Kingdom Commerce: A Daily Devotional
A daily devotional for entrepreneurs building with their values at the center — one new entry each morning. Month 1: Vision with Purpose.
Things I make when I'm not building — on faith, art, culture, tech, and the struggle for the American Dream.
A daily devotional for entrepreneurs building with their values at the center — one new entry each morning. Month 1: Vision with Purpose.
Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia” indicted me fairly, and it has also been used as a stick. On the letters I did not carry, the railroads that bought the essay by the half million, what Rowan actually did in Cuba, and the forgotten man who handed him the message and let go.
Ella Langley's “Choosin' Texas” casts the state as the rival you lose your lover to — and I am the man in the song, in the timeline where he did not go back. On the Kikkers I never quite joined, Bentov's beautiful wrong theory of time, and why a steel guitar collapses thirty years.
Some years ago I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church, and then I left. Reading The Brothers Karamazov has me mourning it. On the Grand Inquisitor, the answer that was a life rather than an argument, and charmolype — the tradition that named my grief before I felt it.
Wendell Berry died Monday at ninety-two, on the land he wrote about for sixty years. On the four tests buried in his famous computer essay, the coming custody battle over his memory, and what survived when a would-be agrarian audited the fantasy honestly.
Were Adam and Eve punished for having sex? Augustine and Milton take opposite corners, the serpent turns out to have kept his promise, and the curses stop looking like vengeance. On Genesis 3 as the terms of a terrible promotion, and why making things costs what it costs.
If you remove the blame, do you remove the pain? A former prosecutor’s answer: the problem was never blame — it is a court with no charging standard, no statute of limitations, and no gavel. On Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and the difference between acquittal and adjournment.
Dolly Parton died Tuesday at eighty. On the difference between a hiding place and a position held at double cost, the bundle she kept refusing, three declined medals from two presidents, and my father’s 45 of “Here You Come Again.”
Dali said the soft watches came from a melting Camembert, then told Mike Wallace the painting had been a prophecy of the new physics. On the paranoiac-critical method turned on its own inventor, and why we believe Lennon's accident and doubt Dali's insight.
Dylan was short with nearly everyone and never with George. On the rank set on a Liverpool bus in 1958 and never re-run, and the song McCartney rehearsed dozens of times and had to learn from scratch thirty-three years later.
Every partnership cited as a model of productive friction ended in litigation or estrangement. On what was actually holding the Beatles together, the difference between kinship and structure, and Steely Dan as the counterexample that makes bad television.
An imagined conversation between Einstein and Yogananda, abandoned once I noticed one of the two men was not in it. On Landor, Frayn and McCarthy, why convergence kills the form, and who gets to say what you meant.
Lennon took the Walrus from Lewis Carroll and did not notice for thirteen years that he had cast himself as the villain. On accidental devils, Jagger's deliberate one, and why the announced kind is the safer one.
One tradition says be certain and receive; another says the certainty is the obstacle and will be taken from you. On bitachon, the Dark Night, Meister Eckhart, and where certainty actually belongs.
The Who’s Tommy, Meher Baba’s mirror, and Jung on Job. On how far you can go toward the mystics before you leave the tradition, and why being wanted is a larger thing than being required.
Machine prose is not dead because it is predictable — it is predictable because it is dead. On next-token generation, why turning up the randomness makes it worse, and Christopher Alexander’s patterns as the layer that is missing.
Huygens watched two pendulum clocks fall into rhythm through the beam they shared. On quantum observation, coupled oscillation, and why alignment is a property of what you are mounted on.
Russell Conwell's farmer sold the land the diamonds were buried in. On why we look elsewhere for meaning, and a kingdom that is both within you and in the room.
Warhol grew up Byzantine Catholic, and it shows in the work. On icons, soup cans, and why meaning is conferred by attention rather than inherited — and why the useful mirror faces forward.
The barrier to building is rarely imagination — it is fear. On Christopher Alexander, Pop Art, and what happens to creative paralysis when the cost of trying falls to nothing.
A small pink book with a big question: why do we make art, and what does it actually do for the communities that gather around it?
A short, accessible primer on the algorithms — from Euclid to Dijkstra — quietly powering search, encryption, and the AI tools we use every day.
On The Education of Henry Adams — the difference between schooling and education, and the case for the accidental kind.
A review of H.W. Crocker's book — on governing with an easy hand, self-denial, and expecting men to fail.
Kline, Pfeiffer and Everett take on Shakespeare — and, unusually, leave the text alone.