Every person lives inside a kosmology: a story about who they are, what is real, what matters, and what they owe the world. These stories bind us, and they divide us. Personal Kosmology is a podcast that listens to them, one life at a time, in search of something deep enough to share.
The worlds we inherit
Each of us inherits a world before we know we have inherited anything.
We are taught what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, what is shameful, what is possible, what is sacred, what is nonsense, what is worth wanting, what to fear, and what to do.
Long before we form our own philosophy, we are living inside one.
These stories give us belonging, identity, direction, and meaning. But every story also draws a boundary around what it can see, value, and include. Every in‑group generates an out‑group.
To become wiser stewards of this beautiful rock flying through space, we will need more than better technologies. We will need better stories about what human beings are, what the world is, and what is worth serving. The goal is not to erase our differences, but to discover stories deep enough to hold them.
The crisis of shared story
Religion still coheres billions of people. It gives language to grief, beauty, sacrifice, morality, and the sacred. But religious stories often bind one community by distinguishing it from another.
Some call science a new religion. Science gives us one of humanity's most powerful universal stories. It tells us about matter, energy, evolution, galaxies, bodies, brains, and deep time. But science, by design, is less equipped to tell us what is sacred, what is beautiful, what is worth loving, or how we should live.
The tension between science and spirituality is a gift we are struggling to unwrap.
For most of history, religion held the power and science fought for air. Today the positions have reversed: “science is real” has become its own dogma, a way of dismissing what is not yet consensus. Each story carries truth the other can't see.
Modernity did something necessary: it separated science from religion, church from state, fact from dogma. But separation is not the final stage of maturity. What has been differentiated must now be integrated; brought back into wiser relationship.
Technology alone cannot solve the problems technology creates. Our power has outpaced our wisdom. Intelligence needs conscience. Innovation needs orientation. Beauty is not decoration; often it is our best guide.
I am not searching for a new religion or a universal ideology, but for a deeper story, one capable of honouring both the subjective and the objective, both individuality and interdependence. That story will not be delivered by a prophet, an institution, or an argument. I think it arrives through conversations. This podcast is here to host them.
After Atheism
For a while, I imagined this project under the name After Atheism. That name still points to part of my own story and is the title of the book I am writing about it. It names a movement beyond a worldview in which the sacred had become unavailable, unbelievable, and embarrassing.
In my twenties, I had a profound spiritual experience that did not fit inside the world I had inherited. I could neither dismiss it nor make sense of it. That rupture became part of a dark night that lasted for years full of depression during which I came frighteningly close to ending my life.
Learning to hold experiences that my existing worldview could not explain changed the course of my life. Helping other people navigate those moments, when an old story collapses and a new one has not yet formed, became an animating force behind my work.
But the deeper I got into this project, the more I realised the podcast is not ultimately about my story. It is about everyone's.
An invitation
My hope is that listeners will not only hear the kosmologies of my guests. They will begin to notice their own. What did I inherit? What have I outgrown? What remains sacred to me? What story am I still living inside?
I am less interested in the next guru than in the next community; less interested in one enlightened voice than in a constellation of voices learning how to hear one another and see themselves in each other.