My hope is to hook up with some human beings or foundations who would like to help me to continue constructing an intellectually and empirically respectable worldview for sacramental Christians. The established Christian intellectual and artistic institutions aren’t nearly doing the job. I addressed this issue in a post back in 2014: We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, where I wrote:
It takes a flexible mind, one which can shape itself to empirical knowledge, to understand Creation by the best standards of any age. In fact, there are few with minds flexible enough to work across a variety of fields of knowledge and they don’t seem much welcome in established institutions. See one of my essays from 2008, Ways of Thought in the Modern West, for a discussion of some insights which the historian Carroll Quigley expressed in The Evolution of Civilizations (reprinted by Liberty Fund). In Quigley’s view, instruments grow up in new civilizations to serve various needs, including pure and applied science in recent centuries. Over time, these instruments tend to rigidify into self-serving institutions which exclude those who can solve the serious problems which will rise eventually. There is now no reason, nor was there ever a reason, to believe that the physical sciences would be immune from this process, this rigidification into institutions which defend themselves rather than seeking truth or serving a greater cause or an entity such as a civilization or the Christian Church.
I also claimed:
And there is no unified understanding of our world, certainly not one which sets it in the context of a greater Creation—unless my understanding proves to be good enough to found a new Christian Civilization or revive the decrepit West.
Put it all together and we see a decaying ex-Christian civilization, including the decaying Christian churches which are accepting their role as (mostly) loyal (not so much) opposition. This sad excuse for a civilization and the corresponding sad excuses for Christian churches are particularly sad because of what it means for the next generations. As matters stand, those churches and Western civilization as a whole are putting vast resources into institutions which aren’t doing the job of producing a viable understanding of even the most concrete levels of empirical reality and don’t seem to have the faith or courage to even try to do the job.
At the very least, I’m trying to do the job. I think I’ve made substantial progress in that job which is really that of building a new understanding of all of Creation, abstract created being as well as concrete created being.
So it is that I’m on Patreon.com, a site set up to help individual or small-group `artists’ to get some cash from patrons who appreciate their work. I don’t know how to use this system and might go for another fundraising method instead, but anyone inclined to check out my Patreon website can go to my Patreon page. That page is very basic for now—my primary efforts will always be found at this website, Acts Of Being.
I suspect or imagine that many of my readers are students or are in a similar situation as me—marginalized in our the secularized West and inside a Christianity increasingly part of that secularized West. I’m not looking for anyone to sacrifice so I can live better. I do hope that those who have some surplus of worldly goods, individuals and institutions, and which have been reading my essays or downloading my books will be willing to share some of that surplus to keep me going. I would use funds to help keep me to work more effectively and that would include some improvement in what looks to be a life of genteel poverty, but would also include money to buy books, computers, and other supplies. I would also like to be able to travel a little bit, mainly to visit and speak to those who might be getting some good out of my writings. Maybe, I could even help out those who are heading further than me or in a slightly different direction. Use your imaginations on how my mission might grow with some funds and what that might mean for reviving Christian civilization a little sooner than would seem likely as matters stand.