I sustain an oftimes heated and strange relationship in dialog with Craig Nulan whom I've known in various guises over the years as Xavier Moon and Hesychastic. It has only been over the past year that I've been able to recognize the signal beneath the noise. I think I have a fairly good idea where he's coming from but where he's going is a puzzle best left in his own hands.
There are three primary reasons that I pay him respectful attention. The first is that he does the same for me and this reciprocation has history which I respect. I have no reason not to, he does me no wrong and I have no intent of doing him any. The second is that I understand him to be coming from a very strongly disciplined spiritual place with a kind of monastic consistency. This is my primary attraction to Mr. Nulan. He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian who understands a spiritual way out of psychiatry, and I find that to be an extraordinarily powerful weapon. I also have found him to have an apparently rigorous understanding of various cognitive processes tangential to moral praxis. Although I find that he weighs a bit too heavily on such matters between consciousness and the unconscious and the meaning of such signals to that level of brain function I do appreciate that level of evaluation of the self. Thirdly I find parallels of an existential nature, and there are just certain props due black fathers of my generation. I give them up, especially to MIT grads even if they failed to pledge the proper fraternity.
That said I find him on occasion to be particularly noisome in a way I think would be hilariously entertaining in person but very annoying in print. There is nothing quite like a devastatingly intellectually superior put-down done with a smile over cocktails. If Cobb were a bar, I'd like three or for Nulans going at each other.
Here is a good place to get to the bottom of things. We can start with my Conservatism vs Nulan's black partisanship.
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