Deep in Depression, a Philosopher Turned to the Mystics

IN HIS BOOK Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, author James K.A. Smith traces his own evolution through a personal “dark night of the soul.” Marooned by depression, Smith experiences a crisis of meaning, foreign terrain for him as a philosophy professor and preacher. In the context of what Smith calls our “knowledge economy,” the discipline of philosophy encourages academics to know, define, profess, defend, and win.