The Emergent Self

Questioning what we're told it means to be human

Topic

Articles

Longer essays and arguments on how we become who we are: through humiliation and recognition, belief and doubt, loss and meaning.

Sleigh tracks and reindeer prints in deep snow leading away from a farmhouse back door at dusk on Christmas Eve, a broom leaning against the wall

Nobody Found the Holidays Under a Tree: How the Season Was Assembled

The most magical Christmas of my childhood was built by my grandfather with a broomstick and a dog. So was the holiday itself, two centuries ago, by people with problems to solve. Knowing that costs us nothing, and it frees us to decide what we keep.
A tall brick building glowing with lit windows on a snowy December evening, with a lone figure sitting on its front steps

The Season We Built: Why I’m Spending the Holidays Asking Who They’re For

The holidays feel like weather, something that simply arrives. They are a building, and buildings have owners, tenants, and people sleeping on the steps. For eight weeks I am walking through the building and asking who it was built for.
A hand-drawn family tree on aged paper, with one faint, unfinished branch set apart from the rest

The Cousin We Were Afraid to Call: Racial Hatred in One Family Tree

For fifty years my family has traded records and old photos, but one branch we left alone: a third cousin who became a Klan leader. What a family tree can and cannot explain about racial hatred.
Sunlit empty classroom doorway seen from the hallway

Who Can I Become Here?

Violence came into a classroom on East 38th Street. Years later I am still asking what brought those men there, and what it would take for a different life to emerge.
Growth through suffering: a young tree growing from a crack in a stone wall

Growth Through Suffering, and What It Costs

For years I've called my dark years a gift. Here I put that claim to the test: suffering can become a place of growth, but growth never makes the harm good.
A coastal map on a wooden desk with a black marker line drawn across it, a marker beside it, and a calm ocean through the window

The Sharpie and the Ocean: Reading Donald Trump, and Ourselves, from Four Directions

A marker on a hurricane map, a plan to rename an ocean: what Donald Trump’s strangest moments reveal about him, about the culture that cheers, and about the rest of us.

The Weight of a Cloud

A fair-weather cloud weighs over a million pounds and looks like nothing at all. We make the same mistake about the people around us.
Painting of an empty public swimming pool behind a chain-link fence on a summer afternoon, with flowering trees and a diving board

Who Decided What Our Skin Would Mean?

In 1977, a student in my rural Georgia classroom told me he wasn't allowed in the city pool. That moment raised a question I still carry: who decided what our skin would mean, and who gains from the answer?
Illustration of the systems we build: many hands of different skin tones assembling an open scaffold in sage green, pink and blue, with people inside it and others watching from its edges.

The Systems We Build, and the People They Make of Us

People build systems, and then those systems quietly build us. What the research on corporate leaders reveals about privilege, who pays the price, and why what we built we can also rebuild.
A luminous figure dissolving into flowing fabric and light in golds and warm tones, suggesting human transformation and becoming

People Are Verbs: The Quiet Rebellion Against How We’ve Been Taught to See Ourselves

What if you are not a thing at all, but a happening? Whitehead's quiet rebellion against the grammar of nouns — and the freedom it offers.
Open doors of a grand Catholic church, seen from the altar with a green chasuble in the foreground, looking out on a neighborhood street where neighbors talk together

From the Altar to the Streets

I loved the liturgy and served a near-northside Indianapolis parish as White flight hollowed it out. Spinoza helped me understand why I had to leave, and what true piety asks of us.
Watercolor of an elderly woman in a pink cardigan speaking with a nurse who listens closely in a sunlit examination room, while a gray-haired man sits quietly in the corner with his back to the viewer.

Dignity Is Something We Do

In the emergency room, I answered every question the staff asked my mother. My answers were correct, and that was the problem. What that morning taught me about dignity.