I Am Writing This on Severance
On the economics of Christian faithfulness, and the ledger that doesn't wait for you to leave it on your own terms.
I should say, before anything else, where I am standing while I write this.
I have spent thirty years inside the systems that the Christian tradition has always had the most ambivalent relationship with. Eight years as Chief Clerk of the Committee on Rules of the United States House of Representatives — moving within the machinery of public power, administering the procedural life of democratic governance. A period in defense contracting, where the ledger measured obligation in deliverables and bid cycles. And then twenty years in the corporate world, most recently as a Regional Director, where the metrics of success were clear, the expectations legible, and the moral weight of economic inequality was something I encountered in the reports I filed rather than in the face of anyone I was accountable to.
I was not a villain in this story. I was formed by it — buffered, competent, useful to the system, and largely insulated, by design, from the full weight of what the system produced.
I had been planning a transition. Not a dramatic renunciation, but a deliberate turn toward the caregiving community: housing security, food access, eldercare, the work of tending to people the market has largely stopped counting. I had begun a Master of Christian Leadership at Leland Theological Seminary. I had started imagining what it would look like to bring thirty years of systems-level experience into human-centered care rather than regional revenue targets. The turn felt, finally, like faithfulness catching up to aspiration.
Then the company eliminated my role. I am writing this on severance.
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I offer this not as complaint, and not as testimony to my own virtue — the involuntary nature of what has happened makes virtue-claiming particularly absurd. I offer it because the argument I have been making across these posts demands that the person making it account for where he stands.
I stand here: admiring Basil of Caesarea, moved by Francis of Assisi, convicted by Dorothy Day, instructed by Mother Teresa — and still working out what it means that I spent two decades inside the structures I have been critiquing, that I was good at it, that I was rewarded for it, and that the system’s decision to dispense with my services arrived at precisely the moment I was preparing to dispense with it.
The ledger, it turns out, does not wait for you to leave it on your own terms.
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The argument of these posts has been building toward a specific claim: that the Christian tradition has not failed to address economic inequality so much as it has systematically displaced the question — moving it from the moral center of Christian life to its margins, where it can be acknowledged without generating the disruption that once made it unavoidable.
I have written that argument from a position I have not fully named until now. I am not a historian observing the displacement from the outside. I am a person who has inhabited it — professionally, institutionally, and with considerable comfort — and who is now, for reasons partly chosen and partly not, standing at an edge that makes certain things harder to look away from than they were before.
This is not the place for a settled verdict on what this moment means. But it is the place to be honest about what it has clarified.
Four figures keep returning as I try to think honestly about what faithful response looks like. Not because they solved the problem — none of them did. But because each one refused to manage it.
Basil of Caesarea liquidated. The inheritance went to build the Basileias — the hospital, the hospice, the shelter outside Caesarea. He did not write from comfort about the obligations of surplus; he divested and built. And yet Basil was also a bishop managing donor relationships. He needed the wealthy patrons his hospital depended upon, and he knew it. His radicalism was real and it was also constrained. He is not useful here because he succeeded. He is useful because he did not use the bind as a permanent excuse to stop pressing.
Francis of Assisi tried to escape the bind entirely. Radical poverty, no property, no institution — the full refusal. And then watched the institution grow up around him anyway. The Franciscan order became wealthy within a generation of his death. His solution did not hold at scale; he knew it would not; he tried anyway. The testimony is worth making even if it cannot be institutionalized.
Dorothy Day kept going. She kept writing, kept opening the door, kept sitting inside the condition she was describing without resolving it into either despair or triumphalism. Her testimony is that the tension is where faithfulness lives — not on the other side of it, but inside it, every day, with whatever you have and whoever shows up.
Mother Teresa built the institution, watched it accumulate the weight of its own administration, and near the end of her life moved to dissolve the corporate structure and return to the founding act. Not reform. Return. The structures built to preserve faithfulness are always means, never ends. When they begin functioning as ends in themselves, the faithful response is not restructuring but return.
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What these four together give this argument is not a program. It is a form of company for a difficult road.
And the difficulty is real. The care the tradition calls for extends well beyond charitable money. Philanthropic giving that doubles as a tax strategy is not what Basil had in mind when he insisted that the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry. It is the ancient accommodation in contemporary dress — the wealthy give, secure credit and a deduction simultaneously, and the underlying distribution remains untouched. This is not giving as restitution. It is giving as management.
The care the tradition envisions is relational before it is transactional. It requires presence, not just payment. The kind that knows the name of the person in need and sits with the weight of that knowledge, rather than routing the obligation through an institution designed to absorb it at a safe distance.
We have also built a culture that manufactures its moral exemplars from the highest-compensated — the athletes, the entertainers, the chief executives whose compensation is treated not as a moral question but as a market verdict. The market doesn’t just distribute resources. It distributes moral authority. And when the people modeling what a life can be are those whose worth has been certified by the market at the highest levels, the tradition’s most basic claim — that human worth is not established by the market’s verdict — is not argued against. It is simply rendered invisible by the weight of what the culture has decided to celebrate.
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The Hebrew scriptures have a word for the condition this produces. Śānēʼ — the word typically translated as “hate” — means, more precisely, to love less. To withhold the fullness of regard, attention, and obligation that love requires. The problem the Christian tradition has produced across seventeen centuries is not that it came to despise the poor. It loved them less — structurally, institutionally, and liturgically less. That is Śānēʼ. And it is, the tradition insists, the condition from which metanoia — the full renewal of the moral imagination — is the only adequate response.
The ledger does not wait for you to leave it on your own terms. I know this now in a way I did not know it a year ago. The question the tradition presses — the one it has been pressing for seventeen centuries, with varying degrees of force and consistency — is not whether you will eventually get around to faithfulness. It is what faithfulness requires of you today, in the position you actually occupy, with the resources you actually hold.
I am working on that answer. I am doing so on severance, with an MCL in progress, in the direction of care.
It is not a clean story. It is the only one I have.
Thank you for the pertinent reminder "The structures built to preserve faithfulness are always means, never ends. When they begin functioning as ends in themselves, the faithful response is not restructuring but return."