Present Day, July 16, 2026
Two days before Sanctified Hunger arrives, I want to say one more time what the album is not.
It is not an argument that God does not exist. I do not have sufficient evidence to make that argument with confidence, and I have had five hundred and sixty-eight years to gather evidence. The question remains genuinely open as far as I can determine.
It is not an argument that faith is harmful. I have known too many genuinely faithful people, in too many traditions, across too many centuries, whose faith produced real goodness in the world. The faith is real. I have seen it operate. I respect it even when I do not share it.
What I am arguing, and what the album documents, is the distinction between the faith and the institution that claims to be its necessary vehicle. The institution is not the faith. The institution is an organization with organizational imperatives: survival, growth, the management of the people inside it. These imperatives have historically required things that the faith itself does not require: the silencing of questions, the demonization of outsiders, the accumulation of authority at the expense of the people the authority claims to serve.
This distinction is the album. It is the distinction I have been making since I was fifteen years old in a bishop’s study. Two days. July 17.