What we are doing here

You clicked the link at the bottom of an article, so here is the honest version. No pitch, no email capture. About four minutes.

The problem with news

News is very good at the first question — what happened — and almost useless at the second one, which is the one people actually carry around: what does it mean that this keeps happening?

A factory closes and eight hundred people lose work. The report gives you the number, the share price, the minister’s statement. What it does not touch is the thing every one of those eight hundred is now thinking about at four in the morning: whether a person’s worth is the same thing as their usefulness.

That question is older than the factory. It is older than industry. People have been arguing about it for three thousand years and have left a great deal of thinking behind about it. Almost none of that reaches the person at four in the morning, because the categories are separate — news over here, philosophy and religion and psychology over there, in a different section of the shop.

We think that separation is the mistake.

What we do about it

Every article ends with a layer called the deeper story. It names the question underneath and brings the best thinking we can find to bear on it — history, philosophy, psychology, and the older wisdom traditions, including the religious ones. Sometimes that means a Stoic, sometimes a neuroscientist, sometimes a line from a text written before Rome existed.

We do not tell you which of them is right. That would be both arrogant and boring, and you would see through it immediately.

Who is behind it

The people who make this work within the Christian tradition, and we say so plainly rather than let you find out and feel misled. Some of our longer pieces read a story through that tradition explicitly, and those pieces are labelled. Most of what we publish is not that at all.

If you want to know why we find that tradition worth reading, we have written that out honestly, including the parts we cannot resolve and the historical record that is indefensible. But it is a separate page, and you have to want it. Nothing here is going to steer you towards it.

What you can expect

Facts you can check. Sources linked every time. Corrections left visible. An honest label on where the reflection is coming from. And no moment, ever, where an article you were enjoying turns out to have been an argument all along.

That is the whole thing. Thanks for reading this far.