the reason I find easiest to understand

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This is a chapbook written by me and published by above/ground press:

https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-from-aboveground-press-press-from.html

It came out last year. This is how it starts:

“Writing comes easily to me, while I find most other things in life exceedingly difficult. This is often a problem with writers. The truth of what they write is deeply shaded by a writerly distance from life which is also often connected to various forms of loneliness. Writers are often not the best people when it comes to understanding either community or solidarity. Maybe I should only speak for myself. Certain kinds of religious conversions bring one directly into community with others who are similarly converted. As you might have already guessed, I lean rather heavily into not wanting to be part of any club that might have me as a member. Religion has always been one of the places people look to for community. As has often been noted, in our current world, community can be rather hard to come by and even harder to maintain. One of the many reasons religion hasn’t disappeared, as was not so long ago predicted, is it allows its adherents to mainline a sense of community. This is the reason I find easiest to understand.

It is difficult to imagine how anything secular could generate the same intensities of community that religion does. Such intensities are also forms of power which are easily abused. Yet when certain kinds of atheists fail to understand how powerful a genuine sense of [spiritual] community can be, it is as if they are willing themselves to understand nothing. Nonetheless, I somehow know that religion will never be a solution for me. How exactly do I know this? I don’t think I’m writing a book about religion, but if I am it is about the furthest thing I can imagine from anything I previously thought I might someday do. And yet in various moments in my life I have felt that in order for the left to win it needs to find ways to connect to something one might call spirituality. A sense of the sacred. As an unbeliever I am not really the person best able to figure out how we might do this. Yet maybe it is the person who truly doesn’t know who is able to ask the most genuine and genuinely difficult questions. I am writing this book because I truly don’t know. (Here again we come back to the question of doubt.)”