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 energy in tech: it is gravitating toward things that seem powerful and dangerous, like autonomous weapons systems and defense tech, and not necessarily to the more unsexy things like, say, a cure for Alzheimer’s. War is much more energizing to the young.

I don’t deny the notion that it has always been like this to some extent. History is filled with those who have pushed boundaries and sought the most energizing pathways forward. Nietzsche gave us all a philosophy and language to describe the impulse, and the world has never been quite the same. Once we stepped back and did the meta-analysis of attraction, then attraction itself became corrupted. We may begin to think that if we want something that seems pedestrian—I don’t know, like a family with children and a messy household—that we are somehow not wanting powerfully enough.

All of this has to do with the most fundamental topic of what is life—which is, as many of you know, the very theme of the annual Cluny Conference that I am hosting in Napa this July (tickets still available!). And one of the most fascinating distinctions of “what life is” is between bios and zoë, a distinction which itself is the subject of debate. One of the leading thinkers who has made this distinction central to his philosophy is the Italian Giorgio Agamben, for whom zoë represents “base” life—the simple fact of being alive. It is life that has not yet taken form. It is bare, vulnerable, stripped of everything that would give it real vitality, like political form and particular structures like participation in communities. These things turn it into bios and give life vitality—or we may even say a kind of energy. It becomes meaningful.

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Agamben’s masterstroke is his argument that modern politics increasingly collapses the distinction between zoë and bios while pretending to maintain it. Sovereign power decides who is a bios (a life that matters) and who is reduced to zoë (bare existence, a life that doesn’t matter). The person reduced to this form of zoë becomes a homo sacer, in Agamben’s language: a person who can be killed, because they lie outside of the system, but a person who is still recognized as having a base form of biological life.

For Agamben, the concentration camp represented modernity’s distinction between bios and zoë: pure death without—at least in the minds of those committing the murders—the character of sacrifice.

Using Agamben's framework, we can begin to see why debates like abortion are so intractable. The disagreement is not only moral but ontological. It turns on whether the life in the womb is understood as bios—a life with form and meaning—or as mere zoē, biological existence without that form, or as something that has not yet crossed the threshold into either category and thus is not a life at all. Most people have never articulated their position in these terms, but their intuitions already presuppose one of these views. The conflict, then, is not just about rights or policy, but about what counts as a life at all.

I hope the difference is becoming clear, because now I’m going to turn it on its head. We’re going to get back to energy—but first, the inversion.

A Different Kind of zoë

Agamben equates bios with life that has form—a life that is part of a city or state, for example. It acquires a new kind of vitality—we might even say energy—from this participation.

What turned this basic distinction on its head were the Christian gospels, especially the Gospel of John, in which Jesus uses the word zoë to refer to a specific kind of new life:

“I came that they may have life (zoē), and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life (zoē).” (John 14:6)

“I am the resurrection and the life (zoē); whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)

“Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life (zoē aiōnios*). He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)

“I am the bread of life (zoē); whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” (John 6:35)

Here zoë refers to a higher form of life that transcends city or state and is not dependent on them. It is a more abundant form of life in Christ that is within anyone’s reach, regardless of the circumstances or political forms of life that they find themselves in.

Agamben exposes the fragility of political dignity. The Gospel asserts the indestructibility of personal dignity.

The Gospels almost completely flip the earlier hierarchy: zoē becomes the highest form of life, because it means participation in the divine life. It is capable of eternity. Bios is not.

In Christianity, “form of life” began to take on new shapes that did not inherently have political character: for instance, the form of chastity (even celibacy), poverty, and obedience, as in the monastic traditions—something which, interestingly, the post-secular Agamben turned to in fascination in his later work. The very concept of “abundance” could now be conceived of in different terms than the merely material.

This doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between bios and zoē in the spiritual life; it does mean that bios is now oriented to zoē, though, and these new forms and structures should only be sought to the extent that they make this zoē more accessible, and attractive.

Jean Danielou began to describe this relationship in his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, originally published in 1965. In it, he describes the structure of politics like a lever that can either open or close people off to transcendent realities to varying degrees. He wasn’t just talking about the number of times an NFL football player says “First of all, all thanks to God” before he makes his post-game comments, or any of these performative or mimetic things which are hard to draw any serious correlation from. I think he was, at root, writing about the ways in which our environments direct our energy and ambition.

It’s incredibly hard to change the shape of desire for a single person, and it’s even harder for an entire company or community or nation. But one thing I’ve learned, having been helping people and organizations do this for the past 5 years, is that there is a singularly strong connection between energy—the things that make people feel truly alive—and desire. To ignore that connection would be to Platonize desire in some sense, to abstract it from its bodily form. Desire is something intimately bound up with the body. Not just sexual desire, but all desire.

That is why I believe that in the next decade, with the ascendency of disincarnate AI, the body will become paradoxically more important to those who truly understand. Enfleshed and ensouled desire will have primacy over the artificial desires of machines, if we could call those desires at all. (I don’t.)

Which brings me back to the fundamental question of what is energizing people right now. One thread that is undeniable is the desire to transcend all systems, or to overturn them, to become solo entrepreneurs and build billion dollar companies, to exist outside of any boundaries—in essence, to live the life of Agamben’s homo sacer, a life of zoē. But this new thirst for zoē is also Christ haunted, tinged with the Christianity it can’t escape, because it promises a form of salvation. My OpenClaw AI, set up here in my attic office, will save me from the coming economic disruption. It’s titillating to think of all the things we’ll do together, me and my Claw.

But this is clearly a kind of luxury desire—the kind of desire I have because I can afford to have it, and because my pursuing that desire doesn’t immediately affect anyone else negatively. It might take some time away from my family in the short-term, but most people won’t notice or have any idea of how I am directing my time and energy until, in some cases, years later. A great tragedy of our society is that any of us could be chasing thin, ephemeral desires for years without anyone stopping us or making us question ourselves.

We go searching the world over, in René Girard’s words, searching for the thing we want, believing that it must lie beneath the only rock on earth that is too heavy for us to lift. But the truth is not a rock, nor something that can live under a rock, nor something that is reducible to a “fact” or “object” that we will ever find.

We are living in a moment in which people are chasing energy as if it were life itself.

But energy is cheap. It can be manufactured, amplified, engineered. Entire industries now exist to produce it—political movements, media ecosystems, even technologies that promise to make us feel more alive while quietly detaching us from the conditions that make life possible.

This is why the most “energizing” ideas today so often feel dangerous. They are. Not always because of what they propose, but because of what they train us to seek: intensity without depth, stimulation without form, freedom without relation. A kind of life that looks, in the end, very much like Agamben’s zoē—exposed, unprotected, and endlessly manipulable.

The Gospel offers a different vision. It does not deny energy, but it refuses to confuse it with life. The life it speaks of—zoē—is not the life that burns hottest, but the life that cannot be extinguished. It does not depend on the system, or the crowd, or the next idea that feels electric.

And that is why it is so easy to overlook. Because in a world addicted to energy, real life often appears, at first glance, almost quiet.

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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 other professionals and act as a forcing function for doing something important that you know you need to do, or will figure out during the course of the 40-day workshop. And it will help you exercise the agency to do it.

I hope to see many of you there. The next seven days are your last chance to apply and enroll.

Be Not Conformed—Advance Reader Edition of the Introduction

Be Not Conformed is out April 10 from Catholic University of America Press and available for pre-order now from CUA Press and most places books are sold.

I’m excited to share with you below my Introduction to the edited volume of essays, along with the Table of Contents so you can see the array of thinkers and writers who make up this volume. I have permission from CUA Press to publish my Introduction here. For the rest, you will need to buy the book.

Here is why you should: While there are many fascinating essays that make it up, and some innovations—including Girard being brought into serious contact with Marshall McLuhan, von Hildebrand, and Liugi Giussani for the very first time, not to mention some apocalyptic (and antichristic! provocations)—it is fundamentally a book that is meant to transform you.

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Introduction, by Luke Burgis

The origin of this book is a conference I hosted at The Catholic University of America on November 3, 2023. That gathering, called NOVITĀTE: René Girard at 100, was one of several major events worldwide that celebrated the one hundredth year since the birth of René Girard on Christmas Day 1923. The conference title was inspired by the Vulgate wording of Romans 12:2—“reformamini in novitate sensus vestri” (“be transformed by the renewal of your mind”)—signaling its call to intellectual and spiritual renewal in Girard’s centenary year.1

I began planning about a year early. And then, relatively late in the process—nearly halfway in—I was forced to move the event from its original mid-October date due to joyous but unforeseen circumstances: my wife and I learned that we were expecting our first baby the very same week as the conference. Wanting to avoid the anxiety of hosting an event the same week as the birth, I moved it to the only other date that the banquet venue had available for the entire fall season: November 3.2 Still too close for comfort, but at least not a direct overlap.

After making the change, a friend reminded me that René Girard had died on November 4, 2015; the forced move had resulted in a conference that coincided with the anniversary of Girard’s death. We organized a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington the morning after the main event. A surprising number of conference participants, Christian and non-Christian alike, attended.

After the high intellectual pitch of the previous day’s talks and panels, and a boisterous party that evening, the mass brought our conference to its conclusion with sacred solemnity. I walked home afterward reflecting on the idea that, for all the grandeur of Girard’s theory, it may have found its highest expression in that liturgy: people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, heads bowed, asking for forgiveness.

Two of the keynote speakers were entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Girard’s famous former student, and Father Elias Carr, a Canon Regular of Saint Augustine from the abbey of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria. The day featured a panel on race and mimesis with Coleman Hughes, Hollis Robbins, Lester Spence, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and another on mimesis and media with Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie, author Walter Kirn, and Renée DiResta, moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. More than sixteen separate panels and presentations took place in concurrent sessions—everything from a Girardian critique of ideology (Geoff Schullenberger) to the Eschatological Problem of Technology (Jon Askonas) to conversations bringing Girard’s ideas into generative contact with Marshall McLuhan, Luigi Giussani, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.

One of the fruits of the conference is the book that you are holding in your hands. We selected and developed many of the essays presented at the conference, and solicited several additional essays related to its theme, to form a cohesive whole. The collection is meant to serve a dual purpose: to reflect on what Girard achieved in the past one hundred years, and to speculate about the potential contribution of his work to the next hundred.

The subtitle of this volume is René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. Few thinkers of the past century were as multidisciplinary as René Girard. He was a silo-busting figure whose singular, dense insight of mimetic desire blossomed into a rich field of study that spanned the philosophical, anthropological, theological, economic, literary, and more. Girard wrote a book on Shakespeare; a book about Job; another about the apocalypse. He wrote essays about business and innovation, and some of his mentees were renowned entrepreneurs and investors.

Girard was a world-renowned academic, elected to the Académie Française in 2005. He was also deeply Catholic. And, being based at Stanford, his ideas influenced Silicon Valley indirectly perhaps more than any other thinker of his time, through his proteges. When the history of the twenty-first-century Silicon Valley is written, he will have a place in it. Girard is at the nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley (which stand for reason, religion, and innovation) because he probed anthropological truths in a way that connects them. That is rare in today’s fractured and fragmented world.

Inspired by Girard’s example and by the integrating force of his ideas, the conference in November 2023 led not only to the publication of this book, but also to the formation of the Cluny Institute in 2024, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to connecting the “three cities” to build a future that is as meaningful as it is prosperous.3 Girard is one of its intellectual fathers and will continue to shape its evolution.

You will find a diverse array of essays in this volume of different style, substance, and form—some from Girard scholars, and others from writers who are relatively new to his work. That diversity was intentional, and key to the conference’s spirit; however, it may feel jarring if you’re expecting consistency. At the conclusion of NOVITĀTE, someone described it as a mix between a Parisian salon, a party, and a traditional academic conference, without regard to rank or title. I think that’s something Girard himself would have appreciated. There were professors encountering priests and technology entrepreneurs in conversation with novelists. The intention was to bring the greatest energy possible to Girard’s work and let the chips fall where they may. “Be Not Conformed” wasn’t just the theme of the conference, it was the form of the conference—something non-conforming—and the form of this book, too.

On one hand, we all strive to differentiate ourselves; we instinctively want to set ourselves apart, to not conform, especially when we feel our sense of identity under assault. And yet, on the other hand, we can’t entirely escape mimesis. We must ultimately conform our lives to something.

The way out of this conundrum, you will see in this book, starts with understanding that there are different kinds of conformity. The Czech theologian, Josef Zvěřina, a survivor of totalitarianism, saw that it is conformity to the world that leads to negative mimesis—to rivalry, and eventually to violence. In his commentary on the scripture passage from Romans 12:2 (“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”), he notes that the Greek word Paul uses for “form” has the root schema. “In a nutshell,” Zvěřina writes, “all schemas, all exterior models are empty. We have to want more.”

When Paul exhorts the Romans to be “transformed,” Zvěřina notes, he uses the word metamorphosis. “He opposes schêma or morphé—permanent form, to metamorphé—change in the creature. A person is not to change according to any model that in any case is always out of fashion, but it is a total newness with all its wealth.”

External models are easy to cling to, but true metamorphosis is a dynamic change from within the creature—and there are not always clear signposts.

And so, this book is not an argument, it’s an invitation: to step outside the ready-made forms of thought, to risk that kind of transformation.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Luke Burgis

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Cynthia L. Haven, National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar

Part One: Athens

1. Mimesis and Thumos: A Synthesis of Girardian and Platonic-Scholastic Psychology

Mark Shiffman, Saint Patrick’s Seminary and founding director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics

2. To What Do We Conform? René Girard, Black Studies, and Ayn Rand

Hollis Robbins, Professor of English at the University of Utah ()

3. Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist

A. Natasha Joukovsky, novelist

4. Girard and the Fictional Self

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author, Lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford

5. Aeneas as Founding Murderer: A Girardian Investigation of the Aeneid’s Close

Annika Nordquist McGregor, OpenAI

Part Two: Jerusalem

6. Escaping the Mimetic Whirlpool: Deceit, Desire, and the Catholic Imagination

Michael P. Murphy, Director, Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Senior Lecturer at Loyola University Chicago

7. The Analogical Antidote

Trevor Cribben Merrill, California Institute of Technology and author ()

8. Rulers of the World or Triumph of the Cross? René Girard and Dietrich von Hildebrand on: Anthropology, Liturgy, and Resisting Contagion

Michael Matheson Miller, Acton Institute Chief of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Research Fellow

9. Beyond Deceit: Girard and Giussani on the Meaning of Desire

Thomas Deutsch, Theology Teacher at Connelly School of the Holy Child

10. Media and Mimesis: From Imitation to Immolation

Andrew McLuhan, poet, educator, researcher, and founder of The McLuhan Institute ()

11. “We Lepers”: The Mimetic Saint According to Gavan Daws’s Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai

Fr. Elias Carr, Canon Regular of Saint Augustine of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria

Part Three: Silicon Valley

12. “Things Hidden”: Mimesis, Technology, and the Apocalypse

Tobias Huber, writer
Byrne Hobart, writer, entrepreneur, investor, and consultant

13. Waiting for Girard: Rivalry, Apocalypse, and Return

Owen Yingling, student at the University of Chicago

14. Against the City of Noise

Justin Lee, First Things Associate Editor

15. The Illusions of Novelty: Belle Delphine and the Eternal Return of Online Fame

Katherine Dee, writer and podcaster ()

16. The Medium is the Mimesis: McLuhan, Girard, and the Technologies of Imitation

Brett Robinson, Associate Director for Outreach and Associate Professor of Practice at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame

17. From the Passion to the Hydrogen Bomb: René Girard and the Eschatological Problem of Technology

Jon Askonas, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America

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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 me and my father to confront serious existential questions: our relationship to one another, to our families, to our friends, to group affiliations of every kind, and in turn our very identities. And I was forced to face questions about relationships which I had never seriously confronted before:

Why have I never felt at home in crowds? What important rites of passage did I miss in my life? (And did I have the courage to complete the one I was clearly in the middle of?) Which movements or affiliations had I been co-opted into without full awareness, knowledge, or consent? What does “resistance” really mean, and how and when do we know what to resist and what to accept? How could I be sure that my thoughts and desires were even my own? What effect is technology having on the way I relate to other people—and on the structure of my soul?

Ultimately, I realized that my journey—and the questions I was asking—is universal.

Those questions have become even more urgent in an age of thin desires and crumbling institutions, artificial intelligence, and powerful forces of social contagion amplified by technology. What does it mean to forge a solid self, a differentiated identity, and still have deep relationships with others when the world seems to be conspiring to make us retreat into bastions of safety under the guise of loyalty, or “finding your tribe,” or “finding yourself”—all detached from the freedom and responsibility that are the very foundation of love?

I’m convinced that beneath the economic and policy debates, beneath the political battles, beneath the fertility crisis, beneath the smartphone arguments, and beneath the endless online discourse, something fundamental has broken in the relationship between individuals and groups. It has become extraordinarily difficult to belong to groups without either becoming alienated or joining something that demands cult-like loyalty and eventually costs you your integrity—and yourself.

I’ve seen countless friends, families, and relationships fall apart because of a lost ability to relate to others when anxiety is high, when insecurity is present, and when mimesis and social contagion take over—often in the form of coercion and conformity.

The solution is not fundamentally technological, economic, or political. It is profoundly human.

Ways of Relating

Until we come to grips with the ways our society incentivizes and often produces pseudo-selves—people who lack a solid sense of self, who negotiate their identities in real time based on whatever is most expedient—and with the likelihood that we ourselves operate this way more often than we would like to admit, we will continue to experience greater volatility, polarization, and hollowed-out conversations and relationships.

There is a perennial path for entering into group dynamics in a way that leads to growth rather than hijacking. It is possible to use social technology—and an increasing share of tech is social tech—in ways that lead to depth, not shallowness. There is a way to recover strong rites of passage in our own lives, and for our families and children, that can lead to purpose and meaning rather than trapping us on the infernal hamster wheel of keeping up with whatever other people say is important at any given moment.

Many of us come back to the well daily, carrying our buckets, looking for other people who might help fill them with whatever form of water we think we need. What we seek is the kind of water that creates a well springing up within us. When we find it, we leave behind the cycle of addiction, the cycle of endless validation, and the search for being known and liked. We embrace a new path which, at times, will require us to feel unknown, unvalidated, and even unloved. We do the unrepeatable thing that only we are called to do on this earth. We speak what is real. We stop operating from fear.

Not All Who Wander…

It was with much of this in mind that I reread the parable of the lost sheep—perhaps for the 1,000th time—sometime in late 2021. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s simple: a single sheep leaves the flock of the ninety-nine and becomes “lost,” wandering until the Good Shepherd finds it and brings it back into the fold.

I have always been unsatisfied with the interpretation of this sheep as simply the lone sinner brought back into communion. After all, we all identify with the lost sheep when we read the story. So if that is all of us, how can we all be lost, all astray, while there remains the image of a perfect ninety-nine that has not?

Today, we face competing narratives about “the one.” I think many of those narratives are summed up in the Gospel of Thomas where—true to the gnostic mind—the lost sheep is actually the most intelligent sheep (“he has a 150 IQ!”—you can already picture it on Twitter), tracked down by Jesus and praised for being unlike the other dumb, herd-like sheep. Perhaps it is the neurodivergent tech founder who will save us all.

But this reading is thin, too. We are meant to be in communion with others, so what good is differentiation for differentiation’s sake?

This is the question at the heart of The One and the Ninety-Nine, which is an exploration into the heart of our culture—and into the heart of each one of us. I share details from my own journey that are intimate enough that, at times, I wondered what I was doing as I sat writing this book in my office after rocking my newborn daughter to sleep.

I did it because I had to.

We are in a moment of profound existential crisis, and it is going to take courage to find our way out—and to each other.

—Luke

P.S. If you’re interested in buying 100 or more copies, please use this form to submit a short application (1 min or less) our new crowdsources platform. In short: if you buy 100 copies for a group event, or can help 100 other individuals buy copies, you will receive a 25% discount off retail, signed books, and a virtual appearance by me to your group. The link to the crowdsourcing platform will be available next week for those who think they can move 100 books by June 1st.

Pre-order THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE now. Thank you.

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) thing I’ve ever written, and I’ve poured my heart into it for the past few years.

But first: I’d like to extend a special invitation to anyone who would like to dive deeper into the themes that will have become familiar to regular readers here—mimetic desire, agency, relationships, moral thickness, storytelling, anti-mimetic lives—in an intimate, cohort-based model with other great people over the course of 40 days. I’ve designed a workshop called The Foundations of Agency, which cuts through and deepens the bro-speak around the word ‘agency’ and explores seriously what freedom and responsibility really entail, and how you can exercise more in your own life.

Here is the kicker: Applicants who are accepted to the workshop will also receive a complimentary pass to an in-person conference that I’ll be hosting in northern California this summer (July 26-28, 2026) which explores the most fundamental question about the value and future of human life. We will go back to the basics and simply probe the questions: what is life? What is real and what is unreal? What does it mean to be fully alive? Conference tickets are $795, and are going fast. If you are part of the workshop, though, you attend at no extra cost.

If one or both of those things sound appealing to you, please read on.

Foundations of Agency + Fullness of Life

In an age increasingly dominated by AI and information, the future belongs to those who have a solid self, a strong sense of vocation, and a capacity to act in accordance with their highest ideals alongside others who love them.

People know more than ever about habits, productivity, psychology, and self-improvement—and yet many still feel stuck. They have an agency problem, not a knowledge problem.

This distance between knowing and doing has become one of the defining frustrations of modern life. In an attempt to close that distance, I’ve designed a small, intensive, online workshop: It draws on key insights from Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley, and it’s called Foundations of Agency.

Participants are introduced to fifteen key ideas (you can see exactly what those key ideas are by clicking the link to the workshop website) and complete weekly challenges that actually encourage real growth—and which also allow us to get to know one another and form real friendships. Together, we work through questions about desire, attention, relationships, and decision-making in the context of the actual challenges we’re each facing in our lives, from burnout and parenting exhaustion to work-related goals or aspirations like writing a new book.

Here’s what just a few people from Cohort 1 had to say:

A limited offer for this spring:

For the upcoming spring cohort, which runs April 18 — June 1, we’re trying something new.

If you apply and are accepted to Foundations of Agency’s Cohort #2, you’ll also receive a complimentary pass to the Cluny Institute’s 2026 Zoë Conference in Napa, CA, from July 26-28 (individual tickets to the conference cost $795; if you are not able to participate in the workshop, you are welcome to reserve your slot at the conference separately).

Zoë is a gathering focused on one of the biggest questions of our time: What does it mean to live a fully human life in an artificial age? We’re bringing together people from technology, religion, philosophy, and culture who take that question seriously.

Early speakers that I can announce include: entrepreneur Bryan Johnson (Don’t Die), Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB, novelist Tao Lin, and professor Catherine Pakaluk. It will also be an arts-filled gathering, with poetry by the former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, strings/jazz, more music by thinker/investor/author/DJ Jared Dillian, and some of the most brilliant engineers, founders, and writers from the Bay Area who are in generative contact with Athens and Jerusalem. I am also organizing a special seminar style session on one of the most unexplored aspects of René Girard’s thinking, featuring some of the leading Girard scholars in the world.

Many more speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

All registrants will gain access to a private networking app two months prior to the event to get to know one another, set up meet-ups, and begin to dialogue about the themes that we will explore in depth when we gather in person.

Why pair these together?

Agency grows through models, relationships, environments, and encounters.

Zoë expands the themes of the workshop and will connect you to a wider network of thinkers and builders.

Together they create something closer to what many of us are actually looking for.

A few details

• The FoA spring cohort is limited in size (Cohort #1 had 24)
• Applications are reviewed carefully by me and my team
• The Zoë pass is included for all accepted participants in this round for anyone who applies by March 15.

If this resonates with you, I’d encourage you to apply. These groups tend to fill quickly.

Apply here: foundationsofagency.com

I look forward to hopefully meeting you this year. I’ll be back this coming week with much more, including a preview of things I’m thinking about as I embark to Rome for 2 weeks later this month to explore questions of technology, faith, and desire.

— Luke

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.

Secure a Spot

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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It was a difficult summer. My wife and I had to put a pet down, juggle demanding work and parenting, and face a difficult health diagnosis in the extended family. My dad’s dementia has continued its course. In the middle of it all, while carrying what often felt like a crushing weight, I was trying to finish a book.

In early August, I had an unexpected lunch with a friend at Hope College that I hadn’t seen in three years. He told me about the school’s degree program for men serving long sentences at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, about an hour’s drive north. I learned that one of the teachers had introduced my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, in a first-year seminar, in an effort to help the men think seriously about what it is they wanted—and to help them understand the way that conflict happens in the prison environment.

I was told that one student in that class became so captivated by mimetic theory that he tracked down and read everything he could fi…

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Would you please consider casting a vote that will bring a talk from me on the general theme of my next book to SXSW in Austin next year? All you need to do is hit the ‘heart’ next to the talk title (you might need to create an account first, which takes about 10 seconds).

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The most dangerous forms of manipulation don’t look like manipulation at all. They wear the language of virtue—humility, sacrifice, obedience. But instead of shaping the soul, they slowly unravel it. This is spiritual manipulation. And it strikes deeper than any other because it doesn’t just hijack your thoughts or feelings—it hijacks your sense of what is right.

What Spiritual Manipulation Is

Spiritual manipulation is the dangerous use of spiritual categories—things like guilt, shame, humility, obedience, or the redemptive value of suffering—to subvert the action of the Spirit. It clouds the conscience. It distorts desire. And ultimately, it deadens the soul in the service of a false good.

It’s different from ordinary psychological manipulation. Playing hard to get, for instance—masking your own desire to increase someone else’s—is a fairly harmless form of psychological maneuvering. It takes place on the worldly plane. You …

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Two brief announcements before this week’s essay, in which I venture into Daoism:

1. Workshop: There are still 2 weeks left to apply for “The Foundations of Agency”, a 40-day workshop I developed with the novelist Jordan Castro. It starts in late September. You can learn more and apply here.

2. Work with me: I’m looking for a Marketing partner for a part-time role starting immediately. This person will work extremely closely with me to help launch my new book—but the possibilities extend far beyond that. I expect this position to grow into a full-time role within 12 months. You can learn more here.

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It’s been 9 months in the making. THE FOUNDATIONS OF AGENCY—a new workshop that I developed with novelist Jordan Castro—is now open for enrollment. The first 6-week cohort kicks off the last week of September.

Learn More & Apply

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This is the first installment of a new “Behind the Scenes” series. Paid subscribers will get periodic sneak peeks into my upcoming book, THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE (St. Martin’s Press/2026). This series will cover everything from the writing process, to my personal life, to offshoot ideas that either didn’t make it into the book—or they did, but they need to be developed further somewhere. That place is here.

Thank you for your support of my work.

I tracked down a copy of The Village Voice from June 1987 because there was a “Jazz Special” insert dedicated to the great Ornette Coleman. I wrote an essay about him and the problem of audience capture in this newsletter last year, but I wanted to develop his story further to fit it into my manuscript and eventually my forthcoming book.

It became clear early in my research that the only way I was going to get the best stuff was to track down a few rare hard copies of stuff from the 60s and 70s—the content simply doesn’t exist online. And now, after a decent amount of effort, it sits on my coffee table. I’ve been digging through it this past week.

Inside the Jazz insert is an unexpected essay by Greg Tate on Coleman’s philosophy of fashion. “Fashion figures into Ornette’s educational program as a way of seducing folk into getting on board his version of the freedom train,” he writes.

The most unexpected part of the interview was what Coleman had to say about the relationship between fashion and art—and how personal style shapes expectations, not only about the kind of art someone might produce, but even about their political views or personal beliefs.

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I opened the Metanoia conference in D.C. last week with one basic question: “How would you go about making the decision about whether or not to become a vampire?”

It’s the question posed by the Yale professor L.A. Paul in her 2014 book Transformative Experience. I admit that I initially dismissed both the book and the question as ridiculous when I first read it last summer—but I’ve since warmed up to it. I find the question highly generative, even if I find holes in Paul’s theory.

I was at least disturbed enough by the question that I took it into my undergraduate class this spring—a course called The Foundations of Agency, which I taught with the novelist Jordan Castro—and asked our students to help me decide whether or not I should become a fabulous vampire, hosting lavish parties in my new Embassy Row mansion before I dine on unsuspecting guests each night. Wouldn’t that be fun?, I asked?

Being a good Girardian, I ramped up the social pressure after some initial hemming and hawing an…

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1. A Must-Read Essay: Today in the , we published an important essay this morning by Dr. Joshua Mitchell called “Red Pill, Blue Pill”, about the ongoing crisis in political theory—political theory being characterized by "evermore production in the academic world, ever less purchase on the world." You can read the full essay, with no paywall, here. I found it so compelling that I cite one of its key ideas in a chapter on the formation of the “Political Self” in my upcoming book. It’s interesting and perhaps telling that our culture has widely adopted (thanks to The Matrix and a flurry of excellent memes since) the metaphor of “taking pills”—which effect us upon ingestion, sometimes against our will, outside of our control; this process involves little agency or cooperation, sometimes even during the taking process itself. Anyway, read the essay.

2. An Event: This week, I’m co-hosting with Jordan Castro (whose next novel, Muscle Man, comes out in September— said: “Finished this and need a supp…

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In 2008, while running a start-up in Las Vegas, something happened to me that I cannot describe. Certain things are too sacred to share or even attempt to put into words, especially in a world that treats words and experiences with such flippancy and irreverence. (John Henry Newman once said that a man cannot tell the story of his conversion between dessert and tea at a dinner party; if he were alive today, he might say that he shouldn’t attempt to tell it in a two-minute Q&A on a podcast.) We do violence to reality when we try. But I will share what I think is prudent to share.

Pope Francis was a man of gestures. The image of him kissing a sick boy’s feet—pictured above, while he was still the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires—will always be my favorite image of him: I cannot imagine a more tender act. The boy’s frail legs and feet, and certainly his heart, were rattled that day by the force of this man’s tender love.

I was already a Catholic seminarian when he became Pope. When his…

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