Subscribe now

Years ago, I wrote about religion to influence others while trying to understand what I believed.

Eventually, I stopped.

Some of my beliefs changed. Others collapsed entirely. And for a while, it was easier to define myself by what I no longer believed than by whatever might take its place.

I’m less interested in doing that now.

I’m interested in what survives certainty.

I still find myself moved by things I can only describe as sacred: a marriage. A human life. The natural world. Music and art. Birth and death. Beauty. The people I love. The strange experience of being conscious and alive in a universe I understand only slightly better than I did before.

I don’t know exactly what God is. I don’t know what happens after we die. I don’t know whether the language we have inherited for these things comes anywhere close to describing things as they really are.

I’m increasingly comfortable saying I don’t know.

But uncertainty hasn’t made the world feel less sacred to me.

Quite the opposite.

What Remained Sacred is a place to write from there.

Not to defend religion. Not to dismantle it. Not to convince anyone to believe what I believe.

Just essays about belief and doubt, family and relationships, nature and science, beauty and mortality—and the things that remain worthy of reverence after certainty is gone.

I’m curious to see where it leads.

— Eric