About

In giving we receive, in poverty we become rich, in death we find life—so perhaps it is not so absurd that to march forward we must turn back.

Backward Progress is a paradoxical project born from my increasing sense that our world is looking in the wrong direction. Finally responding to a decade-old admonition from a friend—“Read old books”—the writing I present here is my effort to find better answers to questions that have stuck with me.

I’m curious about religion and moral philosophy, true, but also education, health, transportation, cities, music, food, design, architecture, gardening, sports, and more. In that sense, my work here at Backward Progress is broad in focus—like Montaigne, who wrote on subjects as disparate as monstrous children and cannibals. (At least seemingly disparate subjects.) I’m not knowledgeable about much at all, but I’m curious about quite a lot.