When I began writing seriously, I thought the principal task was to explain what I believed as clearly as I could.
I still believe clarity matters.
But the longer I write, the more I realize that serious writing asks something more difficult of the writer.
It asks whether the belief itself can withstand examination.
Writing has become one of the ways I test what I think I know.
An idea can sound convincing in conversation. It can feel settled in the mind. It can even survive for years as something we repeat without much difficulty.
Then we try to explain it carefully.
Questions appear.
Exceptions appear.
Contradictions appear.
The strongest objection turns out to be stronger than we expected.
Experience refuses to fit neatly inside the theory.
And occasionally we discover that something we believed was wrong—or at least much less complete than we had imagined.
I have come to value that process.
A body of work should not merely preserve what a writer thought.
It should reveal whether he became better at thinking.
Some Questions Become Harder as I Get Older
When I was younger, many important questions seemed easier.
Work hard.
Be responsible.
Save money.
Tell the truth.
Take care of your family.
Keep your promises.
Do not depend unnecessarily on other people.
Those principles still seem fundamentally sound to me.
But life has taught me that even good principles eventually encounter difficult boundaries.
Responsibility matters enormously.
But am I responsible for everything I am capable of influencing?
Self-reliance is valuable.
But when does self-reliance become the belief that I must be sufficient unto myself?
Money creates freedom and capacity.
But how much security is enough before the pursuit of more begins serving fear, status, or habit rather than a legitimate purpose?
Conviction matters.
But how do we distinguish moral courage from the inability to admit that we might be wrong?
Faith matters.
But what exactly does it mean to trust God while continuing to prepare, work, decide, protect, and solve problems ourselves?
These questions interest me much more today than simple declarations about what people should believe.
Not because I have become less convinced that truth exists.
Because I have become more convinced that truth deserves better than easy answers.
Good Things Can Become Disordered Things
One idea has increasingly connected many subjects I once treated separately:
Some of life's greatest problems begin not with obviously bad things, but with good things that have moved beyond their proper place.
Work is good.
But work can consume everything around it.
Money is useful.
But money can become identity.
Independence is valuable.
But independence can become isolation.
Confidence helps us act.
But confidence can become certainty about things we do not actually know.
Responsibility is essential.
But responsibility can become the assumption that every outcome ultimately depends upon us.
Self-reliance makes us capable.
But self-reliance can quietly become self-sufficiency.
Even faith can become distorted when genuine belief is replaced by slogans, tribal loyalty, certainty without humility, or religious language used to avoid questions we are afraid to examine.
This has become one of the recurring concerns in my work.
The question is often not:
Is this good or bad?
It is:
What is this good thing for, where does it belong, and what happens when I ask it to do more than it can legitimately do?
That question has changed the way I think about wealth, responsibility, freedom, faith, ambition, family, and even the idea of strength itself.
Experience Is an Unforgiving Editor
I like ideas.
I like frameworks.
I like finding the principle underneath the problem.
But experience has taught me to distrust any philosophy that works beautifully until an actual human life enters the room.
Real life complicates things.
The responsible choice can still produce a bad outcome.
A good person can make a poor decision.
Preparation can fail.
Money can solve an enormous number of problems and remain powerless before others.
People we love can make choices we cannot prevent.
Illness does not negotiate with our plans.
A business strategy that worked for twenty years can suddenly stop working.
Faith does not guarantee that the thing we desperately want will happen.
And sometimes we can do everything reasonably within our power and still lose.
That does not make principles useless.
It makes testing them necessary.
I want the ideas in my work to survive contact with ordinary life.
The family.
The business.
The checkbook.
The hospital room.
The marriage.
The mistake.
The disagreement.
The unexpected phone call.
The problem at seven o'clock in the morning that does not care what we wrote about responsibility the night before.
If an idea works only under ideal conditions, it probably is not strong enough.
I Am Becoming More Suspicious of Easy Answers
This is especially true in my writing about Christianity.
I am a Christian. My faith is not incidental to the work.
But I increasingly believe Christian writing does itself no favors when it uses familiar religious phrases in place of serious thought.
“Trust God.”
“Let go.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Have more faith.”
Perhaps there is truth somewhere inside each of those statements.
But I want to know what the truth actually is.
What does trusting God mean for the businessman who is still responsible for payroll Monday morning?
What does surrender mean for the father whose children depend upon his judgment?
What does Providence mean when something terrible happens and no satisfying explanation ever arrives?
What does grace mean to a person who has spent a lifetime learning that effort generally produces results?
What does dependence upon God mean to someone who learned very young that being able to depend upon himself was one of the safest ways to protect the people he loved?
These are not objections to Christianity.
For me, they are increasingly part of taking Christianity seriously.
I do not want a faith that survives only because I refuse to ask it difficult questions.
Nor do I believe every difficult question will eventually produce an answer that satisfies me.
That may itself be part of the problem faith places before us.
There are things to understand.
There are things to do.
And there may also be things we eventually have to trust without possessing them completely.
I am still learning what that means.
I Have Become More Interested in Distinctions
A useful distinction can sometimes do more for us than an entire argument.
Self-reliance is not the same as self-sufficiency.
Humility is not the denial of competence.
Dependence is not necessarily helplessness.
Wealth is not the same as greed.
Conviction is not certainty.
Forgiveness is not pretending nothing wrong occurred.
Acceptance is not approval.
Responsibility is not control.
Faith is not passivity.
Legacy is not fame.
These distinctions matter because sloppy language eventually produces sloppy thinking.
If we use one word for several different things, we can spend years arguing without realizing that we are not discussing the same idea.
One purpose of these essays is therefore simply to separate things that have become unnecessarily tangled.
Sometimes clarity begins by saying:
These two things are not the same.
That sounds modest.
It can change an entire way of thinking.
The Work Is Becoming More Connected
For a long time, I thought of faith, responsibility, work, wealth, family, character, and legacy as related subjects.
I now see something more integrated.
They continually act upon one another.
Faith affects what we believe responsibility is ultimately responsible to.
Responsibility determines how we use our capabilities.
Work develops those capabilities.
Wealth can expand them.
Character governs whether increased capacity strengthens us or corrupts us.
Family gives much of our responsibility a human face.
Legacy asks what all this effort is meant to produce beyond ourselves.
And eventually the questions circle back toward faith:
What is ultimately worth building?
What can I legitimately depend upon?
What is sufficient?
What deserves to survive me?
This is why I increasingly resist treating my essays as isolated articles.
They are becoming a conversation with one another.
Sometimes a new essay strengthens an older one.
Sometimes it complicates it.
Sometimes it exposes a question the earlier essay missed entirely.
That is how I want the body of work to grow.
Not by repetition.
By deepening.
I Want the Work to Be Useful
I admire intelligence.
I admire beautiful writing.
I admire a sentence sharp enough to make a reader stop.
But I am increasingly suspicious of writing whose principal accomplishment is demonstrating how clever the writer is.
Intellectual depth without usefulness can become performance.
I want something more demanding from my work.
I want wisdom that helps somebody live.
That phrase has become an important standard for me.
An essay does not have to tell the reader what to do.
But it should ideally leave him with something usable:
a clearer distinction;
a better question;
a corrected assumption;
a principle worth testing;
language for something he has struggled to explain;
a warning about a weakness he had not noticed;
a reason to repair something he has neglected;
or an idea strong enough to accompany him into an actual decision.
Sometimes usefulness is practical.
Sometimes it is moral.
Sometimes intellectual.
Sometimes spiritual.
But I want the reader to leave with more than admiration for the prose.
I want something to remain after the prose is forgotten.
Seriousness Requires Revision
One of the most liberating things about building this body of work has been accepting that I am allowed to change my mind.
More than that:
I should change my mind when the evidence, reasoning, experience, or deeper understanding requires it.
An essay is not a contract obligating me to defend forever whatever I believed on the day I published it.
Some of my earlier arguments may eventually need qualification.
Some may need expansion.
Some may need correction.
That does not trouble me.
What would trouble me more would be recognizing that something is wrong and leaving it untouched because changing it might appear inconsistent.
Consistency is valuable when it comes from principles that continue to withstand examination.
It is not valuable when it becomes loyalty to our former selves.
I would rather have a body of work that records intellectual growth than one that creates the illusion that the writer was fully formed from the beginning.
I Am Learning to Put Myself Inside the Argument
It is easy to write about what other people are doing wrong.
The culture.
Politicians.
Institutions.
The wealthy.
The poor.
The religious.
The irreligious.
The young.
The old.
There will always be somebody available for examination.
The harder question is:
Where am I inside this problem?
If I write about pride, where does pride appear in me?
If I criticize materialism, what role does money occupy in my own sense of security?
If I praise self-reliance, where might my own independence prevent me from accepting legitimate dependence?
If I write about responsibility, where am I tempted to turn responsibility into control?
If I write about Christian faith, where do I use belief comfortably and where does Christianity actually challenge the way I live?
This does not mean every essay should become autobiography.
It means I do not want to use ideas primarily as instruments for judging people outside myself.
If a principle applies to human beings, I am one of them.
The work becomes more credible when I remember that.
And more useful.
What I Am Ultimately Trying to Build
I no longer think the purpose of this work is simply to leave behind a collection of things I believed.
I hope it becomes something closer to a record of sustained examination.
A man encounters questions.
He forms convictions.
Life tests them.
Some hold.
Some bend.
Some break.
He repairs what he can.
He changes what needs changing.
He keeps asking.
And over time, something coherent begins to emerge.
Not a perfect system.
Not final answers to every important question.
A structure strong enough to provide orientation.
That is what I hope these essays and books eventually become.
Something my children and grandchildren can read and recognize my voice in.
Something a stranger can encounter years from now and still find useful.
Something capable of helping another person think more clearly about faith, responsibility, work, money, family, character, and what deserves to be handed forward.
I do not know what the finished body of work will look like.
I am increasingly comfortable with that.
The important thing is that it continues becoming more honest, more coherent, more useful, and more capable of carrying weight.
And perhaps that is the most important reflection the work has given me so far:
The writer is not standing outside the structure describing how it should be built.
He is inside it too.
Still examining.
Still correcting.
Still learning.
Still building.
— Joseph C. Kunz, Jr.