10 April 2026
Since my last post, I have a few things to report. I have continued studying Indonesian (working through Hantarto Widjaja's epic 4,637 word vocabulary list, which is almost like a great novel, maybe Moby-Dick, for its texture, themes, and sense of adventure). Waiting for Margot was not selected as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Prize. I spent my time dealing with computer maintenance and some minor but absorbing health issues.
I also listened to the radio a lot, the greatest share to the local NPR station (KPBS), but also conservative and Christian AM talk radio, two Los Angeles stations (KNX and KFI), and once, at night, a conservative talk radio station in the Bay Area, along with some music stations in San Diego and occasionally in Mexico.
I decided to change different things, one of which is that I'm trying to draft what I write (more often) using pen and paper.
I read some novels. Currently reading A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, his memoir covering becoming president of the US, and the majority of his first term.
I see in these last few months an emphasis on news media and politics, which I think is one ingredient in where I'm going next. The other note being fiction. So I am considering the two projects of analysis of news and fiction from an MSL/VMH perspective.
23 April 2026
I find myself beginning to see problems with extended MSL, and also the motivation to fix them. So it's time to start making "patches" of it. These are not necessarily as high-quality as Formulalessness and previous Following posts. With those, I tended to try to think through everything I could, really engaging my brain. But my brain is tired now, and will not lift burdens the same way. However, hopefully these patches help answer some questions (even if they open up new ones). I don't see myself going at a rapid pace in fixing things, and I don't intend to push myself to look for flaws, for instance by re-reading previous posts of the blog. If you think you find a flaw, see my page for MSL problems and solutions, which has a link for submitting problems.
24 April 2026
I have had a hard time identifying myself as a Christian, over the last few years. Identity is not necessarily about truth. My views on the truth of Christianity are basically the same as in Formulalessness. I think philosophy suggests the Bible may be true, with some force. It supports some distinctively Christian doctrines. Exactly how true this makes Christianity, I haven't done the work to say. I don't rely on the Bible or the truth as independent authorities. But identity is more about, would I vote for Christianity if it was on the ballot. Or, am I on "team Christianity"? Notably, for me to do this, I have to make the scenario in which the truth says Christianity is untrue, and I identify with that fact, somehow part of Christian identity. I don't want to abandon the truth, whatever it is, and I think overall that is the wrong thing to do.
I have been comfortable saying "I would be classified as a Christian by non-Christians" (perhaps by scholars of religion). But until now, I have not been comfortable saying I was a Christian. Most Christians are not willing to say they are Christians if "being Christian" can mean just anything. Here are two conditions (there may be more I'm not aware of in this moment) which, if satisfied, allow me to say I'm a Christian, a version of Christianity I would vote for, whether it turned out to be true or not. These conditions are in contrast to my overall experience of the Christian world I've participated in. (Probably there are conditions I would make that I'm less aware of, which were assumed by that world.)
1. Christianity as a form of Judaism. I'm not primarily interested in things like obeying the Mosaic law, more so here the mentality of people living in exile, particularly their ability to see, conceive of, remember, and talk about unhappiness, mourning, defeat, and tragedy, as well as patience and survival, the ability to keep going despite not winning. Christianity as contrasted with Judaism lends itself to triumphalism and toxic positivity. Also, there is a distinctive but not necessarily good element to Christianity which can be seen in cultures that put grace over repentance. This keeps people mired in sinfulness longer than necessary and multiplies victims. I see less of this in Judaism. An extreme (that is, logically consistent) version of this grace culture is Calvinism, another one universalism, both of which VMH contradicts. (Though God is on "team universalism", the reality is that not everyone will necessarily be saved.)
2. Christianity as truth. The previous condition, I've been aware of for some time, but this is the new one that seems to put me over the line. Christianity can be seen as a family religion. For many, or most, it is. But when it was new, it was about truth. The truth is what it is -- may validate your existing beliefs, which hold together your community, or not. Christianity as truth opposes the practice of believing what you do because it is what the people you like believe. It is dangerous -- potentially alienating and producing conflict. Christianity as truth says "question Christianity" -- if it's true, then so much the better for it. Yet it also says "commit to Christianity if it's true", commit not to questioning, but to true belief and the process of seeking true belief. It says that Christianity needs to be good (in a good form) according to reality (God, and people's real situations), not according to definitions of goodness agreed on by the church (or by the secular world, for that matter). (Since "Christianity as truth" is a new thought to me, I may be leaving something out, but I think that's enough to get started.)
What do I do with this Christian identity? I'm not sure. I probably won't change much anytime soon, except feel more comfortable saying I'm a Christian.
27 April 2026
I gave up on this book partway through (toward the end of the first of two roughly equal-length parts). I did not maintain the momentum needed to get through. (The book has no chapters, just the two parts, and the prose is 19th century, not optimized for 21st century readability. I probably wouldn't have had a problem with it if I had read it straight through, but I found I couldn't pick it back up after a while off, had lost connection to what was going on.) From what I read, though, I recommend it.
According to the introduction by Adam Gopnik in the edition I read (2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition), the good characters (an altruistic secret society) are not believable. But perhaps the book is a form of speculative fiction, where human nature is like the ray guns or Mars of science fiction, the subject of speculation. Someday we may walk on Mars, someday unbelievable good characters may be real.
One moment was strangely good and recommended Balzac as a skilled writer. A character is seen as good and bad, back and forth, as more information is revealed.
The book discusses the backstories of its altruistic characters, showing how some altruistic people may come to altruism.
For all this, I will recommend this book, but only provisionally, since I quit partway through.
06 May 2026
I thought about it and decided not to pursue either the news or fiction analysis projects. I think I will take in the news, and read fiction, casually.
I'm reading The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham and have a few more books I might read. Perhaps I will add a philosophy book to the list.
06 May 2026
"That which exists should exist, unless it is sin" -- an MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle. This is a reason people are supposed to live forever, unless they wed themselves to sin permanently. Does this mean that every entity will live forever, as long as it's not sin? Every glimmer of light, every gust of wind, every speck of dust, every line at the grocery store?
Yes -- but, for impersonal beings, to be can be exhausted by being remembered. As long as God remembers them, they exist. Whereas for personal beings (humans, spirits, many or all animals), to be requires the ability to exercise free will.
A line at the grocery store, or a garden party, or the excited moment when an election is called, are things made up of personal beings. Do they exist just by being remembered? I think so. Does your past self exist as anything other than memory? I would say, no. So then those ephemeral personal states exist (once they have happened), as memory, and all they need to continue being is to be remembered.
I've said (IIRC) that God's memory is static, like frames of a film. So the gust of wind from yesterday does not exist in the sense that he necessarily experiences it blowing all the time. But it does exist in a suspended state, like we do when we sleep.
What about heaven? In extended MSL, the existence of heaven (as in, the final state of rest for God and those in tune with him) is everlasting, but only because God erases its contents periodically to free up experience bubbles. This destroys at least some entities (glimmers of light, I would presume). This is necessary for personal beings to be able to exercise, act out, their free will. Perhaps another MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle is that "The impersonal exists to serve the personal". The glimmers of light in heaven exist to serve the personal beings who see them, so that the personal beings can live. Some people need glimmers of light to be who they are (their final identities include being poets, cinematographers, or illustrators, for instance). Eating plants, building things out of metal and wood, etc. is OK. The glimmers of light can be "eaten" (annihilated for the purpose of a personal being). Further, impersonal beings are just part of some or many personal beings, likely God if no one else. (In that every object is an experience experienced by a person, and thus is part of their experience body.) For a personal being to change in what they are in heaven is OK. (So the metaphysical/ethical principle is "Change is OK if it is not change into sin".)
An animist might see in plants, even in metal, some kind of spirit of its own, apart from a human, angel, demon, God, etc. Extended MSL may not be able to rule that out. However, we might say that even if pieces of metal have spirits, glimmers of light don't. We would just suppose that the number of personal beings was considerably bigger than previously supposed. (Personal identity: when does the material in a piece of metal receive the spirit and thus really become a piece of metal? If you melt two pieces of metal together, do you get one spirit? Personal identity in extended MSL might be worth discussing elsewhere, although I don't plan to pursue it unless doing so helps deal with a problem I become aware of in extended MSL.) However, I think that if you go far enough in saying that things that you can sensorily or noetically see must all have their own spirits, are all personal beings, you eventually get to a point where you can create spirits just by, for instance, counting higher than anyone else has counted (bringing new numbers into being). If you do this enough in heaven, you might create spirits that didn't exist before heaven started, and eventually if people (or pieces of metal) do this enough, there will not be enough experience bubbles left to keep heaven going, assuming you can't destroy sinless spirits.
Possible workarounds: the obvious one is that animism must have its limits. Much of the spirit in the natural (or noetic) world, which some would call impersonal, but which animists see as personal, is really God. He is the spirit of the trees, metal, and glimmers of light. Another thought is that there are a finite number of spirits, but they are incarnated in multiple forms over time. Possibly, when a dog dies, its spirit sleeps until entering into a new dog body. Another possibility is that things that are very numerous, like ants, or numbers, have one spirit (maybe one per ant colony, and one for all conceived-of integers, one for all conceived-of real numbers, etc., or just one for all conceived-of numbers of any sort), this spirit connecting to many bodies. When we conceive of a number no one ever has before, perhaps it is the case that the number spirit grows a new limb, which is just a new part of it, not a new spirit.
(I see myself using "metaphysical/ethical" -- in MSL, to be is to ought to be, and thus metaphysics can be about "what God should do with reality, and will, if possible".)
(There could be a "finite/ethical" problem (a problem for finite personal beings, not a metaphysical/ethical problem for the Universal being), around knowing which things we're allowed to use, which are really impersonal. We should do our best with the evidence we have, I guess -- this is more or less an empirical problem. Weird outcome of this idea: we might think it's a bit more likely that plants have spirits than chemicals do, and replace our vegan diets with chemicals.)
06 May 2026
Living enables repentance. Those who get insufficient time to live may have insufficient time to complete their repentance. If you die at age 5, you don't get as much time in this life as someone who dies at age 80. You get the 1,000 years of the Millennium just as they do, but the lost 75 years is significant (if there's literally 1,000 years, that's about 7% of the time you could have had).
That's (I think) about how I say things are in Formulalessness. But it occurs to me, maybe God would just give people who die at age 5 a head start on the Millennium. They could be resurrected 75 years earlier than those who live to be 80.
On first inspection, this looks rational, and I'm not sure why God wouldn't do that (or enact some other plan that also gives people time to make up for dying young).
Any problem just saying that? It takes away somewhat from the moral weight of working to prolong people's lives. It's still good to help people live longer if your brain is part atheist as I think is the case with many believers -- the atheist in you doesn't believe people live beyond this life. (Or maybe you aren't an atheist, but like the author of Ecclesiastes, you are a theist who believes that there is no afterlife.) It's also good to practice respect for that which exists, which should continue existing forever unless it is sin. (That opens the question of "does that mean that gusts of wind, specks of dust, garden parties, and other small and ephemeral things should last forever?" -- something to consider in another post.)
(This leaves aside purely deontological issues like, suppose murder or failing to help people live longer just are wrong -- somehow we know that. Extended MSL does factor in deontology. The thing that we need to maximize (consequentialism) -- holiness -- contains deontology in it, which may be known, at least to a significant degree. This knowledge of what deontology demands or recommends is not something I think I can necessarily derive from the first principles of extended MSL, but there are a lot of real things that I can't derive that way, which must be known through some kind of other observation. Likewise there are pragmatic concerns: how can you have a society with murder, or without people helping each other live longer?)
The Bible (I think, maybe) makes it sound like everyone is resurrected at once. At least, that's the impression remaining in my brain from when I read about this topic in New Wine for the End Times. So if that's the case, that would be a reason to think that people who die young get less time to develop spiritually than those who live a "full" number of years.
The Bible seems to give some support to the idea that there can be some kind of "awakeness" after death but before the Resurrection, at least in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Maybe both the rich man and Lazarus died before age 80? (Or whatever age is the real standard.) So then they got some time to catch up, before going back to "sleep", awaiting the Resurrection.
The way that all makes it sound, it sounds unlikely, but still maybe possible, that people won't have their lifespans corrected by getting extra time before the Resurrection, or something like that. (I can't think of a reason from extended MSL, and I can think of reasons for and against from the Bible, given above). In case it still matters, it lends some weight to the idea that extending people's lives gives them a better chance of being saved from hell, and thus some additional weight on acting like that's true. There are other reasons for acting that way (respecting the preservation of personal beings, behaving like a good atheist since in a way we often tend to be atheists / non-afterlife theists, and deontology).
06 May 2026
For finite beings (like us) our experience bodies (the total of what we can experience, affecting and being affected thereby) is (as far as I know, for humans at least) one experience bubble (unit of unified experience, what we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, intuit, and imagine at once in the present moment). But in theory it could be more than one, if some finite being can experience in more than 3+1 dimensions. It could be possible to experience two 3+1 dimensional experience bubbles if there is a fourth dimension to separate and hold in the same frame the two 3+1 dimensional bubbles. The Universal person's experience body consists of multiple experience bubbles (one for each creature's experience bubble / experience body, plus a number of others, for instance to be an effective Speaker and Universal person of Legitimacy).
I feel like I have sometimes used "experience body" to refer to "experience bubble" -- a warning. Hopefully the right meaning can be inferred from context.
11 May 2026
Recently I suggested that God would give everyone an extension on the Millennium if they didn't happen to get a full life on earth in this life. I thought there was nothing in extended MSL against it. But I was forgetting two principles: evil beings could negotiate against that outcome, and God might allow the risk to exist because we need to take some responsibility for the salvation of others. Some things are guaranteed by God, and some aren't, and this extension may go either way.
It can't be the case that at creation you get no chance to be saved, so we must have some kind of Millennium, since very few if any of us are holy enough for heaven at the end of this life. We have to live some amount of time. Missing out on a little bit of life (a bit, or even a lot, of our ~80 years) might be allowed by God. Whereas missing out on a lot (a lot of our 1,000 years, if that is literally how much time we get in the Millennium) would not be allowed by God. I suppose this means that fairness may not be guaranteed, but (significant) opportunity is.
23 July 2026
It now seems like a good idea for me to do fiction analysis. The project I have in mind is to try to describe what "MSLian fiction" would look like if it existed. Detective fiction is about detectives, professionals who can be outsiders to the case they take on (maybe usually are), who intervene in others' life stories (of victims, perpetrators, falsely accused, and the legal system). MSLians as well are professional outsiders, dropped into various contexts.
Why do this project now? Like Dostoyevsky and Balzac, I pay my debts with words. I don't worry about money, like they did, but writing helps me promote myself. I find a poverty in me toward most forms of seeking attention and social connection. But a relative wealth in me of writing, which can feed those functions. This project, specifically, helps me to solicit attention from literary people.
It occurs to me that literary people may make my best audience. (I didn't really think of this until very recently.) At least, they might, for a few reasons. One is that everything I write is at least a bit literary (my non-fiction may on a low level sometimes not seem literary, but if taken as a whole it is, I think). My voice is more "literary" than it is "analytic philosophy". People follow, trust, and distrust voices as much as content. I think the "analytic philosophy people" (such as philosophy of religion people and effective altruists) might not be able to trust what I do because of its literary dimensions. Also, I feel like for philosophy fans, I might seem like a lightweight, or like I haven't jumped through the hoops necessary to convince them, whereas for literary people, my writing is adequate in "perfection" (in the sense of "fullness", being completed enough to be a literary work).
The most obvious audience for my writing is religious people, of course, because religion is more central to my writing than being literary and philosophical. However, religious people, often, the more serious they are as people, the more invested they are in their current religions. So the very people who are most resonant with religious language, and most ethically serious, may be among the most natural opponents of MSL. Literary people may at least find value in my writing, though many might not be interested in joining a religion.
Something new to me about this project is the feeling of ambivalence I have toward it. My previous writing ventures have all felt clearly necessary, or sometimes if less necessary, at least clearly OK and desirable to work on. But this (after two days at it) feels like a job, something I really don't feel like doing, but which I show up to, my brain warmed up to it, fortunately so far not burning out on it. There are other things I would rather be doing, and I think when my social situation permits it, that is likely what I'll switch to.
23 July 2026
The philosophy in this seems valid, but I haven't thought it through.
Why is there evil in the world? Why?
"Why?" can be asked to find out facts, to build a worldview. It can also be asked as a cry of the heart.
Is there a pat answer for why there is evil in the world, an intellectually satisfying one? Perhaps. I think so. All it takes is for God to have to negotiate with evil beings, and for beings to have the free will to be evil.
Yet, the cry of the heart remains. And then I question some more. Is there ever really a reason for why free-willed beings choose evil? Free will is not determined by reasons. No, all free choices of evil are done for no reason. Similarly, all free choices of good are done for no reason. But the heart does not cry out "why" about the free choices of good, so there tends not to be the unanswered question "Why is there good in the world? Why?".
18 August 2026
Reading this post by Joseph Rahi, I was reminded by him of Nietzsche's idea that philosophies reflect the personalities of the philosophers who come up with them or espouse them. Rahi describes the links between his personality and his philosophy. MSL does reflect some of my tastes and values, which I had before developing it. Could Rahi (or any number of other people with various philosophical tastes) ever accept MSL, or would it simply not interest them, not appeal to them to even think about? Maybe they would think about it from a conversation online which forced them to consider it for a time, think about it a bit, but never really get into it.
I can't change MSL much (without making it something it's not), but I think it might be possible to at least bridge some of this aesthetic and gustatory gap by a project of explicit interrelationship with the philosophies of the world. For instance, literally writing footnotes to Plato (in the text of a public domain ebook, perhaps) from an MSLian perspective, or footnotes to Aristotle, Plotinus, etc. all the way down to the present. What would be the MSL response to the distinction between formal, material, efficient, and final causes? To non-cognitivism? To questions about the authenticity of the self? To Platonic Forms? To what extent must these things be argued against by MSL, and to what extent can they be folded into it?
I don't think I have the brain for this right now, but someone who liked philosophy and was into MSL could work on something like this. The benefit would be to reach a philosophically literate audience (for each philosopher, a subset of their audience), which is a niche audience, but I think that MSL could specialize in niche audiences, rather than only trying to reach a large number of people, and as MSL is based in a natural theology, the philosophically literate (thus philosophically formed, educated, opinionated, and even prejudiced) may end up being a big part of those who adopt MSL.
18 August 2026
With the luxury of foresight (where I can imagine anything, since nothing has happened), I see a potential for "men's MSL" and "women's MSL". I wouldn't use these terms, since I don't want to be the one to institute a gendered expression of MSL, but they are inherited from Leila Ahmed's "men's Islam" and "women's Islam" (from her memoir A Border Passage). For her, "women's Islam" comes about because women did not go to the main mosque meetings, didn't hear the sermons, and generally didn't study the various official Islamic texts. Some, but not all, men did. So while the men focused on what the texts said, the women focused on what they remembered of the Quran, discussing it with each other as they tried to understand their lives, dealing with the problems that their various relationships presented to them. This Islam "stresses moral conduct and emphasizes Islam as a broad ethos and ethical code and as a way of understanding and reflecting on the meaning of one's life and of human life more generally." (p. 125 of the paperback edition from 2000, in ch. 5)
My interpretation: "men's religion" is about law, structure, doctrine, and apologetics. "What is the content of texts?", defending texts, proving which text is correct. Defending the flag, the beliefs, the culture, from those who might deceitfully or violently oppose them. Whereas, in my interpretation, "women's religion" takes some kind of text as given (in Ahmed's world, the remembered Quran, but perhaps similarly in Christian contexts the remembered Bible) and then tries to live according to it, its practitioners adjusting their understanding of the text as necessary because of what it takes to live it in the particulars of life.
I think that my writing up until now has often emphasized "men's MSL", certainly that's broadly what Formulalessness and the MSL and VMH booklets are all about. But resonance with something like "women's MSL" I think is more common among people. It occurs to me that perhaps better, less-gendered names for the two are "epistemic MSL" (what do we believe? what should we believe? let's believe it) and "ethical MSL" (what is the right thing to do? how should we do it? let's do it). Some minds are given to abstraction and learning, while others are given to action. I have been hesitant to be the one to write "how-tos" for MSL, largely because deep understanding (of MSL beliefs and the way the world works) should enable anyone to act in as MSLian a way as they could. To follow a how-to without understanding doesn't work in the long run, as how-tos become obsolete and to correct them requires your own contact with reality, and how-tos that are adequate for someone with the wisdom to interpret them correctly may not be adequate for those who have not built up their understanding, but who may naively try to work them as formulas anyway.
"Women's Islam" sounds like it involves a social, conversational form of building understanding. I can imagine someday MSLians meeting together, when they meet for mutual support, talking over their lives, the people groups they're embedded in, how things are going in their lives as missionaries and in the lives of those they find themselves sent to. What is the right thing to do? What is the MSLian thing to do? What is the MSLian worldview? Holistic tendencies in me want the "men's religion" to be integrated with the "women's religion". "Worldview" is a "men's" term, yet worldview is at least implicit in "women's" reasoning.
"Women's religion" can be very textual, in one sense. A book club involves talking over life stories -- fictional, in the case of a novel. I see a parallel between reading fiction or memoir and discussing it in a group and the discussions between the female family members of Ahmed, where they discuss the problems in the lives of their family members and servants. Book club members sometimes engage in moral analysis, and could easily try to imagine themselves in situations like those of the protagonists of the books they read. Perhaps the literary world is a textual equivalent or expression of "women's religion" (or "ethical religion"), while philosophical, theological, and political texts relate to "men's religion" (or "epistemic religion").
(Literary criticism could be on either side of the "women's/men's" divide, sometimes about the text, and sometimes about life.)
Reading texts of narratives, particularly realistic, contemporary ones (although not necessarily exclusively those), and discussing them, as though they are real situations that MSLians must enter into, could be a "ethical religious" MSLian practice.
MSL so far is mostly locked up in philosophy. Many people can't or don't want to digest philosophy. (I can sympathize.) But narrative (even containing philosophy, if properly digested), is easier for people to take in. The Bible is much more successful than the Summa Theologiae. The Summa is considered a nice addition to the Bible, but the Bible is necessary and prior. But with MSL, the opposite is the case. The philosophy comes first -- so what is there for narrative? I've considered reading MSL into the Bible, and maybe someday I will. But it may be just as appropriate to develop the narrative side of MSL using contemporary texts.
I feel that my MSLian literary analysis project, as much as I've done so far, is turning out to be a kind of monologue version of an MSLian book club, an "ethical MSL" project. I wouldn't want it to be a replacement for such a thing (not a replacement for various MSLians talking over narratives themselves), nor am I totally at ease thinking about how it might end up being a bit too much of a "how to" in some sense. But I may need to keep writing so that I have material that might interest readers, and I guess I will have to live with the fact that I'm at least somewhat treading into "how to" territory.
I suppose all kinds of ethical and practical things could be written by MSLians, and generally speaking, I wouldn't object to them being written. But if I write something related to MSL, it's likely to be seen as being more official than what someone else writes in that space. Perhaps it's self-evident that, for a religion based in reason, things that (truly) follow from first principles are more solid (and thus naturally official) than things that involve guesswork, personal experience, and so on, which others might more validly question from their own, different perspectives. Literary analysis involves seeing things in a human way, not in the alien way of philosophy, to see with your self, and to guess what it's like to be someone else (someone you have never been). I could at least put a disclaimer on my literary analysis project saying that what I'm writing there is not meant to be official, the less it is rooted in some kind of more or less rigorous philosophy.
Is it then the case that an epistemic (or "men's") religion is superior to an ethical (or "women's") one, since philosophy is more official than narrative writing? One could say that the epistemic should be deferred to in epistemic matters, and the ethical in ethical matters. But even the ethical has something to say to epistemic questions, since knowledge of the particular, practical, embodied, etc. is knowledge. (I think it's obvious that the epistemic should inform the ethical in what the ethical does.) Philosophy has its strong points (talking about universals) and its weak points (talking about particulars, talking about human life). I don't know how to prove the existence of God using narrative, something which I think philosophy is capable of. On the other hand, knowing what it's like to be God requires a more narrative type of thinking. Generally, philosophy is good at providing some kinds of information, while narrative is good at providing other kinds. Life without narrative is a "mistake", but so is life without philosophy.
(The guesswork and personal perspective of ethical religious thinking is part of what's good about it. You are the one who guesses, and your perspective is called into question as you use it to make sense of other people and their situations. It changes you in a way that sometimes (often?) philosophical knowledge doesn't change those who possess or obtain it.)
20 August 2026
Paul Vander Klay is a Christian Reformed minister who has a YouTube channel connected more or less loosely with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke. I've watched his channel for a few years on and off, drawn to his video titles on subjects that interest me.
Vander Klay could be seen as being in the tradition of Reformed pastor-theologians (in his case, more "pastor-cultural-commentators"), and one of his influences is Tim Keller, another in that tradition. Vander Klay's channel is largely about relating the church to itself (Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox) and society. It's also about the interface between Christianity and non-Christianity. The channel is part of a community ("TLC") which Vander Klay founded (or co-founded? I don't remember clearly), which drew together people orbiting Peterson, often enough people on the edges of Christianity and non-Christianity, so that they had conversations with each other about religion and life. Vander Klay has a sort of in-person version of this, called Estuary, which meets in multiple cities. (The metaphor of saltwater meeting freshwater.) Vander Klay makes a point of interviewing "randos" (ordinary people without Internet standing, I guess), talking about their life stories. Some of his videos are of him rehearsing sermons for his day job. Otherwise, Vander Klay's videos are usually him speaking improvisationally, somewhat like Andy Edwards.
Both Vander Klay and Edwards are older and come from professions with an educational and pastoral element (Edwards being a music teacher). They both have a base of knowledge that they can draw on on the fly. Both of them could be seen as cultural critics ("critic" in the sense of "literary criticism", someone who speaks about culture, considers it from different angles, traces influences, etc.). Vander Klay has ADHD and he is curious, sociable, and disorganized to some extent. Vander Klay has worked as a missionary, and comes from a ministry family. Vander Klay has opinions, but presents them with a light touch, sometimes speaking in a way which seemingly avoids presenting his opinion, avoiding conflict.
I find myself drifting into scenes/followings that are conservative in some sense, but aesthetically inclined. When I was young, Francis Schaeffer (another Reformed pastor-theologian) fit the bill. Much more recently, the "Christian humanists" (or whatever the name of that scene is, kind of like a more Catholic version of the aesthetic conservative idea). I'm not so much a fan of Jordan Peterson, but he fits that (conservative, but wears custom suits that are trying to express an aesthetic), and Vander Klay orbits Peterson somewhat. There is a kind of political conservatism (maybe more British than American) that I think connects -- don't change old things if you don't have to. While I try not to have mainstream political opinions, the idea of working with rather than against nature, working with existing institutions rather than razing them to the ground, does appeal to me. (Nature and tradition have a certain aesthetic quality to them.)
I'm not sure what to think of this. Is that the box I should put myself in? I might be OK saying something like "my loyalty is not to conservatism or progressivism, but my search for truth may lead me to agree with conservatives sometimes". These "aesthetic conservatives" have the virtue of typically being more humane than some other right-wing movements. Truth-seeking should probably lead to a somewhat moderate view (because listening to many different voices to draw them into one truth should moderate you somewhat, or a lot), and I think these aesthetic conservatives tend to reach into both Christian and secular culture, maybe being aesthetically liberal or secular, while religiously conservative.
Aesthetic conservatism may seem like a comfortable setting. I could see the label applying to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I grew up in a basically aesthetic conservative movement, Tolkien and Lewis Christianity (along with other influences). It's hard to see anything wrong with it in itself (maybe because of my temperament and formation). However, considering movements and thoughts from outside that mindset, I think that seeking the truth means that you must sometimes leave behind the past, and even beauty. Trying to be true to the truth is what leads to doing things in the real world. Trying to be true to the truth produces seriousness. I think secular effective altruism (despite its failings), models this better than the aesthetic conservatisms that I've known.
I see Vander Klay as a window into a certain kind of world I'm interested in: Christianity (particularly theologically-conservative Christianity), non-Christian religions and spirituality (as he understands them from a Christian background), politics, society. In that he fills the role of a journalist. I also see Vander Klay as an example of what people can do to make the Internet (and IRL community) better. Imitating him in different social scenes (the Estuary movement has a training manual you might be able to reference; or you could watch his channel to pick up on how he does things online) could help take diffuse interest groups (e.g. various corners of the Internet, like LitStack and PhilStack (literary Substack and philosophical Substack)) and make them more self-conscious and self-aware, "keep score", and also promote genuine friendship amid intellectual scenes that can often by default be about discourse rather than substantive human connection. His emphasis on conversation is an interesting counterpoint to typical Internet culture, and becoming pastoral, as he is, may be helpful to those who are intellectual.
I think that a loose parallel can be drawn between Peterson and Vander Klay on the one hand, and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander on another. Peterson and Yudkowsky being similarly dark, weird, and dramatic, the founders, while Vander Klay and Alexander are the more reasonable community builders and popularizers. Both Vander Klay and Alexander have that "journalist of a subculture and of society at large" element to what they do.