I’ve been wearing glasses since seventh grade, when I discovered mid-car-ride that the rest of my family could actually read a license plate and I had no idea that was something people could do. When the optometrist put corrective lenses in front of my eyes for the first time, I gasped. That’s the image I keep coming back to when I think about what happens when a philosophy filters out whole categories of human experience — not maliciously, just structurally, the way astigmatism works. You adapt so well to what you’re missing that you don’t know you’re missing it.

This essay is about that. It started with a conversation I witnessed between Philip Clayton and Dan Dennett — two brilliant philosophers, one coffee shop moment, and a question that stopped everything: where in a purely physical universe does “mattering” actually live? It moved through two more conversations in an Edinburgh coffee shop a week apart — one with a theologian who could defend every doctrine but couldn’t explain why holding his newborn made him weep, and one with an evolutionary biologist who could describe the neurochemistry of her daughter’s depression but couldn’t answer the question her daughter was actually asking. Both were half-blind in the same direction, just from opposite sides.

What I’m after here is coherence. Whitehead’s test, Griffin’s challenge, Clayton’s emergence framework — the claim that a philosophy failing to account for time, causation, moral urgency, beauty, consciousness, or the felt reality of love isn’t humble or rigorous. It’s just incomplete. And the good news is that correcting for both eyes doesn’t require abandoning science or embracing magic. It requires something harder: sitting with the full weight of human experience and refusing to explain any of it away. You can read this essay and find plenty of others on my Substack, Process This.

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Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!

The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED?

6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology.
6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics.
Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair.
Online Community: Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

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