas as one traitor among many. But one’s personal disposition in the face of mimesis matters. In the murder of Christ, all are guilty—but the wide variety of individual responses within that universal “all” refutes fatalistic misreadings and reaffirms the role of freedom within the events of the Passion.

This brings us to a central problem: how, then, are we to live in a society of potential Judases?

In nearly everyone’s view, Judas is dangerous—he’s a threat. But he is more than that. He is an agent, not merely a pawn. And unless this false understanding is corrected, we should expect to see more attempts to snuff out agency—and with it, the possibility of conversion.

Near the end of his life, Girard stated at a conference that “Politics can no longer save us.” Politics no longer possesses the sacred power that it once did. It cannot magically produce cathartic social solutions as it once did. And so man must resist the temptation to turn everything into a political matter. Doing so results in various forms of political atheism, often resulting in nihilism, which plagued Judas, and which continue to plague people who fail to grasp the transcendent dimension, or collapse it into the immanent.

The French mystic Charles Péguy lamented that “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”⁵² Every movement begins as a spiritual or mystical force and is subsequently incarnated in concrete action. Péguy continued with a warning: “The interest, the question, the essential is that in each order, in each system, the mysticism not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth.”⁵³

Public life and politics become sterile without mysticism. I believe the Christian political atheist must become, and must remain, a mystic. It’s the remaining, as we have seen in the case of Judas, that is the hard part.

In some cases, the believer must have the “salt water of doubt,” of nihilism, washed into his mouth before he comes to the realization that nihilism is not enough.⁵⁴ But that nihilism must lead to a greater belief.

Hope is the answer to the worst accusations that can be made about a man because it allows him to know that his future will be different than his past or his present. The example of Peter shows that remaining a mystic does not mean that one will never descend into paltry politics or never participate in mimetic violence. No, remaining a mystic means maintaining a commitment to the continual conversion through which a man is able to be a mystic even after he realizes that he is Judas.

Notes

1. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 138. ↩

2. “Cancel Culture,” while I dislike the term, may be the most obvious example. ↩

3. See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2011). ↩

4. It’s also instructive to look at the use of theological words in technology. See Antonio Spadaro, SJ, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet, trans. Maria Way (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). ↩

5. See Luke Burgis, “The Three City Problem of Modern Life,” Wired, August 2022. ↩

6. The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey raised this point in a 2024 conversation at an Oslo Freedom Forum interview. He stated: “I think the free-speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. And we feel it right now because we are being programmed.” ↩

7. The Apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy says that Satan possessed Judas even from his birth. Cf. Montague Rhodes James, ed. & trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 80–83. ↩

8. There is a sense of inevitability about any mimetic process that has been put into motion and accelerates past a certain point. The ninth and tenth stones thrown in a ritual stoning are one example. We can rightfully ask, as some have, whether Christ’s prevention (and mimetic reversal) of the stoning of the adulterous woman was something natural—did he merely say the right words to redirect the violent energy of the crowds?—or supernatural. It is fair to ask whether Christ worked a miracle, and whether it was thus grace that broke in and changed the trajectory of normal human affairs. Christ’s intervention in the stoning of the adulterous woman is not classically considered one of his “signs” or “miracles.” ↩

9. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 247. ↩

10. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively about free will, the latter in his refutation of Manichaeism and in his writings against Pelagius. The early Jesuits were challenged in their teaching on free will by the Jansenists, who denied that a human’s free response to grace was required. Likewise the so-called De Auxiliis controversy of the late sixteenth century saw a fierce debate between Jesuits and Dominicans on the subject. Eventually Jansenism was condemned, but both Jesuits, who followed Luis de Molina in emphasizing divine-human synergy, and Dominicans, who followed Domingo Bañez in emphasizing divine providence, received papal approbation. ↩

11. The claims can relate to a specific ruler or political candidate, or to the political order itself. ↩

12. René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). ↩

13. The term “Black Pilled” seems to have originated in the “incel” community, a mostly online group of men who consider themselves unattractive to women and unable to change their position or their fate. I use it here in a more general way to refer to the disillusioned state of a person who loses any belief in their own agency and believes that they are stuck inside of a system they can’t change. ↩

14. For an excellent treatment on Machiavelli in dialogue with Dante, see James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943). ↩

15. Published in 1830, this novel ostensibly treats the issue of monarchism versus liberalism during the Bourbon Restoration following the French Revolution. ↩

16. Girard, Deceit, 132. ↩

17. See John 12:4–6. ↩

18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994). ↩

19. Girard uses “internal mediation” in contrast to “external mediation.” An internal mediator of desire is within the subject’s world; an external mediator is outside of the subject’s immediate world. ↩

20. “Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and dwell there; and the final plight of that man is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45). ↩

21. The movement doesn’t necessarily flow in the same order for everyone. ↩

22. Psalm 2:2, 4. ↩

23. “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us…” 1 Samuel 8. Another text that is relevant here is Augustine of Hippo’s City of God. ↩

24. Scripture seems to indicate the possibility of multiple Antichrists (e.g., 1 John 2:18), not just one as is held in the popular imagination, including structures that could be Antichristic. ↩

25. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John 3:30. ↩

26. Luke 22:62. ↩

27. The person of Franz Jägerstätter comes to mind as a real-life example: he was a lone Austrian peasant who refused to take the soldiers’ oath of allegiance to Hitler, ultimately being executed for insubordination. The recent film A Hidden Life (2019) dramatizes his story. ↩

28. From the classical point of view, drug addiction would be classed as a habitus (hexis), that is, a mode of existence, built up over repeated stimulus and action, that one “has” or “bears” like clothing. Once adopted, a habitus can be changed, but it is quite difficult, requiring more than mental resolve and willpower. See Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Westmont: IVP Academic, 2011). ↩

29. “The Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent cooperate with God…” See Michael Maher, “Free Will,” in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), catholic.com/encyclopedia/free-will. ↩

30. It is that the definitive choice—the sin against the Holy Spirit—has finally happened. Macbeth’s dream of being in the middle of a river is a powerful image: it is just as easy to go forward as it is to go back. This is what the Germans call “Grundentscheidung”: the fundamental choice out of which all other actions lie. ↩

31. Whether the power to resist those demonic forces, or to resist evil, is natural or supernatural is beyond the scope of this paper. ↩

32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (United States: United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), paragraph 395. ↩

33. Demons are classically conceived as immaterial intelligences that primarily work in the realm of thought. A recent Athonite monk compared these thoughts to airplanes circling over an airport: we must take care when considering which planes we will allow to land. ↩

34. Marshall McLuhan, too, was accused of technological determinism for his theory that the “medium is the message,” but this understanding of his work neglects the strong role that agency still played in his understanding of human society. ↩

35. Alan Jacobs, “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2022, thenewatlantis.com. ↩

36. Girard refers to this transformation in his work I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), in the chapter “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.” ↩

37. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “The Danger of Quietism,” in My Battle Against Hitler, trans. & ed. John Henry Crosby and John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 290. March 10, 1935. ↩

38. Luke 10:18, and the inspiration behind one of Girard’s greatest works, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. ↩

39. By anti-mimetic, I don’t mean free from mimesis. As I explain in my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), I am referring to the possibility of responding to the call of deviated transcendence with real transcendence. ↩

40. Girard, Deceit, 100. ↩

41. John 8:3–11. ↩

42. Girard, Deceit, 61. “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.” ↩

43. In Christian terms, agape. ↩

44. See Augustine’s discussion of true sacrifice in Book 10 of the City of God. ↩

45. Cf. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio 31 (Fall 2004): 685–687, communio-icr.com. ↩

46. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

47. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

48. John 21:15. Christ uses the Greek word agape for “love” in his questioning. ↩

49. Girard, Deceit, 291. ↩

50. “Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies it cannot bear much fruit, but if it dies, it bears fruit a hundredfold.” (John 12:24). ↩

51. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of the relative inevitability of mimetic violence. The Christian Gospel, however, in cooperation and an openness to grace, reveals the power of mimetic violence as relative in the grand scheme, and fundamentally destroyed in the end. The Resurrection both reveals and demonstrates this. ↩

52. “Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.” ↩

53. Cited in Robert Royal, “Everything Begins in Mysticism,” The Catholic Thing, January 23, 2023, thecatholicthing.org. ↩

54. A phrase used by Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010). ↩

Friends:

When I heard the words of Pontius Pilate on Good Friday—”What is truth?”—I couldn’t help but thinking that, while his question remains as important as ever—an equally important and interconnected question is: “What is life?” They help answer one another.

They seem almost so basic as to be not worth tackling—so fundamental that they are like hyperproblems which, because they surround us—and because we live them every second— sometimes seem impossible, overwhelming, to confront. So we try not to think too hard about them. That’s a mistake.

I invite you to dive in deeply with me this summer. The ZOË Conference, which I’m hosting with my colleagues at The Cluny Institute this summer in Napa, CA (July 26-28), will dive deeper into the question of life than any other gathering this year. A fitting year, it seems—the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—to ask, very simply, what kind of life is possible here?

I am offering a special 25% discount to friends and family—namely, readers of this Substack, along with a free signed copy of my upcoming book The One and the Ninety-Nine. Use the discount code “luke1and99” at checkout for either ticket type to activate the discount.

This offer expires May 26, or whenever we’re sold out—whichever comes first.

Reserve Your Spot

I will personally give you the book and sign it for you when I see you in Napa. (If you’ve already bought a ticket and subscribe to this Substack, don’t worry—I will do that for you too!)

A new addition to the program: to celebrate the launch of the new book on Girard, Be Not Conformed—which emerged from a previous version of this conference—I’ll be hosting a conversation on René Girard in the age of AI with several special guests. Many more updates below.

The Setting

We chose The Meritage because it functions less like a hotel than a retreat. It sits among the Napa vineyards — quiet, walkable, terraces and gardens that make you slow down without trying. Sessions will move between indoor rooms and outdoor spaces. One evening is held in the resort’s wine cave beneath the hillside. Mornings can begin with movement on the grounds or silent meditation in the cave.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to step out of the news cycle and into a slower frame for a few days — among people who are reading, building, and praying seriously — this is it.

Who’s Coming

All ticket holders—both General and VIP—will gain access to a mobile app that contains the full line-up, schedule, and networking features so you can connect with other attendees and speakers, set-up meetings, arrange tours of local wineries with fellow guests, or introduce yourself to the group. Access will be available starting May 26.

Reserve Your Spot

The lineup so far:

• Bryan Johnson — founder of Project Blueprint and Kernel; the man asking whether his is the first generation that won’t die.

• Tao Lin — novelist (Leave Society, Trip), one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction.

• Freya India — author of the book GIRLS® and a popular Substack of the same name.

• Dana Gioia — former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and former California Poet Laureate. He’ll be reading by the fire on the closing evening.

• Catherine Pakaluk — economist and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, and professor at The Catholic University of America, where she is the Executive Director of The James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology.

• Ruxandra Teslo — Cambridge-trained genomicist leading the Clinical Trial Abundance initiative.

• Ben Klutsey — Executive Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason.

• Jordan Castro — novelist (Muscle Man, The Novelist) and deputy director of The Cluny Institute.

• Victoria Trumbull — Oxford philosopher; her first book, On the Memory of the Soul, comes out from Bloomsbury this October.

• Rebecca Lowe — philosopher of freedom; Senior Research Fellow at Mercatus.

• Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB — Benedictine monk and Oxford-trained theologian; teaches biomedical ethics at St. John’s Seminary (and was my teacher there years ago)

• Jeff Frank — philosopher of education at St. Lawrence; will lead the closing Foundations of Agency workshop.

Joining them on panels and in conversation: Shadi Hamid, Clay Routledge, Toby Kurth, Thomas Demonchaux, Fr. Mark Roosien, and Fr. Harrison Ayre. A few names and special guests are still to be announced.

I’m glad to have several of my colleagues from CUA joining me, including Catherine Pakaluk, and helping to make this event possible on the opposite coast from our homes.

A few moments to anticipate

• The opening-night screening of Dreyer’s Ordet — his luminous meditation on faith, doubt, and the miraculous.

• A panel asking whether reproduction alone is enough: Catherine Pakaluk, Shadi Hamid, Ruxandra Teslo, and Clay Routledge in conversation.

• A breakout I’ll be leading with Toby Kurth, Rebecca Lowe, and one special guest— Machines, Mimesis, and the Future of Wanting — on desire and agency in the age of AI through the thought of René Girard.

• A Hamilton Society debate on technology and human suffering. Full room, no holds barred.

• Closing drinks with Dana Gioia reading poetry around a fire.

• For VIPs, a dinner in the estate wine cave and breakfast on the vineyard terrace.

Tickets

We’re keeping this small and intentional — closer to a salon than a typical conference.

• General Admission — $795 before discount (limited-time introductory price). Full access to all sessions, the welcome reception, the conference app, and post-event recordings.

• Founder/VIP — $1,995 before discount, limited in number (only a handful left). Everything in GA plus reserved priority seating, the wine cave dinner, vineyard breakfast, and a follow-up salon with speakers and Cluny leadership after the event.

As a reader of this newsletter, you will receive 25% off with code “luke1and99”

Reserve your spot →

Reserve Your Spot

If three days in the Napa hills, with this group of people, sounds like the kind of break you’ve been looking for — I hope you’ll come.

Please write our Events team at admin@cluny.org if we can answer any questions or be of service in any way.

More soon—and thank you, as always, for reading.
Luke

P.S. There’s still one sponsorship slot left at the $10,000 level. You have my assurance that this will be well worth the while of any organization that would like to support ZOË as a partner—not just this summer, but beyond. Please email farren@cluny.org to request a sponsorship package if you’re interested. If that particular level or option doesn’t work for you, we would love to talk about something that does.

P.P.S. I just recorded the audiobook for The One and the Ninety-Nine. It was crazy. The audiobook, like the hardcover, is out June 16—and available for pre-order now.

An excerpt from —her foreword to the new book, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis, published earlier this month by CUA Press. The edited volume contains 16 original essays on Girard’s work.

Get the Book

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Before he became an acknowledged Silicon Valley guru, before he became the fourth wise man in a Nativity crèche, René Girard lived quietly and inconspicuously on a far-flung corner of campus, on the aptly named Frenchman’s Road. I was fortunate to know René before he was a legend, before he was featured in The New York Review of Books, before he was the subject of a documentary film called Things Hidden, before everybody who was anybody knew him, had read him, or had at least read about him and could quote him or pretend to quote him. My personal encounter with him would prove to be one of the more fortunate moments of my life.

How the Girard movement came together is an interesting story, too, the tale of how a small group drawn from the Stanford community prodded the beginnings of a worldwide movement that would eventually fan out from a circle of academics to the world at large.1 A good contagion, if ever there was one.

René Girard never craved the spotlight, although the spotlight found him more than half a century after his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was published in 1961. And the light has only become stronger and brighter since his death in 2015. For me, my interest in his ideas was sparked by a one-on-one encounter before I knew much about him.

At that time, articles and interviews with René in the mainstream anglophone press were virtually nonexistent, and René was pretty much an inconnu in the land he had made a home. I combed through interviews and profiles from Le Monde and Le Figaro, but my French was rusty for the task. I cut my teeth on Achever Clausewitz—the title in English was still being wrestled out and the English proofsheets were under review when I first visited his home on French-man’s Road. The winning title: Battling to the End. Music and the mass brought us together.

Decades earlier, I had studied Dante with Stanford Professor John Freccero, a leading Dante scholar, and a close friend of the Girards. That connection led me to the Stanford music professor, William Mahrt; the medieval music in Dante was of interest to both men. A brilliant spiritual, musical, and literary nexus—they’re rarer than we think. The bonus: I eventually met René Girard for the first time, too. He was in a back pew every Sunday at St. Thomas Aquinas Church.

The “Carpenter Gothic” church, more than a century old, was familiar to me; I had appreciated Bill Mahrt’s long and tenacious work directing a Gregorian and polyphonic schola, a liturgical cycle of early music that has continued without break every Sunday and feast day for more than half a century. It was not a political statement in a culture war: it was an aesthetic and spiritual stance, with centuries of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Josquin des Prez, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Orlando di Lasso to back it up, and an uninterrupted chain of Gregorian chant going back to the fourth century.

I would soon learn that René and I were of the same party in liturgy and books. A world of harmony, order, beauty, and discipline. That was his life, but his work wrestled with the worst of what humanity had to offer: violence, scapegoating, and eventually the prospects of nuclear war.

These polyphonic composers were the basis for our first bond, along with the enduring chant of centuries. “When I first attended,” René wrote to me way back in 2002, “I assumed that the Catholic Church and the University actively supported this unique contribution to the spiritual and cultural life of the community. The truth is that ever since 1963, Professor Mahrt has been very much on his own in this enormously time-, talent- and energy-consuming enterprise.”2

That was my first brief, epistolary connection with René. I was writing about early music and chant and had contacted him for comment.3 It was the first note of an unexpected and unequal friendship. He made a debut in one of my books in 2006.4

At Stanford in 2007, we finally met face-to-face after circling around each other for years. I was invited to attend the meetings of a small Girardian group on the edge of the Stanford campus. I don’t recall how I came to be invited or how this particular eclectic group came together. Elective affinities, perhaps. Molecules pulling people together chemically: like to like.

The group had formed sometime in the 1990s. It convened every two weeks at the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, a gray-and-white building on tree-lined Salvatierra, off Campus Drive behind the law school. Though there were at least twenty names (at one point, fifty) on the email list for the Genesis reading group (more often called “the Colloquium”)—less than dozen or so would be able to get away from workday commitments for the gatherings on the Stanford campus, settling into the well-worn couches and armchairs upholstered in faded browns and grays.

The discussions were an adventure. In March 2008, René shared his interpretation of the biblical Joseph story. It would have been the first time I heard his unusual take on the patriarch, culminating in René’s surprising claim that the account is history’s first recorded instance of true forgiveness. I haven’t been able to prove him wrong.

The group discussed Heraclitus, Pope Benedict’s controversial Regensburg lecture, and John Henry Newman’s idea of the university. Ken Quandt presented a mimetic theory of Plato. A Paris graduate student in political science visited to explore how to bring mimetic theory to his academic work.

Meanwhile, I was quickly put to work. At the April 2008 Imitatio conference, I conducted video interviews with Italian scholar Giuseppe Fornari, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and others, as well as René himself. Another discussion considered the Girardian aspects of The Wizard of Oz, based on the deceit of desire. There was a strangeness in being swept up by all of this: I was working crazily to finish journalism commitments at night, and carrying out my Stanford humanities work by day, with a deepening connection with René Girard on the side.

Years earlier, someone told the story of Stanford Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in Berlin with friends, who was confronted and asked why he had become a “Girardian.” The answer, according to the story: “Because it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis.” He had a point.

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a brilliant scholar and theologian, dominated the conversations, sometimes to the exclusion of everyone else; a big bold man with a pronounced South African accent, a wise and witty (and sometimes abrasive) one-man show. However, when René softly ventured a few comments, Bob deferred quickly: the courtesy of long friendship. Bob’s sidekick, a former Stanford football player named Wayne Larocque, often attended, as did the Voegelin scholar and Hoover Fellow Paul Caringella, theologian Gil Bailie, Plato scholar Ken Quandt, and Byron Bland, a consultant at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and fellow at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Institute. I would meet more members of the group in the weeks to come.

René also attended regularly—the star, a supporting player, and audience all at once. By then he was in his mid-80s and his energy was already ebbing, eight years before his death. But he was still an inescapable presence, still the reason that we were there. I observed his self-effacement, his modesty—he declined to dominate, even when he could have, even when we wanted him to be the boss. Finally, there was an intense young man of about forty with penetrating, pale blue eyes. He sat on the floor, legs akimbo, wearing running shoes before running shoes were a thing. That, someone whispered to me, is Peter Thiel. So it isn’t too much of a reach to say I studied René Girard with Peter Thiel, though I don’t recall ever exchanging so much as a greeting with the legendary entrepreneur in all my visits to the Gould Center.

Thiel’s interest in René’s thought was not about making money but rather understanding himself and his motives and assessing the times—that would be true of just about everyone who seriously engages with Girard’s ideas. As a young man in a New York law firm, Thiel remembers all the lawyers competing for the same goals. They measured themselves by their progress within their peer group, not any transcendent objective.

Get the Book

Later, Thiel would focus on global warming and fossil fuels, apocalypse, immortality, and the future of democracy. His thinking followed the profoundly interdisciplinary directions and patterns modeled by René himself, though his preoccupations were of an entirely different hue. René’s theories weren’t fashionable and, in some cases, could be a career-killer. But not for Thiel.

Bologna-based anthropologist Mark Anspach, then an undergraduate at Harvard, wasn’t so fortunate. René Girard had warned him that mimetic theory was a risky career choice. One advisor told him that citing Girard in his senior thesis was “batty.” Anspach recalled the event ruefully: “It wasn’t a criticism of what I was doing; it was criticism of Girard. He said this guy’s ideas are dotty. That word stuck in my mind—you know, ‘dotty.’ It was dotty.” He complained to Harvard about the unfairness, arguing that once the faculty had approved the subject of his thesis, it was out of bounds to criticize him for writing about it. Rather they should critique his work on its merits. Such was Girard’s reception in academia. And for many years, the scholarly exile would continue. Girard’s theories are only beginning to find acceptance in academia, though his entire career was in American universities.

The point: I assumed back then I was entering a well-established circle of old-timers, long familiar with Girard’s work. That wasn’t the case—or at least, not entirely. I realized only much later that I was there at the beginning, not knowing it was a beginning. And everyone else was finding their way, too.

The Gould Center fostered a colloquium of Girardian novices at various stages of initiation. Everyone was learning and is still learning. The arc extends beyond our lifetimes, which puts a different scale on the notion of “beginning.” Almost all of us were new, or relatively new, to Girard’s thought—with the obvious exception of Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who met René in 1981. Though he was theoretically one among equals, his longstanding friendship with René and his clout at Stanford brought the colloquium into being. He was dean of the chapel at Stanford and also one of the cofounders of the Colloquium on Violence

Hamerton-Kelly usually offered an article or paper for the discussion at the Gould Center. Others did, too. I remember, in particular, English Professor Bernadette Waterman Ward of the University of Dallas presenting a paper on Adam Bede and mimetic angels in George Eliot’s novels.6 Women were still something of a novelty in the group then—so her appearance was cheering and so was the discussion around her paper. I recall an Imitatio workshop on neuroscience, a discussion of the Regensburg lecture, a visit from a PhD candidate in political science from Paris who was using mimetic theory in his research, and a large, splashy lunch at the tony Il Fornaio restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, with San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer as a guest of honor. That was Bob Hamerton-Kelly’s style and influence.

How was this conclave different from the other, more academic or corporate models of organization that were already coalescing around Girard? It was not a society, not an association, but rather a colloquium: that is, focused academic discussions with an in-depth consideration of René’s work. Professional societies also began to form, along with academic sessions where formal papers were given—but the growing Girardian movement hadn’t yet reached the worldwide audiences most in need of Girard’s message of reconciliation, forgiveness, and the utter abandonment of violence and retaliation. Girard was unequivocal and yet ambiguous: “The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough.”7 Time enough . . . for ourselves, for the world? Time enough to escape the apocalypse we’re preparing for ourselves? René left the possibilities open for good reason. Each one of us faces our own apocalypse, our own personal mortality. Perhaps we focus on big worldwide cataclysms to avoid coming to terms with it.

In those years, Imitatio was just beginning to sponsor research to pro-mulgate René’s concepts and legacy. Few of us anticipated that we would be recipients of its largesse. We were drawn to René’s work because it spoke to us, and to the world.

Elaborating and applying Girard’s concepts can’t be entirely a solo operation, a “head trip.” Hence organizations like the Colloquium on Violence & Religion. His concepts must be enacted in community, in concert with others. After all, it’s a social theory, not a self-help scheme, though all of us have found applications to our own lives. We are the experiments. We are the guinea pigs.

No one came to the Gould Center because it was the smart and up-to-date thing to do. Rather, like Peter Thiel and his running shoes—he wore them because it was the most convenient way to get to Salvatierra Street, not because he was trying to impress us with his savoir faire and nonchalance in a room of older academics. If it was cool, maybe it was because he seemed cool and unknown. Not a fashion statement, but his way of being true to himself and the world. He was onto something—and we sensed it was valid.

Mimetic independence creates a mimetic reaction from the people around us—but it is a good contagion. René was a model for many of us: we wanted to be like that guy; we wanted to understand what he understood. He had something to say that’s compelling. We were motivated by what, years later, Luke Burgis would call a “thick desire.” The thickest possible.

And that was the point: we were not just talking about breaking away from mimetic desire. We were demonstrating how to do it.

Inevitably, friction sparked among the players—people are prone to conflict, after all—but also a surprising joy and relief. It was the beginning of a growing movement. Nobody was in it for getting rich or getting tenure. Some lost social standing and prestige for taking up with an unconventional Frenchman, others dropped out of grad school. In Paris, Benoît Chantre lost his job as a publisher. Others switched their careers, or their college majors, or moved across the country or world. “You had a sense of a bunch of losers, but it was a lot of fun,” Trevor Merrill recalled. He compared it to one of those science fiction stories where people with no apparent affinities hear an unusual summons to gather, forming a disparate group of oddly assorted people with an all-encompassing mission.

In short, the reasons for being there were not mimetic. We were not driven by what the cool kids were doing. To the contrary, you had to abandon the cool kids to get in the space where you could understand what René was driving

No one was making a buck off this. There were no books pouring out of publishing houses, no seminars, no conferences. No one was interpreting Girard’s work because we were still learning his work. No one was getting tenure or doctorates or prizes because of mimetic theory. Podcasts and talking-head Zoom videos did not exist. Girard wasn’t yet in a New York Times crossword puzzle or mentioned on White Lotus—that was in a future he didn’t live to see. What he offered instead was the truth of humanity’s condition, the reason for our inhumanity, and a way out of madness.

The measure of success happens within the heart of each person. The theory has succeeded when we halt before an envious or snide remark, when we decline to join in a vindictive and personal attack on a rival, or when we resist the temptation to pour invective on a figure only seen on social media.

Here’s the kicker: I can’t remember a single word anyone said at any of those hours and hours of meetings decades ago.

What was happening in the room was more important than what was being said inside it. Words disappear with time, but the lessons linger. Consider: one of the wisest men in the world sat to the side, silent and humble. One of the richest men in the world sat on the floor.

And Robert Hamerton-Kelly—I remember his soliloquies as he talked wisely, wittily, not even stopping to inhale. Talking so long that people were no longer listening but merely waiting. And just when you were sure he couldn’t be more pompous if he tried . . ., he paused. His face crumpled in embarrassment as he began merrily laughing at himself, in front of the whole group. He was onto Bob Hamerton-Kelly. The unexpected self-recognition and disconcerting humility were worth the price of admission. That’s what I remember. Not the words, but the laugh. It taught me more than a bucketload of words.

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The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.

The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.

So much of this discourse, though, remains at the level of ideas and taste, and not at the level where it is most insidious: our moral convictions, our conscience.

I sat down with Maddy Kearns, a journalist for the , last week for a couple of drinks and a chat about my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. (You can read the full interview here, if you’re interested). We covered a lot of ground over the course of two hours, but the one word that came up the most in our conversation—and to which I keep coming back again and again—is the word conscience.

While Pope Leo XIV doesn’t explicitly use the word in his tweet from this past week, he does capture far more eloquently and with more spiritual depth and authority than I could the cultural diagnosis that has been keeping me awake at night and driven the work I’ve been doing on the book for the past two years.

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How do we encounter truth that transcends the crowd? Or does our ‘truth’ always happen to be the truth of the crowd that we are most closely aligned with at any given time? I think all of us hope not—but we look at the world, and we see a ‘false conscience’, or what is commonly a hive conscience, prompting people to draw moral conclusions that always just happen to line up perfectly with the decisions they’ve already made. And that seems especially thin when it comes to political decisions and loyalties, like the Vice President’s suggestion that the Pope “be careful” when talking about matters of theology after it became apparent that there was friction between the administration and the Pope’s recent statements regarding war, care for immigrants, and general matters of morality. The Pope’s office involves teaching—but not merely in the way that our middle school teachers taught us math. His office involves forming the conscience, our sense of what is right and wrong.

The hive conscience doesn’t start with 'is this true?’ or ‘what must I do?’. It starts with something base: ‘which team will my words and actions put me on?’ How will my stance on this issue align me with certain groups or interests? And that primary reference to groups, interests, power, and community is precisely where things can begin to go off the rails.

As far as I know, the Pope is not seeking to enter or win any future elections. His relationship to the truth has not been distorted by power. His words are calling many people back to a primordial sense that many have lost, partly due to the media and technology cocktail that has scrambled both intuitions and even our very senses.

Conscience is emphatically not the voice of subjective conviction—the mere feeling that one is in the right. That reductive modern view is precisely what allows people to commit grave evils with perfectly "clear consciences," mistaking the comfort of their own certainty for a genuine moral summons. The older and deeper sense of conscience is rooted in what the tradition calls anamnesis: a primordial memory of the good, inscribed into our nature, which resonates when it encounters truth. Conscience in this sense is not something we construct out of our preferences and feelings; it is something we uncover, and it stands in judgment over us precisely because it points to a truth that exceeds us. The everyday act of moral judgment—what the tradition calls conscientia—is only as trustworthy as the formation of the anamnesis beneath it.1

The connection between memory and conscience has been one of the great revelations of the past two years for me. In the interludes between the chapters of The One and the Ninety-Nine, I tell part of the story of my relationship with my dad, who was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's disease as I was beginning the book. Through his illness, and through my care for him, I found myself called back to a deeper conscience, something almost primordial within me. This surprised me. My father did not appear in the original proposal I sent to St. Martin's Press, but he emerged in the writing of the first chapter and never left. His memory, which is bound up with mine, carried moral consequences I did not yet understand when I began writing.

The conscience is how we safeguard ourselves from the tyranny of our own age, or the corruption of the communities we inhabit. John Henry Newman grasped this when he raised his famous toast "to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards"—not as a declaration of private judgment against authority, but as a confession that conscience is binding precisely because it is the voice of a truth higher than the self, a truth to which even the Pope must answer. Such a conscience is never formed in isolation. It is awakened, tutored, and corrected within a living tradition—scripture, liturgy, the witness of the saints, the slow pedagogy of a community that hands down what it has received. But even communities can become corrupted, at which point their fate rests on the extraordinary witness of those who are still able to sense and respond to a truth which transcends the populism of its members.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: people telling others that they have a ‘moral responsibility’ to do something, as if one person’s moral imagination could substitute for another’s conscience.

Last week I tweeted that I had received an invitation from the AI company Anthropic to participate in a couple of days of working sessions at their San Francisco headquarters with other Christian leaders to help talk about their model Claude’s new constitution.

There were various red flags in my initial communication. Anthropic had raised over $30 billion the previous month, but the invitation reached me in the register of a non-profit or church appealing to volunteers' "time, treasure, and talent" for a kind of spiritual mission. The tone was too odd for me. I decided to sit it out, since something didn’t sit right with me about it. (Not to mention it would’ve required a huge sacrifice for my family, with me being away from my newborn and her sister for several days while I was technically on paternity leave—something the company thought was a sacrifice I should gladly make in order to help them.)

When I shared my decision publicly, many understood—but I was still shocked at the number of people, mostly fellow Christians, who implied or even said explicitly that I had a moral responsibility to show up when invited to things like that. Says who? I have a moral responsibility for many things, but I am confident that Anthropic’s invitation is not one of them. This was a prime example of the “hive conscience” at work: a notion of the conscience that is not personal, but collective: “because we are X, we must do Y.” In this case, X is Christian and Y is “be at the table”.

The conscience is the faculty by which we learn to say “I” with moral conviction. It is a step deeper than the comfort of “we believe” statements—it is how we fully own responsibility for what we think and believe, even if others do too: without the coercion and conformity that they want or expect from us. Sometimes, the people doing the coercing are the ones closest to you: your own family, friends, party, colleagues. Usually, they won’t be so explicit about it. The coercion will come in the form of a thousand nudges in the back with the thumb or forefinger, and those who aren’t paying attention may not even notice.

You will notice that the Apostles and Nicene creeds do not begin “We believe”, but “I believe”. And I’d like to suggest that getting to a genuine “I” is the work of a lifetime, but it’s the work that each of us must do—because that same tension plays out in nearly every aspect of our lives, in which we are asked to sacrifice our real conscience to the hive one.

And when you do exercise it, it may not be respected. And that’s okay—do it anyway.

The only tables you are really welcome at are the ones where you can get up and leave freely, and where the invitation doesn't come as an offer we can't refuse.

We can’t learn to respect the freedom of others until we first learn to respect our own: a freedom oriented toward truth over tribe, and one which finds its fulfillment in genuine communion with others who have learned the cost of freedom.

I am not going to suggest that loneliness is a necessary consequence of integrity and truth in today's world, but I will say this—if you feel lonely, do not assume that something is wrong with you; in fact, your desire for a form of real communion that you have not yet been able to achieve may be the very fire that you are called to keep kindled.

If you enjoyed this essay, would you pre-order your copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine today?

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In recent years, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the use of the word energy to describe how people feel. This person had good energy about them. The event had amazing energy. People join a movement because it seems to have energy. All of those are relatively straight-forward. I love live music, and that’s largely because I love the energy in the crowd—an energy that doesn’t come through my home speakers. But one area where I have heard the word over and over, to the extent that it has caught my attention, is that ideas have energy.

Oddly, though, the ideas that seem to have the most energy are the ones that seem most dangerous. Not Christian Orthodoxy, but heterodoxy—or at least if not obviously heterodox, ideas pushing the boundaries, operating slightly outside of the Overton Window (witness the energy surrounding Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, for instance). Notice the energy around Nick Fuentes and what used to be fringe political movements. Energy is now in edginess. Or the en…

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Almost two and a half years after the NOVITĀTE conference in D.C. (which celebrated René Girard’s 100th birthday), the book that I promised would emerge from that gathering is finally about to be published. There is much more on the book below—including a detailed table of contents of the 17 original essays that make it up, as well as a bonus preview of the Introduction.

I’m also excited to announce that we are going to be bringing back the spirit of NOVITĀTE with a special session dedicated to Girard and A.I. at the upcoming Zoe conference in Napa this summer, where you can expect to see a lot of the same faces from the 2023 conference—and a lot of new ones.

But before I get to the book: For the next 7 days, the second cohort of the Foundations of Agency workshop is open this spring at a cost of $495.

This is not simply a course that takes you on a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and theological foundations of the concept of agency—it will put you in a small cohort of 4-5 …

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It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching and writing the most important and personal thing that I have ever published: THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, out from St. Martin’s Press on June 16, 2026.

For those who know me or have followed my work, please consider stopping now to click this link and pre-order. For the rest: let me tell you why I believe this book is worth the investment—and why I think it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Some Backstory

In 2021, when my mother unexpectedly died, I became the primary caregiver for my father, who was battling advanced Alzheimer’s disease—only a few months after my book Wanting was published, and just weeks after I was newly married. That experience forced both …

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Friends,

First, some big personal news: the reason I haven’t been as active here lately as I was hoping is that our second daughter was born a little earlier than expected (shortly after Christmas), and nothing has brought me more joy than having two baby girls, one on each shoulder, grabbing each other’s faces and mine—but it’s also been a period of major adjustment and pure exhaustion.

Within 48 hours of my daughter being born, I received a round of last-minute edits on my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine (publishing contracts and schedules are unforgiving!)—so when I was up from 2-4 a.m. putting my toddler back to sleep, I was making edits on the manuscript before I went back to bed rather than writing here.

All that is to say: thank you for your patience with me. Life is rich, even when it’s exhausting—and probably especially when it’s exhausting.

I’ll have much more to say on the book here in the next few months. It’s the most important (and personal) …

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Last chance for discounted Cluny Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) tickets—15% off good through the end of year with coupon code ‘antimimetic’. Full-time position now open: Manager, Social Media and Community.

Moths evolved to navigate by celestial light. Artificial light hijacks that instinct—and they spiral. Technology introduced changes into the environment that they can’t adapt to fast enough.

While none of us like being compared to moths, it’s hard not to see our current predicament as somewhat similar. We’re not adapting fast enough—morally, spiritually, intellectually, physically—to the bright, artificial light that is Artificial Intelligence.

The Internet ushered in the Information Age, in which people quickly became exposed to an abundan…

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Before we get to this week’s essay, two important notes:

1) Tickets to the ZOE Conference in July—where Silicon Valley will come face to face with Athens and Jerusalem, and —are available at a discount, until the end of the year. Apply coupon code ‘antimimetic’ before Jan. 1 at checkout. You’ll be invited onto our conference app to get to know others, set-up meetings, and chat beginning in April.

2) I’m hiring a Director of Operations & Strategy for The Cluny Project in Washington, DC. It’s an in-person job only. We will pay up to $100k with generous benefits for an experienced candidate. Filling this position is my top priority. Applications can be found here. (Other open roles, including Director of Communications, can be found here, but our timeline is longer on filling them.)

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Dear Readers:

I was up until midnight last night (yes, on Thanksgiving) turning around copy-editing queries and fact-checks for my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. Some of the fact-checks were painful, like the time I remembered going back to my basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, on the N train, and feeling a certain way as it “rumbled over the Queensboro bridge” (“The N train doesn’t go over the Queensboro bridge,” my lifelong New Yorker fact-checker reminded me bluntly).

I’ve poured both my mind and my heart into this one, and I hope you enjoy it when it hits shelves next year: June 16, 2026. I’ll be publishing a lot more here related to its central themes in the coming months. Until then, some news:

I’m Hiring!

I’m hiring for several different positions. The one I am expediting, though, and the one with the broadest reach—because the position can be totally remote, and it’s part-time—is Content Strategist. It’s a position that requires: 1) being intimately familiar with …

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In August, I sat down with one of my favorite thinkers, the economist , in my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI. The last time Tyler had been to Grand Rapids was 1982—the year after I was born. So I was greatly amused to hear his commentary on how the city had changed since his last visit, while I was still in a bassinet.

We made our way to an intimate concert venue with outstanding acoustics, where a jazz band played for our gathering of about 100 people during our Cluny Encounter, which I like to describe as mash-ups between unlikely collaborators around a topic that is not too well-grooved, where we can carve fresh snow and challenge assumptions at the intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. The topic that we sat down to discuss on this day in August: The development of talent networks and the role of apprenticeship in a changing world.

Tyler and Daniel Gross wrote an excellent book on talent, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, which helped frame our discussion and has influenced the way I think about talent and conduct interviews. But I’m particularly interested in talent development for another reason: I see the Cluny Project as building a talent network of its own—a different kind of talent that will continue to emerge and become more important the further we get into the 21st century, as the cost of cognition trends toward zero.

Tyler and I talked Luca vs. LeBron (L.A. Lakers) talent dynamics, why certain Midwest towns once produced so much business talent, why Cowen thinks religious thinkers will be the most important thinkers of the coming decades, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy it!

Note: we had this conversation in a dark, jazz-club like setting with pretty terrible lighting. The Cluny team ended up having a lot of video and audio issues in post-production, which delayed our ability to publish this video for an embarrassingly long time. Please excuse the lack of quality in audio/video. Lessons were learned for when we do this in the future… You should still be able to fully watch/listen to the conversation with minimal distraction, though, as we put in a lot of work to get into a version that is serviceable these past couple of months. Thanks.

My best,
Luke

Three short N.B.’s before my new essay:

1) Next Summer’s Cluny Conference: Tickets for the ZOE Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) are available to subscribers of this newsletter at a 20% discount until Nov. 10. Please use code “antimimetic” at checkout. While speakers haven’t been announced yet, I can tell you that Girard’s name will surely be invoked (for those interested in the mimetic and anti-mimetic dimensions of the theme, abundant life…)

2) Hiring for a Full-Time Role: I’m hiring an apprentice—either part-time or full-time—in a marketing and operations role ASAP. It’s not for the tame, as you’ll be thrown quickly into the publishing industry and the media worlds and tasked with approaching everything differently (there are no good models!)… But the upside is practically infinite, and we’ll have a lot of fun building something important together. If interested, please apply here.

3) DC Halloween Event / SF Party: Cluny is hosting Dasha Nekrasova for a live event on …

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I’ve just finished my upcoming book, THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion (June 2026), submitted to St. Martin’s Press last week.

First: thank you for your patience this past year, as my work here slowed down so I could focus on the most important words I have ever written. I expect to be back in full force soon. Your support of my work here means more than you know.

I’ve never felt so vulnerable as I did in writing this book because it required me to tell parts of my own story I’ve never shared publicly before. Nor have I ever felt so convicted of the importance of sharing them, because I know they can help others make sense of this moment, and the liminal spaces in their own lives—when we are not who we once were, but not yet fully who we will become.

As the…

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“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” — Daniel 12:4

Dear Readers,

In July 2026, I’ll be hosting ZOË—a gathering in Napa, California—one I’m thrilled to finally announce.

Our moment can feel like it’s oriented toward death—suicides and overdoses, debt and cynicism, depression and anxiety, ugly aesthetics, endless discourse. Across politics, geographies, and ideologies, there’s a growing sense that life together is getting thinner.

ZOË, the theme of the gathering, is against death. In the New Testament Greek, zoē (ζωή) refers to abundant life—not mere survival (bios, or biological life), but a human being fully alive.

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ZOË will be a three-day gathering convening leaders from Athens (arts and philosophy), Jerusalem (faith and religion), and Silicon Valley (technology and venture) to ask the most basic—and urgent—questions:

• What is life?

• What does abundant life look and feel like now?

• Wh…

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