flâneur

The Unimagined Good

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This essay is about moral imagination as a design practice, including my own unresolved confrontation with one of its results. Posted to both my Substack and my notebook – comments are open at both, and I'd love to hear your thoughts! And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? – Robert Pirsig, inspired by Plato One of my favourite places is the St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood of San Francisco. It's unassuming from the outside. You enter to see a dome ringed with shining life-size saints, all dancing. If you look closely, you realize these are not the usual Christian saints. You see Rumi, Mohandas Gandhi, Anne Frank, Charles Darwin, Paul Erdős, and more, a generous, expansive notion of sainthood: The Church is named for a bishop of the long-vanished town of Nyssa, in what is now Turkey. In his own time, Gregory was a small-town bishop, peripheral to affairs of the Church. He wrote several books,

This essay is about moral imagination as a design practice, including my own unresolved confrontation with one of its results. Posted to both my Substack and my notebook – comments are open at both, and I'd love to hear your thoughts! And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? – Robert Pirsig, inspired by Plato One of my favourite places is the St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood of San Francisco. It's unassuming from the outside. You enter to see a dome ringed with shining life-size saints, all…

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