I'm one of Arron Iber's Patrons, and so I heard you expound Santa Claus as the Hypostasis of Christmas on his podcast before I read it on your Substack newsletter. Let me explain myself: My granddaughter-in-law and my grandson are college friends of the Ibers, and granddaughter Erin recommended Aron’s podcast to me. And, as that may tell you, I'm an old guy, eighty-two years in the making. However, I was raised in an agnostic family in an agnostic subculture and with an agnostic apprenticeship in biology (PhD 1968 University of Oregon). I was well into my career in the project of modern science, when I got Religion, and was baptized into the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church in 1980. As an unplanned consequence, I now enjoy many grand and great grandchildren being raised in vastly more traditional Catholic families than ever we were able to offer, as my wife was as agnostic as I, and she was baptized decades after I was and after the kids had long dispersed.

I mention these personal circumstances because I have a Substack site (JBS Palmer, The Spiritual Thing), which I think you might be interested in, but you might not like it at all, because I am a theological and philosophical cobbler. Your writing in Santa Claus as the Hypostasis of Christmas is smooth flowing and majestic and your mental tools appear to be rooted in the modern Scholastic tradition. My mental tools have a very different and idiosyncratic origin. With these tools I've labored most of my life, starting as a teenager, within the project of science, to seek to comprehend the place of humanity in the cosmos.

I have now cobbled together a more or less coherent philosophical and theological conception, which I call the Myth Model. And this conception is what I'm presenting on The Spiritual Thing. However, I'm not presenting it in a reasoned expository manner, but in what I call thought verse, as opposed to poetic verse. Thought verse looks and smells a little like poetic verse but it aims, probably unsuccessfully, to show an idea to the reader which might be apprehended by his multiple intelligences. For instance, your Santa Claus appeals to multiple intelligences in your reader: literary, philosophical, theological and familial. These four modes of intelligence are like four dimensions of a space in which the object of your essay exists in itself. The orthogonal projection of the object into any of these dimensions would be a distortion of its essence. And, the space in which these dimensions themselves exist as a frame of reference, can only be that of a profound narrative. The Myth Model is like that, too.

Anyway, my vain hope is that my thought verse works like strokes of lightening (or the flashes of fireflies) to illuminate facets of both the dimensions and of the Myth Model itself which exists in them. Thought verse #17: Running With The Beagle, which is scheduled to be published this Thursday, May 4, illuminates the intuitive dawning of the role of myth—as true narrative—entering into my strictly scientific mindset. That was when I was just into my thirties as an associate professor of Biology.