Introducing CLUNY
A place for people building the real.
Today I’m excited to unveil the first stone laid of a new project that I’ve been working on for well over a year, and in some sense for the last 15 years of my life.
I invite you to follow and subscribe to the new , a multidisciplinary publication which lives here on Substack. We will be publishing essays, trialogues, fiction and poetry, by the best writers of our time. Subscribe today to get full access to everything with no paywall, for a limited time:
The Cluny Journal went live this very morning. This first edition features more than ten new pieces of original writing by an array of writers that I deeply admire: essays that have an existential valence, powerful poetry, an experimental trialogue on A.I. and the limits of rationality which I edited myself, and encounters—personal stories anchored by incarnational experiences, the opposite of think pieces.
Subscribing is the best way to learn more about the spirit of CLUNY and to have beautiful writing delivered to your inbox on a weekly basis.
The
is the first public-facing element of CLUNY: a new home for people who want to build the real in every sphere of life: from families, to meaningful work, to education, to creative endeavors, to souls. The Journal is CLUNY’s scriptorium and press. Its other operating initiatives will be announced in the coming months, as we prepare those for invitation. Put simply: we’re investing in the human person.A personal note to longtime readers: some of you have read my work here for years. I’m grateful to all who have engaged with and supported me here. I’m not going anywhere. This newsletter will remain the primary home for my weekly writing. This fall I am in the latter stages of finishing a first draft of my next book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. Once that is done, I will have more time to write longer-form essays, and do other things here, in 2025. I’ll also be helping to oversee strategy and growth for the CLUNY Journal. If you’ve liked anything you’d read here, you will get 10x more of it there.
The Cluny Journal will be a publication without any one featured writer. It is more like a central meeting place for readers and writers who have grown cold by content and who begin gathering around the fire pit in the backyard to warm their hands and talk about real things. Wonderful encounters happen in that environment, and they lead to important things getting built.
I will be writing for the Journal, of course. My writing will have to meet the same high bar that the journal’s new Editor-in-Chief, the novelist Jordan Castro, would maintain for anyone else. And it will need to fit into the new (anti-mimetic) paradigm that CLUNY is operating in.
I am extremely grateful for Jordan’s leadership of the Journal—it certainly wouldn’t exist today without him. He has joined me full-time in D.C. to help lead the broader venture. We’re both off to Italy next week to host the first CLUNY retreat.
I look forward to sharing more about this project in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, would you please help us spread the word about the Journal?
Ex umbris et in profundum.
On this Feast of Theresa of Avila, 2024, yours,
