ENGLISH ESSAYS
Essays and reflections
Long-form writing on philosophy, technology, culture, faith, work, and the questions that shape a life.
Recent essays
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The Return of the Knowledge Worker
The Strange Feeling That Something Has Already Changed The first signs were easy to overlook because they appeared through ordinary tasks rather than dramatic technological events. When publishing an article through a content management system, I found myself speaking to…
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When Signs Stop Speaking
When Sophistication Begins to Feel Empty There was a time when a minimalist corporate logo seemed to communicate confidence. The clean typeface, restrained colors, and absence of decoration suggested that the organization had reached a certain maturity. It no longer…
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The Canon Principle
Writing, Meaning, and the Shape of a Life When Music Changes the View When my wife walked through the church during our wedding, Pachelbel’s Canon accompanied her steps. I had chosen the music because it seemed naturally suited to the…
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The Limits We Mistook for Reality
Many limits that shaped our understanding were never absolute limits of knowledge. The Month the Numbers Broke the Pattern Patch Tuesday has long followed a familiar rhythm. Security professionals know that the second Tuesday of each month will bring another…
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When Knowledge Stops Living in Documents
I have come to imagine such a package as an AI feed cassette. The Moment I Stopped Thinking About Files For a long time, I assumed that digital work naturally meant working with files. Writing meant opening Word. Data meant…
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The Line That Holds the Throne
A Debate Hidden Inside Another Debate Japan’s current discussion about the Imperial Family appears, at first, to concern a limited institutional problem. The number of imperial family members has been declining, largely because female members traditionally leave the Imperial Family…
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The Ways We Come to Know
A Book We Have Not Read A book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read immediately creates a small moral crisis. The title sounds like permission to bluff. It seems to promise a method for surviving literary conversations…
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The Seed That Awaits Us
A Small Image With a Long Future When Jesus wished to speak about the Word of God, He chose the image of a seed. It was an ordinary object, familiar to anyone who lived close to the land. A seed…
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The Corruption of Good Intentions
The Dream That Inspired the World Many years ago, I encountered the Millennium Development Goals through Jeffrey Sachs’s book The End of Poverty. The idea was astonishing in its simplicity and moral scale. Humanity had reached a point where it…
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When Characters Begin to Live
When Admiration Does Not Become Conviction For a long time, I wondered whether my inability to appreciate Hideaki Anno’s films revealed some weakness in my own judgment. Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and Shin Kamen Rider have all received considerable admiration.…
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