Essays on Development & Education
Developmental Ecology of Meaning
Developmental Ecology of Meaning describes the reciprocal process through which human beings develop inside layered environments, adapt to those environments, organize those adaptations into perception and meaning, and then participate in reshaping the conditions in which future development occurs.
Its central premise is simple:
Every human being develops inside an ecology.
In Defense of God
There is a question I have carried for a long time, although I am only beginning to understand how large it actually is: Why did Jesus have to die?
The question is so familiar within Christianity that its premise can become almost invisible. We ask why his death was necessary before asking whether it was necessary at all. Yet the historical event at the center of Christianity is not simply that Jesus died. Jesus was executed. Human beings, operating through religious and political institutions, made decisions that resulted in his death.
Whatever theological meaning has subsequently been placed around the crucifixion, that fact remains.
People killed him.
I find myself increasingly unwilling to move too quickly past that.
The Verb Beneath the Institution
Every system began as a living operation. What happens when we forget what it was built to do?
Before there was a church, someone prayed.
Before there was a school, a child watched an adult's hands and tried to copy them. Before there was a hospital, someone sat beside someone who was hurting and did not leave. Before there was a court, two people stood in front of their community and asked, what happened here, and what do we do now?
The Quickening
“...a quickening that is translated through you into action.”
— Martha Graham, in a letter to Agnes de Mille
Sometimes we do not move because we know. We come to know because we move
Who Bought Your Time?
On pre-sold life, temporal debt, and the strange luxury of an unclaimed afternoon.
There is a particular kind of wealth I don't think we talk about enough. An afternoon nobody has already purchased. Not vacation — vacation is often scheduled six months in advance, paid for with other hours, packed with expectations, and followed by an inbox waiting patiently to punish you for leaving. I mean something stranger. Time that arrives before anyone has decided what it is for.
I started thinking about this while considering what financial freedom actually buys. The obvious answers are safety, housing, healthcare, travel, comfort. All true. But underneath them is something more fundamental. Money buys back the ability to say no. And eventually, if you have enough of it, it can buy something even more valuable: the right to encounter your own time before allocating it.