Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer
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Hi, I’m Jim. This Substack is where I share my thoughts on post-religion spirituality. After a crisis of faith and walking away from my former life as a megachurch superstar pastor, I rebuilt my life and cultivated an authentic and liberating non-religious spirituality.
This publication is named, “Deconstructionology”. Yes, it’s a word I made up. The term deconstruction means to disassemble something into its separate parts in order to understand it more deeply and meaningfully. The lived human experience is filled with all kinds of tensions, contradictions, nuances, lessons and complexities, which may not be apparent on the surface or through the lens through which we most familiarly see the world. Source
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesThe Spiritual Crisis Emergency Kit
There is a tension in writing something called The Spiritual Crisis Emergency Kit that I want to acknowledge. People whose religious worlds are falling apart often need help. They may need language for what is happening, some sense of orientation, and the reassurance that others have traveled through this territory. At the same time, many are leaving systems in which someone else claimed the authority to tell them what was true, who they were, how they should live, and what their questions meant.
What If This IS It?
There is a question that seems to find most of us eventually: Is this it? Sometimes we mean something enormous by it. Is this all there is? Is this brief human life the whole thing? Is there some deeper reality beneath what we can see, some larger meaning we have not yet discovered? But the question also finds us in much more ordinary places.
Conversations at the Edge (Part One)
There are people I have encountered through books whose ideas refuse to remain on the page. They disturb something. They expose an assumption I did not know I was making, give language to something I have experienced but never named, or challenge an idea I had grown too comfortable believing. This series is about those encounters. Conversations on the Edge is not an attempt to assemble a new spiritual canon or collect wisdom from different traditions into one comprehensive system.
Beginnerhood
Living in Costa Rica has made me a beginner again in ways I didn’t expect. I can write books, teach a room full of people, and spend an afternoon discussing religion, philosophy, psychology, mortality, meaning, and the peculiar predicament of being human. I have spent enough years doing certain things that I rarely have to think about how to do them anymore.
The Future Has No Map
Week in Review: September 14-19
The Existential Reformation
Religious reformations rarely begin because institutions decide it is time for renewal. They emerge when inherited structures no longer seem adequate to the world people are actually inhabiting. The Protestant Reformation challenged concentrations of ecclesial authority and transformed the relationship among scripture, church, and individual conscience.
When the Map Runs Out
This is the fourth installment of Conversations in Existential Health, a series in which I place my developing work in Existential Health into conversation with thinkers whose ideas unsettle, deepen, or complicate how we understand the experience of being human. The series began with Bayo Akomolafe and The World Is Still in the Middle of Itself, exploring what becomes possible when we stop treating reality as something already settled.
Living Unfinished
This is the third and final article in The Life That Is Yours, a series about authority, identity, and the difficult freedom of being human. Nobody Is Coming to Tell You Who YouAre explored what happens when we stop looking outside ourselves for the authority to define our lives. There Is No Final Version of You considered identity as something continually becoming rather than something we finally complete. This final article takes the next step.
What Are We Reconstructing?
For years, I have heard people describe the journey out of inherited religion with two words: deconstruction and reconstruction. The first word has acquired an entire literature around it. We have become increasingly sophisticated about what religious deconstruction involves, why it happens, what provokes it, and what it costs. We know that people rarely dismantle a religious worldview because they suddenly become hostile to religion.
There Is No Final Version of You
This is Part Two of The Life That Is Yours, a three-part exploration of authority, identity, and the difficult freedom of being human. In Part One, Nobody Is Coming to Tell You Who You Are, I explored what happens when inherited authorities lose their power to define us. Religion, family, culture, institutions, and the countless systems that interpret us before we learn to interpret ourselves do not simply disappear when we begin questioning them.