Category: Commentary

I left the Mormon church after serving a two-year mission—seven generations of family legacy abandoned because I couldn’t ignore the evidence. I became an atheist. For seven years, the universe was just matter and energy until entropy wins. Then one secular Christmas, I gave myself permission to hope the Nativity might be true. Not because I had new evidence—simply because I wanted to live in a universe where Love became incarnate to share human suffering. Fourteen years after leaving Mormonism, after studying philosophy, theology, and church history with the same rigor that made me leave, I was baptized Catholic. It wasn’t certainty. It was hope sustained by intellectual honesty. This is what I believe about faith, doubt, and the courage to follow truth wherever it leads.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Lance Corporal Kylie Watson stood five-foot-one in her combat boots when Afghan soldiers tried to stop her from treating their wounded comrade. A woman shouldn’t touch him, they insisted. She told them straight through the interpreter: “If I don’t treat him, he dies. There is no argument, he is getting treated.” Then the 23-year-old medic from Ballymena got on with her job—running seventy meters through Taliban fire, splinting a shattered pelvis, performing CPR in an open field with bullets hitting the dust around her. The story of how she became only the fourth woman in British military history to receive the Military Cross isn’t the Hollywood version circulating online. What actually happened is more remarkable because it’s true.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Any author who’s actually seen what AI models produce when attempting to write fiction and is still worried about being replaced is worrying about the wrong threat. (Or they’re a spectacularly mediocre author, but I digress…) And before you say “market saturation,” hold that thought. Because it’s moot. The market is already saturated by content … Continue reading The Real Threat to Indie Authors Isn’t AI

After writing my essay arguing whether “Game of Thrones” is nihilistic or hard-won humanism, I realized the real debate isn’t about Martin at all—it’s about Tolkien. Reformed apologetics has so thoroughly appropriated “The Lord of the Rings,” flattening its Catholic sacramental theology into moral triumphalism, that even Martin’s sophisticated critiques argue against the appropriation rather than the actual author. Tolkien wrote about grace redeeming failure despite permanent wounds. Martin inherited that same Catholic framework for analyzing tragic dilemmas—situations where both choices are objectively wrong—but stripped out the eucatastrophe. Reformed readers can’t see what either author does because they need moral order to reassert itself. The irony? Martin thinks he’s correcting Tolkien’s naïve triumphalism when Tolkien never wrote that. Both work from Catholic tragic moral theology. One just doesn’t believe in Grace anymore—or so he tells himself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The critics who call Game of Thrones nihilistic have never been at the lever when the trolley’s barreling toward both tracks. Everyone “knows” honor matters—until honor costs you your head. Everyone condemns oathbreakers—until you’re sworn to both king and realm and your king plans genocide. Everyone thinks they’d never make Daenerys’s mistakes—until they’re holding power with advisors dead, ideals crashing against reality, and no good options left. Martin doesn’t write nihilism. He writes the gap between moral philosophy in the classroom and the trolley problem in real life. Between theoretical principles and the moment you’re actually forced to choose—knowing both tracks lead to blood and neither choice will let you sleep. The people calling that “unrealistic”? They’ve had the luxury of never pulling the lever.

The indie publishing world accepts undisclosed ghostwriting—where someone else writes the prose and the credited author takes full credit—but treats AI-generated book covers as a betrayal of readers’ trust. This is completely ass-backwards. The line that matters to me is simple: did the credited author actually write the story? I don’t care how the cover was made. And why should I? How did we get to a point where fraudulent authorship practices are dismissed as “just business” but marketing materials created with AI-assistance are some kind of moral crisis?