What is Gnosticism?
May 11th, 2019
Because so much of our understanding of Gnosticism comes from one cache of badly damaged manuscripts, the tradition has become a nesting ground for a lot of bizarre modern reinterpretations. With this essay I attempted give an overview of Gnosticism that is in line with contemporary scholarship while simultaneously focusing on some of the real reasons why this dead religion is still relevant to our modern world.
God in the Shitty Monitor Speaker
May 25th, 2017
This is an essay about my experiences as a heroin addict that I started right after I got out of jail in April of 2017. I was still very new to both sobriety and my return to writing, and this piece was as much an attempt to reengage with the things I used to love before my addiction as any kind of coherent statement. However, the fact that it was written so close to some of the most pivitol moments of my life gives it a raw quality that is not present in later attempts to write about this period.
J.R.R. Tolkien and the Concept of Applicability
February 9th, 2015
A reworking of a college essay I did about a key, under-discussed aspect of Tolkien's work that he touches on in his 1947 essay "On Fairy-Stories". Like many young students, my writing here is overflowing with a kind of stiff, heavy-handed absolutism that ignores the subtlety and ambiguity in favor of hard, all-encompassing statements of ideology. However, it points at a major aspect of Tolkien's worldview that I still try to adhere to today, so I figure it's worth keeping.
Essays
This section is a kind of catch-all for writing on a wide variety of non-fiction writing that doesn't fit into any of the other categories. At the moment, this includes writing about my experiences as a heroin addict, a writeup on Gnosticism that I did for a now-defunct subreddit, and an essay I wrote some of J.R.R. Tolkien's literary ideas, but there are a few other pieces that I might put up here if I ever get around to giving them another layer of polish.
