About The Moral Hinge

This publication sits at the intersection of two questions I have spent thirty years living inside without fully naming: What does the Christian tradition actually demand of economic life? And why has it been so consistently unable to demand it of itself?

I came to those questions the long way. Eight years as Chief Clerk of the Committee on Rules of the United States House of Representatives — inside the machinery of democratic governance. A stretch in defense contracting. Twenty years in corporate leadership, most recently as a Regional Director. I was formed by those institutions in the precise way this project has been trying to describe: competent, buffered, and largely insulated from the full weight of what the systems I served were producing.

I am now pursuing a Master of Christian Leadership at Leland Theological Seminary, with a vocational horizon in hospice chaplaincy and care ministry — which is to say, I am in the process of redirecting thirty years of systems-level experience toward the people those systems have most consistently failed to count.

The Moral Hinge began as a book — a history of how the Christian tradition moved from Basil of Caesarea’s insistence that the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, to the comfortable accommodation that most of us inhabit today. It became a Substack because the argument needed more room than a manuscript allows, and because the people I most want in this conversation are not primarily in the academy.

The publication works across three investigative threads:

The Imperial Hinge looks back to the eighth and ninth centuries — the era of Charlemagne, Pope Leo, and the Abbasid Caliphate — to examine how these parallel empires codified the legal and religious identities that still define the East-West divide today. The fractures of that moment are not ancient history. They are the architecture of the present.

The Secular Imaginary draws on Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Jürgen Habermas to ask how the modern social imaginary — the background understanding of what is real, what is possible, and what counts as a serious claim on how we live — replaced a world saturated with sacred obligation with one in which that obligation has become, at best, a personal preference.

The Ledger and the Lectern applies thirty years of business and policy experience to the business of religion — tracing the theological shift from the radical communalism of the early Church Fathers to the systemic roots of modern income inequality, and asking what honest engagement with that history requires of those of us who still inhabit the tradition.

If you are a Christian trying to think honestly about money, inequality, and what faithfulness actually requires — not the comfortable version, but the version that presses on the whole structure of life — this is for you.

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