Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This is the live Q&A for Lecture Two, where we dig into the shift that made us who we are: the move from pre-axial to axial religion.
For thousands of years human beings lived inside a flat-earth cosmos, woven into the tribe, the seasons, and the whole earth community — mythic, ritual, communal, cyclical. And then, somewhere between 800 and 200 BCE, the cosmology cracked open. Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age. The flat earth became a three-dimensional cosmos with depth, and into that depth stepped something new: the person. Autonomy. Transcendence. The "I" answered by a "Thou." Freedom, choice — and yes, sin and guilt as we've come to know them.
Bring your questions. We'll talk axis mundi as cosmic umbilical cord, why a shift in cosmology reshapes consciousness itself, Bellah on religion as participation versus religion gone heady and propositional, and where all of this leaves us now — standing, as I'd argue we are, inside a Second Axial Age of ecology, global consciousness, and radical relatedness.
Want the whole thing? This Q&A is part of a four-lecture class with Ilia Delio and Tripp Fuller. Join us at TheFutureOfReligion.com to get all four lectures, sit in on the live Q&As, and become part of the online community thinking through this together.
The class is donation-based — and that includes $0. If this is for you, it's for you. Come anyway.
This is the live Q&A for Lecture Two, where we dig into the shift that made us who we are: the move from pre-axial to axial religion.
For thousands of years human beings lived inside a flat-earth cosmos, woven into the tribe, the seasons, and the whole earth community — mythic, ritual, communal, cyclical. And then, somewhere between 800 and 200 BCE, the cosmology cracked open. Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age. The flat earth became a three-dimensional cosmos with depth, and into that depth stepped something new: the person. Autonomy. Transcendence. The "I" answered by a "Thou." Freedom, choice — and yes, sin and guilt as we've come to know them.
Bring your questions. We'll talk axis mundi as cosmic umbilical cord, why a shift in cosmology reshapes consciousness itself, Bellah on religion as participation versus religion gone heady and propositional, and where all of this leaves us now — standing, as I'd argue we are, inside a Second Axial Age of ecology, global consciousness, and radical relatedness.
Want the whole thing? This Q&A is part of a four-lecture class with Ilia Delio and Tripp Fuller. Join us at TheFutureOfReligion.com to get all four lectures, sit in on the live Q&As, and become part of the online community thinking through this together.
The class is donation-based — and that includes $0. If this is for you, it's for you. Come anyway.
