A church is a wager that a form can carry a content across centuries — that the vessel will not, in the carrying, quietly become the thing it carries.
The Vessel Problem
Institutions that mean to be universal must solve a problem individuals never face: how to be the same thing to people who will never meet.
The essay that follows is less a history than a diagnosis, and less a diagnosis than a question about what, if anything, is trying to be universal now.