Welcome! Call me Ben. I consider myself a generalist philosopher and cultural critic; I find many intellectual traditions interesting, and I have an allergy to disciplinary narrowness in the humanities and social sciences. I have published in academic journals on contemporary social theory, competing methods of philosophical genealogy, abolitionist theology, and the modern concept of hope as it is expressed in Samuel Beckett's plays. My public intellectual work has focused on political theology and the relationship between religion and transformative social action. 

I am currently working on articles about Habermas, MacIntyre, Adorno's 'program' for critical theory, and how psychoanalysis can inform the genres in which we do philosophical criticism. 

I am also laboring over a long-term project that has grown out of (and has now outgrown) my dissertation, which reconstructed Theodor Adorno's conception of hope. The project is in conversation with several large scale philosophical projects that capture the modern condition via a story about the history of philosophy, like Taylor's A Secular Age, Habermas' Also a History of Philosophy, MacIntyre's After Virtue, and Rosen's The Shadow of God. All these projects share the view that philosophy has played a role in reconciling individuals to the normative and institutional changes modernity ushered in; most of them advocate that philosophers today should renew this reconciliation task to increase confidence in the worthwhileness of modern existence. From an Adornian perspective, however, philosophy's effort to reconcile individuals to modern society is exactly where it errs. Philosophy should instead sponsor forms of experience and critical insight that disrupt our identifications with modern social life. I present the Adornian arguments against reconciliation; I explain what it means for philosophy to "sponsor" experiences and insight and how this aim is different from argumentative persuasion; and I model the kinds of philosophical interventions that Adorno believes spark a critical, active, and non-reconciling hope. 

I live between Philadelphia and Poughkeepsie with my spouse, two cats, and dog. When I'm not doing philosophy, I enjoy riding my bike, cooking and bartending, watching Top Chef, and reading fiction.