This is a workshop, not a feed. What follows is the intellectual space the work lives in, and the shape of what it will become.
The question
Why do our tools, which promised to connect us, keep making us more alike and more divided at the same time? Why does every new platform for expression flatten what it expresses, and why does every attempt at unity seem to require someone to be cast out?
Three thinkers frame the answer this project works with.
Girard: what we desire
René Girard argued that human desire is not spontaneous but borrowed. We learn what to want from models, and when a model becomes a rival, desire turns mimetic and rivalrous. Societies in such a crisis — a crisis of undifferentiation, where everyone wants the same things and no one can say why — have historically manufactured a counterfeit unity: they unite against a scapegoat. The mob finds peace by agreeing, together, on whom to expel.
Ellul: how desire is organized and amplified
Jacques Ellul named the system that organizes this desire Technique: the totality of methods rationally arrived at for absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. In the modern world, Technique has merged with mimesis. It industrializes the scapegoat mechanism, turns efficiency itself into the ultimate rivalrous object, and flattens human persons into standardized data points. The algorithm does not invent envy; it optimizes it.
The One and the Many: the horizon of true communion
Against the counterfeit unities of the Technical Collective and the scapegoating mob, classical Trinitarian theology offers the only ontology in which unity and particularity do not destroy one another. In perichoresis — the mutual indwelling of the Persons — the One (unity of essence) and the Many (irreducible particularity) mutually establish each other. Difference is not a problem to be solved by expulsion or by standardization. It is the shape of communion itself.
The ecclesiological crucible
This lens is turned, deliberately, on the three great branches of Christendom — Rome, Constantinople, and Geneva. Each tradition’s Trinitarian starting point shapes its vision of the One and the Many, and each is uniquely vulnerable to using Technique (bureaucracy, rubricism, pragmatic marketing) and mimetic scapegoating (inquisition, ethnophyletism, schism) as prosthetics for the Holy Spirit. The question is not which branch is innocent. It is what each one reveals about the rest of us.
What this becomes
The flagship deliverable of this research will be The Weight of Paper: a print-only monograph series, published twice a year, twenty to fifty pages an issue, made to be held, marked, and kept. No feed, no infinite scroll, no engagement metrics. The inaugural arc runs five issues: counterfeit unity; the engine of our division; the machine that optimizes envy; the ecclesiological crucible; and a liturgy of inefficiency.
Until the first issue is ready for press, the work happens here, in public, on The Workbench — short essays, reading notes, and exegetical deep dives, published freely as the research takes shape.
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