About

“It was good for me to be afflicted, in order to learn your laws.”
— Psalm 119:71

The Wilds

I did not arrive at this project through an orderly education. I arrived through disorder — through the experience of a collapsed soul-structure that taught me, by way of suffering, what the classical tradition means when it says that the interior regime of the person governs everything.

As a young man, I was restless, fiery, hungry for great things but allergic to the disciplines that excellence requires. I found Dostoevsky before I found Aristotle, and the questions in Crime and Punishment awakened in me — why can’t I be great? what wouldn’t I pay? — sounded the depths of my own heart before I had any framework for understanding what I was hearing. The literary encounter exposed an appetite I could not govern. The wilds followed.

What I learned in the wilds was not a theory but a fact: when reason fails to rule, the passions do not wait patiently for its return. They declare their independence, form their own alliances, and build a regime of their own — one that feels like freedom but produces tyranny. I lived the interior-political correspondence that the framework now articulates. The disorder of the soul extended into every domain of life. And the reckoning, when it came, was not an argument but a collapse — the exhaustion of a self that had tried to be its own measure.

The Teacher

Through the turning, I found my teacher — Dr. Elliot Bartky, a great-souled mentor whose many years of patient tutelage became the foundation of everything this project represents. Under his guidance, I encountered Aristotle’s account of the political animal, the Platonic insight that the best guardian of the soul is argument mixed with music, and the Aeschylean vision of justice that transforms rather than destroys what is terrible in us.

What my teacher gave me was not just knowledge but a way of seeing. He showed me that the questions I had been living — about appetite and reason, freedom and self-command, the longing for excellence and the cost of disorder — were not private pathologies but perennial human realities that the classical tradition had been diagnosing and addressing for millennia. My suffering was not wasted. It was the raw material of formation. The poisons could be transmuted into remedies.

The Return

The odyssey of education led, in time, to a return to the Catholic faith I had abandoned. Not through a single dramatic moment but through the slow recognition that the classical account of the human person — the thick account of reason, will, and appetite; the graduated ascent from self-possession through prudence to political expression — found its completion in the Gospel. Grace did not replace what Aristotle had taught me. It perfected it. The Beatitudes completed the natural virtues. Mary’s consent revealed the paradigm of the freedom I had been seeking. The Church held together, across centuries, the very synthesis of faith and reason that I had spent years groping toward in fragments.

Alongside this intellectual conversion came the concrete formation of marriage, fatherhood, and the daily demands of building a household. Raising children taught me what no text could — that the family is the first school of interior order, that patience is a political virtue, and that the education of the soul is not an abstraction but a daily practice of love under pressure.

The Project

Catholic Rulers is the fruit of this entire trajectory — thirty years of craft, twenty years of concentrated study, more than a decade of parenthood, and the slow work of Catholic conversion. It is an attempt to take the internal formation process that shaped my own soul and make it available to others: a comprehensive, architectonically ordered vision of the relationship between nature and spirit, soul and city, reason and revelation.

The framework was not designed in a laboratory. It was hewn from the quarry of lived experience — from the disorders characteristic of our age, transmuted through suffering and study into a constructive response. I emerged from the same cultural confusions that many of our contemporaries are navigating now. I have no standing to speak from above. I speak as one who has been afflicted and, through that affliction, learned the laws.

The AI tools that make this platform possible arrived at exactly the right moment. Decades of notes, reflections, and primary-text study had produced a body of thought too rich for any single book and too interconnected for any linear presentation. The technology made it possible to share the dynamic basis of this vision in ways that would have been impossible a few years ago — not by generating the ideas, but by making their internal architecture navigable at scale.

The Invitation

I am a thinker and speaker, a disciple of Christ through Mary and student of classical political philosophy, a father and husband, a lay Catholic dedicated to upbuilding the political vocation of Christian disciples. I am still learning, still being challenged, still being formed. My own education of the soul is front and center in this work — not as a finished product but as a living process of curiosity and striving.

If you sense that something is missing in our cultural conversation — a language capable of holding together faith and reason, nature and grace, the demands of citizenship and the call of discipleship — then this project was built for you. The framework is here. The formation is real. The grammar of liberty is waiting to be learned.

The vision is ten thousand organizing centers — formed citizens serving as peacemakers in the particular contexts of their lives, capable of building consensus on the basis of right and law because they have first learned to govern themselves. Explore the framework. Enter the formation experience. And if the depth beneath the surface speaks to something you have been reaching for, become one of them.

See the framework →

About the Founder