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Reference

Glossary

Every acronym, term of art, and named system across the research library — 801 in all, defined in plain language, each linked to the corpora that use it. Filter by category, article, or search below, or jump by letter.

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"Master" letters Master letters
Three anguished, unsent draft letters in Emily Dickinson's handwriting, addressed only to a figure she calls 'Master,' whose real-life identity — if there was one specific person — has never been confirmed.Appears in Tell It Slant
4E cognitive science 4E cognition, embodied, embedded, enacted, extended
A movement in the science of mind holding that thinking is not just something that happens inside the skull but is shaped by the body, the surrounding environment, the things a creature actually does, and sometimes tools and objects outside the body altogether.Appears in Experience and Consequences

A

a priori method the a priori method
One of Peirce's four ways people settle on beliefs: choosing whatever seems most agreeable to reason or elegant as a system, with no outside check on whether it is actually true.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
A-not-B error stage IV error
A famous mistake babies make around eight to twelve months old: after watching a toy get hidden in a new spot, they still reach for the old hiding place, suggesting the object's existence is still tied to their own past action rather than to where it actually is.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
AARO All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
The Pentagon office created in 2022 to investigate and resolve reports of unidentified flying and airborne objects, and to issue the government's official annual findings on the subject.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
AATIP Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
A low-profile Pentagon effort running roughly 2007 to 2012 that looked into UFO-related reports; its existence, revealed in a 2017 New York Times story, is what restarted public and government interest in the subject.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
AAWSAP Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program
A Defense Intelligence Agency contract, funded from 2008 to 2010, that paid a Las Vegas aerospace company to investigate UFO sightings and other reported anomalies, including at a ranch believed by its owner to be a paranormal hot spot.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Abba
The Aramaic word Jesus used to address God in prayer, usually translated "Father" — once thought to be baby-talk for "Daddy," but shown by later scholarship to be the ordinary adult word a grown son used for his own father, spoken with unusual warmth and directness.Appears in The Man and the Christ
ABCT Austrian Business Cycle Theory
The Austrian-school theory that a central bank pushing interest rates below their natural level sends a false signal that triggers a wave of investment the economy's real savings never justified, and that the resulting bust is simply the necessary unwinding of that bad investment.Appears in The Argument Over Money
abduction abductive inference, abductive reasoning, retroduction
Peirce's term for the creative leap of guessing a hypothesis that would explain a surprising fact, as distinct from deduction (drawing certain conclusions) and induction (generalizing from many cases).Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
abduction narrative abduction era
The dominant UFO storyline from the 1980s onward, in which a person reports being taken aboard a craft against their will, medically examined by non-human beings, and returned with gaps in their memory — a darker, more clinical pattern than the earlier friendly-alien-contact stories of the 1950s.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
absorbed coping skilled coping
The smooth, unreflective way a skilled person handles a familiar task or tool without stopping to think about it, the way an experienced driver steers without consciously deciding each move.Appears in Experience and Consequences
accommodation
The mental adjustment that happens when the world does not fit the patterns a mind already has, forcing those patterns to change or split to match the new information.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
active imagination
A disciplined technique Jung developed for engaging the unconscious while awake, in which a person lets an inner image or figure arise, then questions and argues with it as though it were another person, without either steering it like a daydream or explaining it away as mere theory.Appears in A God in the Psyche
ad hoc
A description for an explanation invented after the fact to fit whatever happened, rather than one that could have predicted it in advance.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
ad orientem ad orientem posture
The practice of a priest facing the altar (and so, symbolically, facing east) rather than the congregation during the most sacred part of the Mass, as opposed to facing the people throughout.Appears in On This Rock
adaptation
The ongoing balancing act between taking in new experience on one's own terms and adjusting one's mental patterns to fit reality, which together let a mind (or organism) function well in its environment.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
adhesiveness adhesiveness or love
A term borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology for the faculty of deep attachment and friendship, which Walt Whitman adopted as his name for intense, loving comradeship between men and proposed as the emotional glue that could hold a democracy together.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Adopting Act of 1729
A Presbyterian church rule requiring ministers to affirm the Westminster Confession of faith, whose exact terms of subscription became one of the flashpoints between pro-revival and anti-revival Presbyterians.Appears in The Recurring Fire
adoptionism adoptionist
The view, rejected as heretical by the early church, that Jesus was born an ordinary human being who was later "adopted" as God's son rather than being divine from eternity.Appears in The Man and the Christ
affordance affordances
A possibility for action that an object or environment offers a particular creature given its body and abilities, such as a chair's affording sitting or a handle's affording gripping.Appears in Experience and Consequences
agapasm agapastic, agapism
A term coined by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce for the idea that the universe evolves chiefly through creative love — things grow and improve because love draws out the best in what's around it, as distinct from evolution by pure random chance or by blind mechanical necessity.Appears in The Man and the Christ
agapism
A view that the universe itself develops over time not just through chance and mechanical law but through something like a creative, loving pull toward greater order and connection.Appears in Experience and Consequences
AI-assisted narrative-data taxonomy narrative-data triage
An effort by government investigators to sort and search through thousands of written witness accounts of sightings using machine-learning tools, rather than reading each one by hand.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
albedo whitening
In the old alchemical stages that Jung read as a map of inner change, the 'whitening' phase of purification that follows the initial breakdown, standing for a person beginning to clarify and reorganize the self after a period of psychological crisis.Appears in A God in the Psyche
Aldrich Plan
The 1910 blueprint for a U.S. central bank, drafted in secret by a group of leading bankers on Jekyll Island, that proposed a single banker-controlled national institution and was later reworked into the more decentralized Federal Reserve System that Congress actually enacted.Appears in The Argument Over Money
AME Church African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Church
The first fully independent Black Christian denomination in the United States, formed in 1816 after Black worshippers walked out of a segregated Philadelphia congregation.Appears in The Recurring Fire
American Renaissance the American Renaissance frame
A label literary historians use for the mid-1800s flowering of major American writing (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman), fixed as the standard way of teaching this period by a single influential 1941 book.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
AN/SPY-1
A U.S. Navy shipboard radar system capable of tracking multiple fast-moving targets simultaneously, used aboard the cruiser whose radar operators first noticed the 2004 'Tic Tac' object.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
analytic philosophy analytic tradition
The dominant twentieth-century style of English-language academic philosophy that prizes formal logic, precise argument, and technical rigor over broad narrative or historical synthesis.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
analytic-continental divide analytic-continental split
The long-standing split in twentieth-century philosophy between an Anglo-American style favoring formal logic and precise argument and a European style (associated with figures like Heidegger and Sartre) favoring historical and interpretive modes of inquiry.Appears in Experience and Consequences
analytic/synthetic distinction analytic-synthetic distinction
A once-standard dividing line between statements true purely by the meanings of their words (like 'bachelors are unmarried') and statements true because of how the world happens to be; a influential 1951 paper argued the line can't actually be drawn cleanly.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
anancasm anancastic evolution
Charles Sanders Peirce's term for evolution driven by mechanical necessity — the idea, associated with the philosopher Herbert Spencer, that historical and biological change unfolds according to fixed, deterministic laws rather than chance or love.Appears in The Man and the Christ
anathema
A formal, solemn condemnation issued by a church council that declares a specific belief incompatible with Catholic teaching and excludes anyone who holds it from communion with the Church.Appears in On This Rock
Anglo-Saxonism Anglo-Saxonist, white-race theory
A nineteenth-century belief, common among educated white Americans and Britons of the era, that people of English and northern-European ('Saxon') descent were innately superior in character and destined to lead — a pseudo-scientific racial ideology now recognized as a form of racism.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
anhypostasia / enhypostasia anhypostatic, enhypostatic
A pair of technical terms from early Christian theology describing how Jesus's human nature does not exist as its own independent person (anhypostatic) but exists only within and through the divine person of the eternal Son (enhypostatic) — a way of explaining how full humanity and full divinity can belong to one single "who."Appears in The Man and the Christ
anima animus
Jung's term for the unconscious inner figure of the opposite sex that he believed every person carries — the inner feminine in a man (the anima) or the inner masculine in a woman (the animus) — which, once related to rather than acted out blindly, helps connect everyday awareness to the deeper unconscious.Appears in A God in the Psyche
Annales school Annales, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales
A twentieth-century French approach to history that favors long-run social, economic, and cultural patterns over the deeds of kings and great men, in contrast to the individual-and-moral-drama style of narrative history.Appears in The Book That Burned
anthropic reasoning anthropic arguments, anthropic rebuttal, anthropic selection
The move of explaining why our universe looks life-friendly by noting that only life-friendly universes could ever have anyone in them to notice the coincidence, so we should not be surprised to find ourselves in one.Appears in Hard to Vary
Anti-Dryasdust
The title Carlyle gave to an opening chapter of an earlier book, and shorthand ever since for his lifelong complaint that most historians bury the living past under dull, disorganized paperwork instead of bringing it back to life.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
anti-representationalism representationalism
The view, central to Rorty's philosophy, that it is a mistake to think of the mind as a device that mirrors or accurately copies an independent reality, and that philosophy should stop trying to police how well our beliefs match the world.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Anti-Socialist Laws Anti-Socialist Law
A set of German laws passed under Bismarck in 1878 that banned Social Democratic organizations, meetings, and publications for twelve years while leaving individual socialists free to run for office, which paradoxically let the party's vote grow even as it was driven underground.Appears in The Long Advent
Antiburghers Antiburgher
The stricter branch of Scottish Presbyterian dissenters who split from the Burghers in 1747 because they refused to swear a civic oath that seemed to endorse the established church they had just left.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Antichrist
In the Jungian reading applied here, the dark shadow-counterpart that a symbol of psychological wholeness (like the Christ-symbol) inevitably generates because the original symbol excludes evil and imperfection.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
antinomian antinomianism
Someone who holds that a person's inner spiritual conviction outranks external rules and authority, a stance that got radical Puritans like Anne Hutchinson branded as dangerous nonconformists in colonial New England.Appears in Tell It Slant
antinomianism antinomian
The idea that a person answerable to their own inner conscience or divine inspiration is not bound by external moral rules or social laws — used here as a charge that Emerson's self-reliance could shade into a rejection of shared obligations.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe, The Long Advent
AOIMSG Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group
A short-lived Pentagon body, active from late 2021 to mid-2022, that was the immediate predecessor to today's UAP investigative office before being renamed and expanded.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
apocalyptic apocalypticism, apocalypticist
A style of Jewish and early Christian religious expectation centered on the belief that God is about to intervene dramatically in history to judge the world and set things right.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
apocalyptic eschatology apocalyptic-messianic, eschatological, eschatology
The belief, widespread among Jews of Jesus's era, that the present corrupt world order was about to be abruptly and dramatically overturned by direct divine intervention, replacing evil and foreign rule with God's own reign.Appears in The Man and the Christ
apophatic apophatic mysticism, apophaticism
An approach to talking about God that proceeds by negation — insisting that God's true nature exceeds every human concept, so the most honest thing one can say about God is what God is *not*, rather than positive descriptions.Appears in The Man and the Christ
apophatic theology negative theology
A tradition that describes God only by saying what God is not, refusing to attach any positive description at all.Appears in Hard to Vary
apophatic tradition apophatic
A style of religious thought, found in mysticism across several traditions, that approaches the divine by insisting it lies beyond any words or images that could describe it, rather than by making positive claims about what it is.Appears in A God in the Psyche
apostolic nunciature nunciature, nuncio
The Vatican's equivalent of an embassy in a foreign country, headed by a nuncio, an archbishop who serves as the pope's ambassador.Appears in On This Rock
apostolic succession
The doctrine that bishops derive their authority through an unbroken chain of ordination reaching back to Jesus's original apostles, which is meant to guarantee that the faith taught today is the same one the apostles taught.Appears in On This Rock
apostolic visitation apostolic administrator, papal delegate
A formal Vatican-ordered inspection or takeover of a diocese, religious order, or church body, in which Rome sends its own investigator or administrator to govern or examine an institution directly rather than leaving it to its normal local leadership.Appears in On This Rock
apostrophe apostrophize, apostrophizes
A writing technique in which the narrator directly addresses someone who cannot answer back — a dead person, an abstraction, or the reader — as if they were present, used for dramatic or emotional effect.Appears in The Book That Burned
archetype archetypal, archetypes
In Jung's theory, a recurring pattern or figure — such as the hero, the wise old man, or the great mother — that he believed is not learned individually but arises spontaneously from a layer of the mind shared by all human beings, showing up in dreams and myths across unrelated cultures.Appears in A God in the Psyche
Arianism Arian
The teaching of the fourth-century priest Arius that Jesus, though the highest of all created beings, was still a creature made by God rather than being eternally and fully divine himself — condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Arminianism Arminian
The theological position, named after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, that God's grace can be resisted and that a person's own free choice genuinely plays a role in whether they are saved, in contrast to the Calvinist view that God alone determines who is saved.Appears in The Recurring Fire
ARRB Assassination Records Review Board
The independent federal board set up in the 1990s to force the release of classified government files related to the Kennedy assassination, often cited as the model for how UFO-related files might someday be declassified.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
A mathematical result showing that no method of combining individual people's rankings of options into one social ranking can satisfy a handful of basic fairness conditions at once, unless one person is simply allowed to dictate the outcome.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
ars moriendi the art of dying
A centuries-old Christian tradition, literally 'the art of dying,' that treated dying well as a skill governed by ritual: ideally at home, conscious, surrounded by family, and displaying visible signs of faith and salvation.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Article 5 NATO Article 5
The clause in NATO's founding treaty stating that an armed attack on one member is treated as an attack on all, obligating the other members to respond.Appears in The Map of American Power
assimilation
The mental act of absorbing something new by fitting it into patterns of thought or action a person already has, the way a baby who knows how to grasp will apply that same grasping pattern to any new object.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
assumption (of state debts) assumption
Alexander Hamilton's 1790 plan to have the new federal government take over and pay off the debts individual states had run up during the Revolutionary War, binding state creditors' financial interests to the survival of the national government.Appears in The Argument Over Money
asyndeton asyndetic, asyndetic catalogue
A writing technique that strings words or phrases together without connecting words like 'and,' so a list of images piles up and collides rather than flowing in order.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
ATFLIR Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared
A camera pod mounted under a fighter jet that senses heat rather than visible light, letting pilots see and record objects at a distance; its mechanical rotation to keep images upright is the source of the disputed 'spinning' effect in one famous Navy video.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Atman/Brahman Atman, Brahman, Vedanta
Core concepts from Hindu philosophy: Brahman is the single, ultimate reality underlying the universe, and Atman is the individual soul, which Vedantic thought holds to be ultimately identical with Brahman — an idea Emerson found strikingly close to his own doctrine of one divine reality present in everyone.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
AUKUS
A 2021 security pact among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia built around helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines and around joint work on advanced military technologies like AI and hypersonic weapons.Appears in The Map of American Power
Auld Lichts Old Light, Old Lights
The more conservative wing of the Scottish Seceder churches, so called because they held onto the old doctrine that the state should have the power to enforce true religion, unlike their more liberal rivals.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
AUMF Authorization for Use of Military Force
A law passed by Congress giving the president legal authority to use military force against a specified threat; the 2001 version, passed after 9/11, has been used to justify US military operations in numerous countries for over two decades.Appears in The Map of American Power
auto-affection self-affection
A concept describing how life supposedly feels or senses itself directly from the inside, prior to and without needing to first appear as an object presented to a separate observing mind.Appears in Experience and Consequences
autocephaly autocephalous
The Eastern Orthodox principle by which a national or regional church fully governs itself, choosing its own leader and answering to no higher earthly authority, unlike the Catholic Church's single pope over all local churches.Appears in On This Rock
Autocracy, Inc.
A 2024 book by Anne Applebaum arguing that authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and Iran increasingly cooperate as a loose transactional network to undermine democracies, even without sharing a common ideology.Appears in The Map of American Power
autosomal DNA test autosomal, autosomal test
The standard kind of consumer DNA test, which blends together the genetic contribution of every ancestor a person has ever had into one average, unlike a surname or a specialized DNA test that follows just one family line.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Awash in a Sea of Faith
A prize-winning 1990 book by the historian Jon Butler arguing that American religious history has been distorted by too much focus on dramatic 'Awakenings' and too little on the slow, steady spread of Christianity across the population.Appears in The Recurring Fire

B

Bad Godesberg Program Bad Godesberg, Godesberg Program
A 1959 party platform in which West Germany's Social Democrats formally dropped Marxist language about class struggle and public ownership, embracing market competition and presenting themselves as a broad 'people's party' rather than a working-class party.Appears in The Long Advent
Balamand statement Balamand document
A 1993 Catholic-Orthodox joint declaration that renounced trying to convert Eastern Orthodox believers into Eastern-rite Catholic churches as a method of reunion, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic churches already formed by such conversions have a right to keep existing.Appears in On This Rock
ballad meter
A song-like verse pattern of alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, counted loosely by ear rather than by strict syllable count, familiar from old English and Scottish ballads.Appears in Tell It Slant
bancor
A neutral international currency unit proposed by British economist John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference as an alternative to building the postwar monetary system around the U.S. dollar; the U.S. delegation's dollar-based plan won instead.Appears in The Argument Over Money
base ecclesial community CEB, base community, comunidad eclesial de base
A small neighborhood or rural lay group, especially common in 1970s-80s Latin America, that gathered without a priest present to read scripture in light of members' own poverty and organize for practical improvements like clean water or land rights.Appears in On This Rock
Basel Manifesto Basel Congress
A unanimous 1912 declaration by international socialist parties warning that a European war would be a crime against the working class and pledging to use any war that broke out to hasten the end of capitalist rule — a pledge nearly every party abandoned within two years.Appears in The Long Advent
basileia tou theou basileia, kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven
The Greek phrase, central to Jesus's preaching, usually translated "kingdom of God" — better understood as God's active "reign" or "kingly rule" breaking into the present moment, rather than a place one enters.Appears in The Man and the Christ
basis trade Treasury basis trade
A heavily leveraged hedge-fund strategy that bets on small price gaps between Treasury bonds and Treasury futures contracts, funded with short-term borrowed cash, which can force a chaotic sell-off of government bonds if the borrowing dries up suddenly.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Bayesianism Bayesian, Bayesian epistemology, Bayesian updating
A widely used approach to reasoning under uncertainty in which you start with a probability estimate for a claim and revise it up or down as new evidence comes in, using a formal rule for how much each piece of evidence should move the number.Appears in Hard to Vary
Bebbington quadrilateral Bebbington's quadrilateral, the quadrilateral
A four-part definition of evangelical Christianity proposed by historian David Bebbington: a belief that lives must be dramatically changed through conversion, a high regard for the Bible as the ultimate authority, an emphasis on active evangelism and reform, and a focus on Christ's death on the cross as the center of the faith.Appears in The Recurring Fire
being-in-the-world
A term describing human existence as always already caught up in a surrounding world of people, tools, and concerns, rather than a detached mind that separately observes an external world.Appears in Experience and Consequences
being-toward-death
The idea that human life is fundamentally shaped by the constant, inescapable awareness that it will end, and that facing this honestly (rather than avoiding it) is central to living authentically.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Belt and Road Initiative BRI, Belt and Road
China's global infrastructure-investment program, launched in 2013, that finances ports, railways, and other projects in dozens of countries in exchange for economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing.Appears in The Map of American Power
benevolent empire
A nickname historians use for the sprawling network of nineteenth-century volunteer religious charities and reform organizations (Bible societies, Sunday schools, temperance and antislavery groups) that grew directly out of the revivals and shaped American public life.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function Bergson-Samuelson function, social welfare function
A tool economists use to rank different possible states of society by openly writing down how much weight to give each person's well-being, rather than pretending the ranking is value-free.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
berline
A heavy, enclosed four-wheeled carriage of the kind the French royal family used in their failed 1791 escape attempt to Varennes, later read by critics as a symbol of a monarchy too weighed down by its own privilege to move quickly.Appears in The Book That Burned
Bildungsroman Bildung
A German literary genre that follows a young person's moral and psychological growth to maturity, and by extension the German ideal of self-cultivation through discipline and experience that shaped this kind of coming-of-age story.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
BIS Bureau of Industry and Security
The US Commerce Department office that administers export controls, deciding which sensitive technologies (like advanced computer chips) American companies may or may not sell to other countries.Appears in The Map of American Power
Black providentialism
The conviction, widely held among enslaved and free Black Americans, that God was directly and actively intervening in history to free them, modeled on the biblical story of the Hebrews' deliverance from slavery in Egypt.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Blue Book, Project Project Blue Book
The U.S. Air Force's official UFO investigation, running from 1952 to 1969, which reviewed more than 12,000 sightings and closed after a university study concluded further research wasn't scientifically justified.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Born rule
The rule in quantum physics that converts the mathematics of a quantum system into the ordinary probabilities of what an observer will actually see, and explaining where that rule comes from is a famous unsolved problem for theories in which every possible outcome happens somewhere.Appears in Hard to Vary
Bourbaki mother-structures mother-structures, structures-mères
Three basic organizing patterns — group-like, order-like, and shape/space-like structures — that a mid-20th-century circle of mathematicians proposed as the deep foundation of all mathematics, which Piaget controversially claimed could also be found in simple form in how children's minds organize logic, sequence, and space.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
Bourbon Restoration Restoration, post-Restoration
The period from 1814 to 1830 when the French monarchy, under the Bourbon royal family, was reinstated after Napoleon's defeat — the era in which the first wave of professional French Revolution histories were written.Appears in The Book That Burned
bracketing natural attitude
A technique of temporarily setting aside one's ordinary, unexamined assumption that the world simply exists as it appears, in order to examine carefully how things show up in conscious experience.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Brehon law
The customary legal system of pre-conquest Gaelic Ireland, built around compensation and honor-price rather than punishment, and administered by a hereditary class of judges.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Bretton Woods Bretton Woods system
The 1944 international agreement that made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency by pegging it to gold at a fixed price and pegging every other major currency to the dollar, a system that lasted until 1971.Appears in The Argument Over Money
BRICS+ BRICS
A loose grouping of major non-Western economies — originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, later expanded to include countries like Iran and the UAE — that coordinates on economic and diplomatic positions as a counterweight to US-led institutions, though it has no shared currency or binding treaty commitments.Appears in The Map of American Power
Burgfrieden
A political truce declared in Germany at the start of World War I in which parties and labor unions agreed to suspend domestic conflict and rally behind the war effort, in exchange for political recognition from the state.Appears in The Long Advent
Burgher Seceders Burgher, Burghers, Seceder, Seceders, the Secession
A strict, breakaway branch of Scottish Presbyterianism that had split from the official national church in 1733 over its members' insistence on unbending doctrinal purity and resistance to state interference in congregational life; Thomas Carlyle's own family belonged to this church.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Burned-over District
A nickname for a stretch of upstate New York so repeatedly swept by revivalist fervor in the early 1800s that, in the phrase's own logic, there was supposedly no unconverted population left to burn; it also became the birthplace of several new American religious movements.Appears in The Recurring Fire

C

Calvinism Calvinist, Calvinist soteriology
A branch of Protestant theology holding that human beings are so damaged by sin that they cannot save themselves, and that God alone, by his own sovereign choice, decides who will be saved.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Cambuslang Revival Cambuslang-revival
A famous 1742 outbreak of mass religious fervor in a Scottish parish, remembered as the classic template for the dramatic personal experience of despair-followed-by-conversion that Scottish Calvinists expected of true believers.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
camp meeting camp meetings
A multi-day outdoor religious gathering where attendees camped on-site through continuous preaching, prayer, and communion services, often led by ministers from several denominations at once.Appears in The Recurring Fire
cant
Hollow, insincere speech that sounds virtuous or official but does not match what a person actually believes or does — Carlyle's word for the empty talk he thought filled politics, religion, and public life in his time.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
Cantillon effect
The idea that newly created money does not spread through an economy evenly but enters first through banks, government, and financial markets, letting those closest to the source buy assets at old prices before the new money bids up prices everywhere else — a hidden transfer from later recipients (often wage earners) to earlier ones (often asset holders).Appears in The Argument Over Money
CARA Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate
A Georgetown University research center that is the leading source of survey data and statistics on the Catholic Church in the United States, tracking things like Mass attendance and the number of active priests.Appears in On This Rock
cardinal utility cardinal
The older idea that a person's satisfaction from a good can be measured in exact numerical amounts (like counting units), so that satisfaction levels can be added up and compared in magnitude, not just ranked.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Carlylese Carlylean, Carlylean prose, the Carlylean voice
The unmistakable, sermon-like writing style Thomas Carlyle invented — full of direct address to the reader, capitalized abstract nouns like Sham and Reality, run-on accumulating clauses, and the rolling rhythms of the King James Bible.Appears in Carlyle's Everest, The Book That Burned, The Calvinist Without a Creed
Cartesian anxiety
Philosopher Richard Bernstein's term for the compulsive back-and-forth between demanding rock-solid certainty for knowledge and, when that fails, concluding that no belief is any better than any other.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
cash-nexus cash nexus, cash payment as sole nexus
Carlyle's term of moral condemnation for a society in which money has become the only bond connecting employer and worker, replacing older ties of loyalty, duty, and mutual obligation; later picked up by Marx and Engels.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Castle Garden
America's first official immigrant processing depot, located at the Battery in New York and used from 1855 until Ellis Island replaced it on January 1, 1892.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
categorial intuition
The idea that people can directly grasp abstract logical structures (such as the meaning of "is" in a sentence, or a set of related things) in something like the same immediate way they perceive a physical object, rather than only inferring them through reasoning.Appears in Experience and Consequences
cause-and-effect history Philosophy (history), philosophical history
A style of history writing that explains events as a chain of rational causes leading to effects, which Carlyle rejected as a false simplification of a reality he saw as too tangled and simultaneous to reduce to a straight line.Appears in The Book That Burned
CELAM Latin American Episcopal Council
The umbrella council of Latin American and Caribbean Catholic bishops' conferences, whose periodic continent-wide meetings (like the 1968 Medellín conference) have repeatedly set the direction of Latin American Catholic thought and practice.Appears in On This Rock
CENTCOM Central Command, US Central Command
The US military's regional command responsible for operations across the Middle East, parts of Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa.Appears in The Map of American Power
CFIUS Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
A US government panel, led by the Treasury Department, that reviews foreign purchases of American companies and can block or unwind deals it judges to threaten national security.Appears in The Map of American Power
Chalcedonian Definition Chalcedon, Council of Chalcedon
The formula adopted by church leaders at a council in 451 CE stating that Jesus is one single person who is simultaneously fully God and fully human, the two natures united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" — the foundational statement of mainstream Christian belief about who Jesus is.Appears in The Man and the Christ
chartalism
The theory that money's value comes not from any physical backing but from a government's power to demand it back in taxes, which is what gives an intrinsically worthless paper currency its worth.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Chartism the Chartist movement, the People's Charter
A mass British working-class movement of the 1830s-40s demanding political reforms such as the vote for all men, which Carlyle read not as a set of practical demands but as a symptom of a deeper spiritual crisis in industrial society.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
China Military Power Report
An annual Pentagon report to Congress assessing the size, capability, and trajectory of China's armed forces, widely cited as an authoritative baseline for tracking Chinese military modernization.Appears in The Map of American Power
CHIPS Act CHIPS and Science Act
A 2022 US law providing tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to build advanced semiconductor factories on American soil, aimed at reducing US dependence on chip manufacturing concentrated in Taiwan.Appears in The Map of American Power
Christian Realism
A school of political theology associated with Reinhold Niebuhr holding that because sin and self-interest distort every human institution, democratic checks on power are necessary rather than optional, and that political idealism must be tempered by a sober view of human nature.Appears in The Long Advent
Christology Christology manqué, incarnational structure, incarnational theology
The branch of Christian theology concerned with the nature of Christ as God made flesh; scholars use the phrase to describe how Carlyle's doctrine of the hero recasts this pattern — a chosen, exceptional man as the place where the divine becomes visible in history — with the figure of Christ himself left out.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Christus Victor
An understanding of Jesus's death and resurrection as a cosmic victory in which Christ defeats the powers of sin, death, and evil that hold humanity captive, freeing believers the way a champion frees hostages — one of several competing theories of how Jesus's death "saves" people.Appears in The Man and the Christ
church-sect cycle church-sect process
A pattern in the sociology of religion in which a demanding, high-commitment religious group grows rapidly, gradually softens its demands and becomes comfortable as it succeeds, and then loses members to a newer, stricter group that repeats the same cycle.Appears in The Recurring Fire
CIPS Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, Cross-border Interbank Payment System
A Chinese-built system for clearing and settling international payments in yuan, seen as a potential long-term alternative to Western-dominated payment infrastructure, though it still relies heavily on the Western SWIFT network for messaging.Appears in The Argument Over Money, The Map of American Power
circular reaction primary circular reaction, secondary circular reaction, tertiary circular reaction
An infant's habit of repeating an action just because the result was interesting, starting with actions centered on the infant's own body, then extending to objects in the world, and finally to deliberately varying the action to see what happens.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
circular reporting
A pattern in which a claim appears to be independently confirmed by multiple sources but, when traced back, actually originates from the same small handful of people repeating what they heard from one another rather than from direct evidence.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
circulation of elites circolazione delle élites, circulation des élites, circulation of the elites, elite circulation
The idea that individual members constantly move into and out of a society's ruling minority, and that whole ruling groups eventually get replaced wholesale by a rising rival group, rather than power ever passing to the population at large.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
civil religion American civil religion, Civil Religion in America
A set of shared national beliefs, symbols, and rituals that function like a religion but exist alongside and separately from actual churches, binding citizens to their country through a kind of sacred patriotism.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
class-inclusion
The logical understanding that a smaller category is always contained within, and so can never outnumber, the larger category it belongs to — for example, knowing there must be at least as many wooden beads as brown ones if all the brown beads are wooden.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
clean room clean rooms
A secure data environment where two companies can match their customer or audience records against each other to measure results, without either side seeing the other's raw underlying data.Appears in Hard to Vary
clinical method clinical-critical method, méthode clinique, méthode clinique-critique
A flexible, conversational style of questioning children that follows their reasoning wherever it leads, probing their justifications with follow-up questions and counter-suggestions rather than scoring fixed right-or-wrong answers on a standard test.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
cliodynamics
A field that tries to study long-run history the way natural scientists study physical systems, building mathematical models from historical data to explain and forecast things like political instability.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
close encounter classification CE-1, CE-2, CE-3
A three-level scale — sighting only, sighting with a physical effect like scorched ground, or sighting that includes apparent occupants — introduced in 1972 to standardize how UFO researchers describe the closeness and content of an encounter.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
close reading close-reading
A method of interpreting literature by examining a poem's or passage's own words, structure, and ambiguities in minute detail, rather than leaning on the author's biography or historical background.Appears in Tell It Slant
Clothes Philosophy Philosophy of Clothes, the Clothes metaphor
The central image of Carlyle's book Sartor Resartus, in which everything visible — institutions, customs, language, even the self — is treated as a kind of clothing that both reveals and conceals a deeper, invisible reality underneath.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
co-determination Co-Determination Act, Mitbestimmungsgesetz
A German system, formalized in a 1976 law, requiring large companies to give workers an equal number of seats with shareholders on the board that oversees management, though a tie-breaking vote reserved for the shareholder side ultimately keeps final authority with capital.Appears in The Long Advent
COFER Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves
The International Monetary Fund's official dataset tracking what currencies and assets the world's central banks hold in their reserves, used as the standard yardstick for measuring the dollar's dominance.Appears in The Argument Over Money, The Map of American Power
cognitive revolution
The shift in mid-twentieth-century psychology away from behaviorism's focus on observable actions and toward studying internal mental processes like memory, language, and problem-solving, often modeled on computers processing information.Appears in Experience and Consequences
coherentism coherence theory of truth
The view that a belief is justified not by resting on some rock-bottom foundation but by fitting together consistently with a person's other beliefs, the way pieces of a puzzle support each other.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
coincidentia oppositorum coincidence of opposites
A phrase for a state or symbol in which two things normally seen as opposites — such as good and evil, or the sacred and the everyday — are held together as one, rather than one side winning out over the other.Appears in A God in the Psyche
collective unconscious
Jung's proposed deeper layer of the mind, shared by all people regardless of personal upbringing, that he believed generates the same basic patterns and symbols (archetypes) wherever human beings dream, worship, or tell stories.Appears in A God in the Psyche
come-outer perfectionism come-outerism, perfectionism
A radical religious stance, embraced by William Lloyd Garrison and others, holding that true believers must completely withdraw ('come out') from any church, government, or institution that tolerated sin such as slavery, rather than try to reform it from within.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
common meter C.M., hymn meter
A four-line stanza pattern alternating eight-syllable and six-syllable lines, the rhythmic backbone of countless Protestant hymns (including 'Amazing Grace') and of most of Emily Dickinson's poems.Appears in Tell It Slant
common-sense hermeneutic Baconian hermeneutic, common-sense Baconian hermeneutic, common-sense reading
A once-dominant way of reading the Bible that assumed any ordinary person could understand Scripture's plain, literal meaning without needing scholars or clergy to explain it, much as they could gather and trust plain facts in everyday life.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
communicatio idiomatum communication of idioms, communication of properties
A technical rule in classic Christian theology allowing believers to say things like "God suffered" or "God was born," on the reasoning that because Jesus is a single person with two natures, what's true of either nature can be said of the person as a whole.Appears in The Man and the Christ
communicative rationality formal pragmatics, universal pragmatics
Philosopher Jürgen Habermas's idea that ordinary conversation aimed at mutual understanding carries built-in standards of honesty, truthfulness, and fairness that speakers implicitly commit to whenever they make a claim to someone else.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
compensation test Kaldor-Hicks, Kaldor-Hicks compensation test
A rule for judging whether an economic change is an improvement by asking whether the people who gain from it could, in theory, fully repay the people who lose from it and still come out ahead — whether or not that repayment actually happens.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
computationalism computational theory of mind
The view that thinking is essentially a form of computation, in which the brain manipulates internal symbols and representations the way a computer processes data.Appears in Experience and Consequences
conacre
A traditional Irish land arrangement in which a farmer rented a prepared, manured plot for a single growing season only, on a term deliberately too short to create any lasting tenant rights.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Concert of Europe
A loose system of regular meetings and understandings among Europe's great powers after 1815 that managed crises and prevented general war for roughly four decades before gradually breaking down.Appears in The Map of American Power
conciliarism
A medieval theory, largely rejected by later popes, holding that a general council of bishops has authority even over the pope himself and can override or even remove him.Appears in On This Rock
conclave
The closed-door meeting of the Church's cardinals under age 80, held after a pope dies or resigns, in which they vote in secret to elect his successor.Appears in On This Rock
concordat
A formal treaty between the Vatican and a national government that spells out the legal status, rights, and obligations of the Catholic Church within that country.Appears in On This Rock
concrete operational stage concrete operations
The stage of childhood thinking, roughly ages seven to eleven, in which children gain the ability to reason logically and reverse mental operations, but only about real or easily imaginable things rather than pure hypotheticals.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
Condition of England Question Condition-of-England
Carlyle's own phrase, coined in the 1830s, for the pressing social problem of poverty and misery amid industrial wealth in Britain; it became the name for a whole genre of Victorian novels and essays about the plight of the working class.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Condon Report Condon Committee
A U.S. government-funded university study, published in 1969, that concluded UFOs did not merit further scientific study — even though a large share of the specific cases it examined were left unexplained in its own pages — and whose conclusion the Air Force used to shut down its UFO investigation program.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Confrontation with the Unconscious the Confrontation with the Unconscious
The name given to the roughly seventeen-year period, beginning around 1913, when Jung deliberately let himself be overtaken by vivid inner visions and fantasies rather than fighting them off, an experience he later treated as the raw material behind nearly everything he wrote afterward.Appears in A God in the Psyche
Congregationalist Congregationalism, Trinitarian Congregationalism
A branch of Protestant Christianity, dominant in nineteenth-century New England, in which each local church governs itself rather than answering to a bishop or central hierarchy, and which carried forward the strict Calvinist theology of colonial Puritanism.Appears in Tell It Slant
coniunctio chemical wedding
An alchemical image of a symbolic marriage — often pictured as a king and queen, or sun and moon, uniting — that Jung read as standing for the joining of opposite qualities (light and dark, masculine and feminine) into one whole personality.Appears in A God in the Psyche
coniunctio oppositorum coniunctio
An alchemical and Jungian term for the symbolic union of opposites — light and dark, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious — psychologist Carl Jung treated as an image of the psyche becoming whole.Appears in The Man and the Christ
conjecture and refutation conjecture-and-refutation
Karl Popper's picture of how science actually advances: not by gathering evidence and generalizing from it, but by proposing bold guesses and then trying as hard as possible to prove them wrong, keeping only the ones that survive.Appears in Hard to Vary
conservation conservation of liquid, conservation of mass, conservation of number
The understanding that a quantity of something stays the same even when its shape or arrangement changes, as long as nothing has been added or taken away — for instance, knowing that water poured into a taller, thinner glass is still the same amount.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
constructivism constructivist structuralism, genetic structuralism
The view that knowledge is neither copied directly from the world nor built into the mind from birth, but is actively built up over time through a person's own actions and interactions with their environment.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
constructor theory
A physics research program, developed by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto, that tries to rebuild the foundations of physics around a catalogue of which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, rather than the usual equations describing motion over time.Appears in Hard to Vary
contactee movement contactees
A wave of 1950s figures who claimed friendly, often spiritually themed personal contact with human-looking space travelers delivering warnings about nuclear war, distinct from the later, more clinical and involuntary abduction stories.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
contract curve
The set of every possible way of dividing goods between two people such that no further trade could make one of them better off without making the other worse off.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
convergence theory of truth convergence theory
Charles Sanders Peirce's idea that truth is whatever opinion a community of investigators would eventually agree on if they kept studying a question carefully and indefinitely, rather than a fixed fact sitting apart from all inquiry.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
conversion narrative
A personal, often formulaic account a person gave of their own religious conversion, describing their sinfulness, spiritual crisis, and eventual assurance of salvation, which many churches required before granting full membership.Appears in The Recurring Fire
core CPI core inflation
A measure of consumer price inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices, giving a read on the underlying inflation trend without one-off shocks like an oil spike.Appears in The Argument Over Money
core knowledge core cognition, core systems
A theory holding that infants are born with a handful of specialized, largely automatic mental systems — for tracking objects, rough quantities, and living agents, among others — rather than a single general-purpose logic that develops from scratch.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
correspondence Science of Correspondences, doctrine of correspondence
A mystical theory, borrowed from the Swedish thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, holding that every object and event in the physical world symbolically mirrors a matching spiritual truth, so that nature can be read like a coded language of the soul.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
cottier cottiers
A near-landless Irish farm laborer who received a small plot of land to live on and grow food, in exchange for months of unpaid labor each year, typically on a lease too short to gain any legal right to the land.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
credibility doctrine credibility trap
The recurring belief among US policymakers that backing down from any military commitment, even a minor one, damages the country's reputation for resolve everywhere else, which has repeatedly pushed presidents toward escalation to avoid appearing weak.Appears in The Map of American Power
Crime of '73 Coinage Act of 1873
The nickname given by 19th-century silver advocates to an 1873 law that quietly dropped silver coins from U.S. currency, effectively putting the country on a gold-only standard; the move badly hurt debtors when silver's price later collapsed, and it became the era's iconic conspiracy theory about a secret creditors' plot.Appears in The Argument Over Money
criterion of embarrassment criteria of authenticity, embarrassment criterion
A tool historians use to judge whether a detail about Jesus is likely to be historically real: if a story would have been awkward or damaging for the early church to invent (such as Jesus being baptized by someone who seemed superior to him), it's less likely to be a later fabrication and more likely to be true.Appears in More Than a Forerunner, The Man and the Christ
critical rationalism
The philosophical tradition founded by Karl Popper holding that we gain knowledge not by proving theories true but by relentlessly trying to criticize and refute them, discarding the ones that fail and provisionally keeping the ones that survive.Appears in Hard to Vary
Cross of Gold speech cross of gold
William Jennings Bryan's famous 1896 speech demanding the U.S. allow unlimited coinage of silver to ease farmers' debts, in which he declared creditors and gold-standard bankers should not be allowed to "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."Appears in The Argument Over Money
crowding out
The idea that when a government borrows heavily, it competes with private borrowers for a limited pool of savings, driving up interest rates for everyone else — mortgages, business loans, corporate bonds — as a side effect of financing its own debt.Appears in The Argument Over Money
culture industry
A term applied by a later historian to the network of lecture circuits, published books, and newspaper coverage that turned Emerson into a mass-market celebrity 'prophet' — a system that spread his ideas widely but also simplified and softened them in the process.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
curia Roman Curia
The Vatican's central administrative bureaucracy, made up of departments (now called dicasteries) that run the day-to-day government of the worldwide Catholic Church on the pope's behalf.Appears in On This Rock
curse of Ham curse of Canaan, the curse of Ham
A passage in Genesis in which Noah condemns his grandson Canaan's descendants to servitude, which proslavery writers controversially stretched into a claimed biblical justification for enslaving Africans.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Cynic Cynic philosopher, Jewish Cynic
A member of an ancient Greek philosophical movement that rejected material comforts and social convention in favor of a simple, itinerant, provocatively unconventional way of life — some scholars have compared Jesus's wandering ministry and radical lifestyle to this tradition.Appears in The Man and the Christ

D

Danger Zone thesis peak China, peaking-power thesis
The argument, made by scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, that a rising power becomes most dangerous not while it is still rising but at the moment its growth begins to plateau or reverse, because its leaders may feel a closing window to achieve ambitions by force.Appears in The Map of American Power
Dark Enlightenment neo-reactionary, post-liberal right
A loose, internet-based political and intellectual movement, prominent since the late 2000s, that rejects democracy in favor of authoritarian or monarchist alternatives and looks to older anti-democratic thinkers, including Carlyle, for intellectual ancestry.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Davidson window
Shorthand for the 2027-2030 period identified by a former US Indo-Pacific commander as the timeframe in which China's military could plausibly be capable of attempting to seize Taiwan by force, now used as a general planning benchmark rather than a firm prediction.Appears in The Map of American Power
de-dollarization
The gradual process by which countries and central banks shift some of their reserves, trade invoicing, or debt away from the U.S. dollar and toward other currencies or assets like gold, usually to reduce dependence on a currency the United States could restrict access to.Appears in The Argument Over Money
de-risking
A more limited alternative to full decoupling in which a country restricts economic ties with a rival only in specific sensitive sectors (like advanced chips) while keeping broader trade and investment relations open.Appears in The Map of American Power
Death-Birth of a World Death-Birth
Carlyle's own phrase for revolution as a single event that is simultaneously an ending and a beginning — the violent destruction of an old order and the painful emergence of a new one at once.Appears in The Book That Burned
declension
The perceived decline of a community's religious devotion and moral seriousness compared to an earlier, more pious founding generation, a fear that recurs throughout early American religious history and was often preached about in sermons called jeremiads.Appears in The Recurring Fire
decommodification
A measure of how much a person can maintain a decent standard of living without depending on selling their labor in the market — the more government benefits are available as a right of citizenship rather than tied to a job, the more decommodified a society is.Appears in The Long Advent
decoupling
The deliberate unwinding of economic and technological ties between two countries — most often used to describe efforts to reduce US and Chinese dependence on each other's markets, supply chains, and technology.Appears in The Map of American Power
Deesis Deësis
A traditional composition in Orthodox Christian religious art showing Christ enthroned as judge flanked by two figures interceding on humanity's behalf, one of whom is consistently John the Baptist.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
demagogic plutocracy plutocrazia demagogica
A system in which a wealthy, manipulative elite actually holds power while keeping up the appearance of democratic, popular government by managing public sentiment, dispensing favors, and running a political machine rather than by open force.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
denial defense deterrence by denial, strategy of denial
A military strategy aimed at making an adversary's attack physically impossible to carry out successfully, as opposed to merely threatening to punish the adversary after the fact; associated with plans to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before it could succeed.Appears in The Map of American Power
dependency ratio old-age dependency ratio, total dependency ratio
The number of retirees (or retirees plus children) compared to every 100 working-age adults, used as a gauge of how much financial weight each worker effectively supports as a population ages.Appears in The Argument Over Money
dependency theory
An economic framework holding that poor countries stay poor not because they are behind on a path to development but because the global economic system systematically transfers wealth from them to rich countries through unequal trade and exchange.Appears in The Long Advent
derbfine
In Gaelic Ireland, the circle of a chief's male relatives back to a shared great-grandfather, from among whom his successor was chosen by kinsmen rather than automatically passed to his eldest son.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
derivations derivation, derivazione
The shifting reasons, doctrines, and ideologies people invent to make their sentiment-driven behavior look logical after the fact — in other words, the rationalizations layered on top of what people really want.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
descriptive phenomenological method DPM, Giorgi's method
A structured research technique for studying people's lived experiences by collecting detailed first-person accounts, breaking them into meaningful segments, and distilling from them the general shape a particular kind of experience tends to take.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Deus absconditus the hidden God
A Latin theological phrase meaning "the hidden God," describing the Reformed Christian belief that God's ultimate purposes remain concealed from human understanding even while God is also revealed in nature and scripture.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
devotional revolution
The rapid, large-scale transformation of Irish Catholic practice into its familiar strict, church-centered, highly observant form, which scholars trace to roughly 1850-1875, in the decades right after the Great Famine.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency
The U.S. military's own intelligence agency, which has funded several of the government's UFO-related investigations, including the 2008-2010 contract that reopened the subject after decades of official silence.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
dicastery dicasteries
The current name, adopted in a 2022 Vatican reorganization, for what used to be called congregations or pontifical councils — the major administrative departments that run the Vatican's central government.Appears in On This Rock
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith CDF, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, DDF
The Vatican department responsible for safeguarding official Catholic teaching, ruling on doctrinal disputes, and investigating serious canonical crimes such as clergy sexual abuse; it was called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) until a 2022 reorganization renamed it.Appears in On This Rock
differentiated consensus
An approach to resolving disputes between churches in which two traditions agree on the core, essential truth of a disputed doctrine while acknowledging they still describe or emphasize it differently, and treat those remaining differences as no longer serious enough to divide them.Appears in On This Rock
Dilettantism Dilettante, Idle game-preserving Dilettantism
Carlyle's contemptuous term for dabbling, amateurish engagement with serious subjects — treating knowledge or art as a hobby for conversation rather than something to be lived out through real work.Appears in Carlyle's Everest, The Calvinist Without a Creed
diocese archdiocese, eparch, eparchy
The basic territorial unit through which the Catholic Church is organized and governed, headed by a bishop (an archdiocese is a senior diocese, and an eparchy is the equivalent term used in Eastern Catholic churches, headed by a bishop called an eparch).Appears in On This Rock
discount window
The Federal Reserve's standing facility for lending directly to banks that need short-term cash, historically the classic tool of a "lender of last resort" in a banking panic.Appears in The Argument Over Money
disequilibrium déséquilibre
A felt gap or contradiction that arises when a person's current way of thinking cannot handle a new experience, creating an inner tension the mind is driven to resolve.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
disestablishment the voluntary principle, voluntaryism
The legal process of ending a government-supported, tax-funded official church and the special legal privileges that came with it, replacing it with a system in which all religious groups must survive on voluntary donations and compete for members.Appears in The Recurring Fire
divine simplicity ipsum esse subsistens
A doctrine in classical theology holding that God has no separate parts or properties at all, so that what looks like a list of divine attributes — power, knowledge, goodness — are really just different names for one single, undivided reality.Appears in Hard to Vary
Divinity Hall
The part-time training course, typically attended for a few summer weeks each year over five or six years, by which the Burgher Seceder church prepared young men for ordination as ministers.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
DNI Director of National Intelligence
The US official who oversees and coordinates all eighteen agencies of the American intelligence community and delivers the president's daily intelligence briefing.Appears in The Map of American Power
Docetism Docetic
An early Christian heresy holding that Jesus only *appeared* to have a physical human body and to suffer, when he was actually a purely spiritual being putting on a convincing disguise.Appears in The Man and the Christ
DOE Department of Energy
The federal department that runs the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and its national laboratories, included in recent UFO-file releases because of incident reports tied to the restricted airspace over nuclear facilities.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
doom loop sovereign-bank doom loop
A self-reinforcing spiral, most visible in the Eurozone, where a struggling national government's bonds lose value, which damages the balance sheets of the domestic banks that hold those bonds, which then pressures the same government to bail out its banks and worsens its finances further.Appears in The Argument Over Money
dot plot
A chart the Federal Reserve publishes several times a year showing where each of its policymakers individually expects interest rates to be in future years, used by markets to gauge the likely direction of rate decisions.Appears in The Argument Over Money
double-consciousness double consciousness
W.E.B. Du Bois's term for the inner split he described in Black Americans forced to see themselves both through their own eyes and through the contemptuous gaze of a white-dominated society, producing two competing senses of identity in one person.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Dryasdust Dryasdustic, Dryasdusts
A mocking nickname, borrowed from novelist Walter Scott, that Carlyle used for the type of historian who piles up dull, disorganized facts and documents without ever bringing the people or events back to life.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
dual banking system
The American arrangement, dating to the Civil War era, in which banks can choose to be chartered and regulated either by the federal government or by an individual state, producing two parallel and overlapping regulatory tracks that persist today.Appears in The Argument Over Money
dynamical vs mechanical distinction mechanism, the Mechanical Age
A contrast Carlyle borrowed and adapted from German philosophy between a "dynamical" view of the world as alive with inward spiritual force and a "mechanical" view that reduces everything — including politics, religion, and the self — to lifeless machinery; he used it to diagnose his own era as spiritually hollowed out by mechanism.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
dyothelitism dyothelite, monothelitism, two wills
The doctrine, confirmed at a church council in 680–681, that Jesus had two complete wills — one divine and one human — working in harmony, against the rival view (monothelitism) that he had only a single, divine will.Appears in The Man and the Christ
décalage horizontal décalage, vertical décalage
Piaget's term for the puzzling time-lag by which supposedly related mental abilities do not actually appear at the same time — for example, children grasp that the amount of a substance stays constant years before they grasp the same idea for volume.Appears in How Knowledge Grows

E

ecocriticism ecocritical
A field of literary study that examines how writers portray nature and the environment, and that has debated whether Emerson counts as an early ancestor of environmental thinking or as a thinker who treated nature mainly as a resource for human and spiritual purposes.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
EDCA Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement
A 2014 US-Philippines agreement that lets American forces rotate through and use designated Philippine military bases, expanded in recent years to sites facing Taiwan and the South China Sea.Appears in The Map of American Power
Edgeworth box Edgeworth-Bowley box
A diagram that shows every possible way of splitting a fixed amount of two goods between two people, used to find which divisions leave no further beneficial trade on the table.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
edifying philosophy
Richard Rorty's term for philosophical writing that aims to keep an interesting conversation going and open new ways of talking, rather than trying to nail down a final, provably correct account of knowledge or reality.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
egocentrism
In Piaget's technical sense, not selfishness but a young child's inability to recognize that other people might see, know, or feel something different from what the child itself sees, knows, or feels.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
eidetic reduction eidetic variation
A mental exercise of imagining variations on something to figure out which of its features are essential to what it fundamentally is, versus which are just incidental details.Appears in Experience and Consequences
elastic currency
A money supply designed to expand and contract automatically with the economy's actual need for cash, the feature the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was built to provide after the old, rigid national-bank currency proved prone to panics.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Elijah typology Elijah redivivus, Elijah-redivivus
The deliberate literary technique by which the Gospel writers portrayed John the Baptist as a reenactment of the ancient prophet Elijah, right down to matching his clothing to a biblical description of Elijah, to cast John as the promised forerunner of the end times.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
elite overproduction
A theory that political instability builds up when a society trains and produces far more people who expect positions of wealth, status, or power than there are actual positions available, creating a pool of frustrated, ambitious people ready to challenge the existing order.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
elite settlement elite-configuration theory, elite-settlement theory
A theory holding that whether a country ends up with a stable democracy or unstable, authoritarian-leaning politics depends mainly on whether its various power-holding factions have reached a lasting agreement on the basic rules of the political game.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
eminent domain (UAP context)
A proposed legal power that would let the government seize and examine any physical material — such as alleged recovered craft debris — currently held by private companies or individuals, if disclosure legislation including it were ever passed.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
empiricism British empiricism, empiricist
The philosophical view that genuine knowledge comes chiefly from sense experience and observation rather than from pure reasoning alone.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
emplotment Romantic emplotment, emplotted
A term from literary theory for the way a historian shapes real events into a story with a recognizable shape — such as tragedy, comedy, or romance — meaning that even supposedly neutral history-writing makes storytelling choices.Appears in The Book That Burned
enactivism enactive cognition
The theory that a mind isn't a passive processor of information but is actively brought into being through a living creature's ongoing, embodied engagement with its surroundings.Appears in Experience and Consequences
enantiodromia
A principle, borrowed by Jung from the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, holding that anything pushed to an extreme eventually flips into its own opposite — for example, an age of intense spiritual focus eventually giving way to an age dominated by material concerns.Appears in A God in the Psyche
encyclical
A formal letter written by the pope and addressed to the whole Church (and sometimes to "all people of good will" beyond it), typically used to lay out authoritative teaching on a major moral or doctrinal topic.Appears in On This Rock
endogamy
The practice, common in some tightly-knit communities, of marrying within a small population repeatedly over generations, which makes DNA-based ancestry tools much less reliable because everyone in the group ends up sharing similar genetic segments.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
engagement
The US strategy, dominant from the 1970s through roughly the mid-2010s, of expanding trade and diplomatic ties with China on the bet that economic growth would eventually produce political liberalization — a bet most policymakers now consider to have failed on its central premise.Appears in The Map of American Power
entelechy
An old philosophical term, revived by the biologist Hans Driesch and borrowed by Jung, for an inner goal-directed force that supposedly steers a living thing toward the mature form it is meant to become, independent of any single physical part.Appears in A God in the Psyche
Enthusiasm
An eighteenth-century term of criticism (not a compliment) for claiming direct, unmediated inspiration from God — visions, physical fits, prophetic certainty — bypassing the Bible and reasoned argument, which critics used to attack the revival's excesses.Appears in The Recurring Fire
entity list
A US government blacklist that bars American companies from selling technology and goods to the foreign companies and organizations named on it, used mainly to cut off Chinese firms from sensitive technology.Appears in The Map of American Power
Entsagung Entsagen, renunciation
A German term meaning "renunciation," central to Goethe's writing, describing the deliberate giving-up of personal happiness or desire as the necessary condition for a meaningful, disciplined life; Carlyle adopted it as part of his own gospel of work.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
epistemology epistemological
The branch of philosophy concerned with what knowledge is, how we can be justified in believing something, and how belief relates to truth.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
epoché
The deliberate suspension of one's everyday, unquestioned belief that the world simply exists out there as it seems to, done in order to study the structure of experience itself rather than the things experienced.Appears in Experience and Consequences
equilibration équilibration majorante
The self-driven process by which a mind resolves the friction between what it expects and what it encounters, building a more powerful and stable way of thinking as a result — Piaget's proposed engine of all mental growth.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
Erfurt Program
The 1891 platform of the German Social Democratic Party, which paired a theoretical section predicting capitalism's inevitable revolutionary collapse with a practical section listing achievable reforms like suffrage and an eight-hour day — a split that let the party act as a reformist machine while still claiming to be revolutionary.Appears in The Long Advent
eschatological eschatology
Having to do with the end of the world or a final, decisive divine judgment — used here to describe Carlyle's sense that the Revolution was not just political upheaval but something closer to doomsday.Appears in The Book That Burned
eschatology eschatological
The branch of theology concerned with the 'last things' — the final destiny of humanity and history — and, in this context, the belief that history is moving purposefully toward a redeemed or perfected future.Appears in More Than a Forerunner, The Long Advent
eSLR enhanced supplementary leverage ratio
A bank-capital rule requiring the largest U.S. banks to hold a minimum cushion of capital against essentially all of their assets, regardless of how risky those assets are, intended as a simple backstop underneath the more complex risk-based capital rules.Appears in The Argument Over Money
esse in anima being in the soul
Jung's core philosophical claim that experiences of the mind — such as a religious vision or a recurring dream image — are genuinely real and have real effects in their own right, whether or not anything matching them exists outside the person having them.Appears in A God in the Psyche
essence/energies distinction energeiai, essence-energies
A distinction developed by the Eastern Christian theologian Gregory Palamas between God's inner being (which is permanently unknowable to any creature) and God's outward activities or "energies" (which humans can genuinely experience and share in) — used to explain how people can have real contact with God without becoming God themselves.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Essenes Essene
A strict, separatist Jewish religious movement of the first century BCE and CE, widely associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls community, known for communal living and rigorous purity rules.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
ETH extraterrestrial hypothesis
The idea that at least some UFO reports involve genuine visiting spacecraft from another planet, as opposed to secret human technology, misidentified natural phenomena, or something else entirely.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
ethnocentrism
Richard Rorty's preferred alternative to relativism: the frank admission that we can only ever judge claims from within our own community's assumptions, while still believing some of those assumptions are worth defending, rather than claiming that every community's views are equally valid.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
evangelicalism evangelical
A strand of Protestant Christianity, dating from the 1730s revivals, that stresses a personal, transformative conversion experience, the Bible's supreme authority, active evangelism and reform, and the centrality of Christ's death on the cross.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Everlasting No / Centre of Indifference / Everlasting Yea Centre of Indifference, Everlasting No, Everlasting Yea, the Everlasting Yea/No
The three-stage spiritual journey — from despairing rejection of a meaningless universe, through a period of numb detachment, to a hard-won affirmation of duty and work — that structures the autobiographical core of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, modeled on the traditional pattern of a religious conversion.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
ex cathedra
Latin for "from the chair," the narrow, formally defined circumstance in which a pope is considered protected from error by Catholic doctrine — speaking in his official capacity as supreme teacher to define, once and for all, a specific matter of faith or morals for the whole Church, which has happened only a handful of times in history.Appears in On This Rock
ex opere operato
Latin for "by the work worked," the Catholic teaching that a sacrament (like baptism or the Eucharist) delivers its spiritual effect through the ritual act itself when properly performed, rather than depending on the personal holiness of the priest performing it.Appears in On This Rock
excise (whiskey tax) Whiskey Rebellion
A federal tax on domestically distilled liquor imposed by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 to help pay off the national debt; it provoked an armed uprising by Pennsylvania farmers in 1794 that President Washington personally suppressed, establishing that the new federal government would enforce its taxes by force if necessary.Appears in The Argument Over Money
exorbitant privilege
A term coined in the 1960s to describe the unique economic advantage the United States gets from issuing the world's reserve currency — namely, the ability to borrow more cheaply and run larger deficits than any other country could get away with, because the whole world wants to hold dollars and dollar debt.Appears in The Argument Over Money
extraordinary measures
A set of accounting maneuvers the Treasury uses once the debt ceiling is hit — such as suspending certain federal retirement-fund investments — to free up borrowing room and keep paying the government's bills for a while longer without formally exceeding the legal debt limit.Appears in The Argument Over Money

F

Fabian Society Fabianism, Fabians
A British society of intellectuals and professionals, founded in 1884, that pursued socialism not through revolution or mass working-class organizing but by patiently persuading influential politicians and civil servants to adopt collectivist policies — a strategy they called 'permeation.'Appears in The Long Advent
fallibilism fallibilist
The position that every belief or theory we hold might turn out to be wrong and none can ever be proven with total certainty, while still insisting that truth is real and that some theories genuinely get us closer to it than others.Appears in Experience and Consequences, Hard to Vary, The Cash-Value of Truth
falsifiability falsificationism
Karl Popper's requirement that a genuinely scientific claim must forbid some possible observation, so that there is at least some outcome that could, in principle, prove it wrong.Appears in Hard to Vary
family resemblance
A way of describing a tradition or category whose members share overlapping similarities with each other without all sharing one single defining feature in common.Appears in Experience and Consequences
fascicle fascicles
One of about forty small manuscript booklets Emily Dickinson made by copying her poems onto folded sheets of stationery and binding them herself with thread, essentially a private, hand-sewn form of self-publication that she never showed to a general audience.Appears in Tell It Slant
FDIC Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
The federal agency, created in 1933, that guarantees bank deposits up to a set limit so that ordinary depositors don't lose their savings if their bank fails, a fix specifically designed to stop the self-fulfilling bank runs that helped cause the Great Depression.Appears in The Argument Over Money
FDPR Foreign Direct Product Rule
A US export-control mechanism that lets Washington block sales of a foreign-made product anywhere in the world if it was built using even a small amount of American technology, giving US sanctions extraterritorial reach over global chip supply chains.Appears in The Map of American Power
feminist pragmatism pragmatist feminism
A branch of scholarship arguing that women overlooked by the standard, male-centered history of pragmatism — above all Jane Addams and her Hull House settlement-house colleagues — were doing serious original philosophy through hands-on social reform work, not merely applying men's ideas.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
feminization thesis feminization, feminization of American religion
A historical argument that nineteenth-century American Protestantism became more emotional, domestic, and female-dominated as it lost intellectual and public authority, a claim later criticized for treating women's long-standing majority presence in churches as if it were a decline.Appears in The Recurring Fire
fiat money fiat currency, fiat era
Money that has value only because a government declares it legal tender and people trust it, rather than being backed by a physical commodity like gold or silver.Appears in The Argument Over Money
filioque and the Son
A phrase meaning "and the Son" that the Western church added to the ancient Nicene Creed, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son; the Eastern Orthodox church rejects both the added wording and the West's authority to alter a creed unilaterally, making it a lasting symbol of the split between the two churches.Appears in On This Rock
financial repression
A strategy, deliberate or effectively so, of keeping interest rates below the inflation rate so that a government's existing debt quietly loses real value over time, with savers absorbing the cost through weaker returns on their money.Appears in The Argument Over Money
first fundamental theorem of welfare economics First Fundamental Theorem
The economic principle that, under a set of idealized conditions such as full competition and no hidden costs, a free market left alone will settle into an arrangement where no further win-win trades are possible.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
first island chain
The string of islands running from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Borneo that forms the first line of US and allied military positions aimed at containing Chinese naval expansion into the wider Pacific.Appears in The Map of American Power
first-past-the-post FPTP, plurality voting
A voting system, used in the UK and the US, in which whichever candidate or party gets the most votes in a district wins outright, with no requirement to win an outright majority and no seats awarded in proportion to a party's overall vote share.Appears in Hard to Vary
FLIR Forward Looking Infrared
A heat-sensing camera system carried by military aircraft that produces black-and-white video by detecting temperature differences rather than visible light; footage from these cameras produced the most widely circulated Navy 'UFO videos.'Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
foederati
Non-Roman fighting forces contracted by the late Roman Empire to supplement its regular army, paid through subsidies and increasingly indistinguishable from Rome's own troops by the empire's final century — used as a comparison point for the modern US military's growing reliance on private contractors.Appears in The Map of American Power
folkhemmet people's home
A Swedish political metaphor, coined in a landmark 1928 speech, picturing the nation as one big household in which no class should look down on any other — the phrase that gave Swedish welfare-state politics its unifying, above-class appeal.Appears in The Long Advent
FOMC Federal Open Market Committee
The Federal Reserve's central decision-making body, made up of its governors and regional bank presidents, that meets regularly to set the target interest rate and other core monetary-policy tools for the entire country.Appears in The Argument Over Money
FONOPS Freedom of Navigation Operations
Routine US Navy voyages through waters that other countries claim more territorial control over than international law allows, conducted to assert that those waters remain open to all shipping.Appears in The Map of American Power
Foreign Births Register FBR
The official Irish government process that grants Irish citizenship to a person born outside Ireland if they can document that a grandparent (or, through an unbroken registered chain, a more distant ancestor) was born in Ireland.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
formal operational stage formal operations
The final stage in Piaget's scheme, beginning around age eleven or twelve, marked by the ability to reason about hypothetical possibilities, form and test systematic hypotheses, and think about thinking itself, rather than being limited to concrete, real-world situations.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
foundationalism foundationalist
The view that all justified belief must ultimately rest on some bedrock of basic beliefs that are certain in themselves and don't depend on any further beliefs for their support.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
foundherentism
Philosopher Susan Haack's hybrid theory of justified belief, which she compares to solving a crossword puzzle: an answer is supported both by the clue itself (like raw sense experience) and by how well it fits with the other answers already filled in (like the coherence of one's other beliefs).Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Free Banking era free banking
The mid-19th-century period, after the Second Bank of the United States was killed off, when almost anyone who met minimal requirements could open a bank and print their own currency, producing a chaotic patchwork of thousands of different, often unreliable, local banknotes.Appears in The Argument Over Money
FSB Financial Stability Board
An international body of financial regulators, hosted by the Bank for International Settlements, that monitors risks to the global financial system and issues warnings — such as its 2026 report flagging dangers in the private-credit industry — though it has no power to force any country to act.Appears in The Argument Over Money
FSOC Financial Stability Oversight Council
A U.S. government council, created after the 2008 crisis and chaired by the Treasury Secretary, tasked with spotting risks that could threaten the whole financial system before they cause another crash.Appears in The Argument Over Money
FTO Foreign Terrorist Organization
An official US State Department designation that labels a group a terrorist organization, unlocking legal tools such as criminal penalties for supporting the group and grounds for using military force against it; applied to several Latin American drug cartels starting in 2025.Appears in The Map of American Power
Fugitive Slave Law Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
An 1850 federal law that required citizens and officials in free Northern states to help capture and return enslaved people who had escaped to freedom, making noncompliance a crime — a law Emerson publicly vowed to defy.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
functional invariants organization and adaptation
The two basic mental processes Piaget believed operate the same way at every age and stage of life: organizing knowledge into coordinated wholes, and adapting that knowledge to fit the world.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
functionalism (Chicago school) Chicago functionalism, functional psychology
An early American school of psychology holding that mental processes should be studied in terms of what they do for an organism trying to adapt to its environment, rather than by cataloguing the basic building blocks of conscious experience.Appears in Experience and Consequences
functionalism (philosophy of mind) functionalism, multiple realizability
The theory that a mental state (like pain) is defined by the role it plays in taking in information and producing behavior, not by what physical material it happens to be made of, meaning the same mental state could in principle be built from a brain, a computer, or something else entirely.Appears in Experience and Consequences

G

G-SIBs Global Systemically Important Banks
A short list of the world's largest, most interconnected banks — eight of them American — that regulators subject to extra capital and oversight requirements because their failure could threaten the entire financial system.Appears in The Argument Over Money
G-Zero
A term coined by analyst Ian Bremmer describing a world in which no single country or coalition has enough combined will and capability to lead on global problems, producing persistent coordination failures.Appears in The Map of American Power
Galicia Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
A province of the old Austrian (Habsburg) empire straddling what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine, historically one of the poorest regions in Europe and a major source of turn-of-the-century emigration to America.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
The 1947 international agreement that set the ground rules for reducing tariffs and non-discriminatory trade among its member countries, later evolving into the World Trade Organization.Appears in The Map of American Power
gavelkind Gavelkind Act
A law imposed on Irish Catholics in 1704 that forced a father's land to be divided equally among all his sons rather than passed intact to one heir, which fractured Catholic-held estates generation after generation until families converted to the Protestant church.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
GEIPAN GEPAN, SEPRA
France's government UFO investigation unit, running continuously since 1977 under a series of name changes, which classifies reported sightings by how thoroughly they have been explained rather than promoting any single theory of what UFOs are.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
general equilibrium
A way of modeling an entire economy at once, in which the prices and quantities of everything are determined together because every market depends on every other market through the choices of the same buyers and sellers.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
generalized other
A person's internalized sense of the community's shared expectations and viewpoint, built up as a child learns to imagine how a whole group, not just one other individual, would see their actions.Appears in Experience and Consequences
genetic epistemology
Piaget's larger theory of how knowledge itself grows and develops, using both the study of children's minds and the history of science as parallel windows onto the same underlying process — not, despite the name, anything to do with genes or heredity.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
genetic fallacy
The logical error of confusing an explanation of how a belief came to be held with a justification for why that belief is true.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
genetic-text school genetic tradition, manuscript/genetic-text school
A school of textual scholarship holding that a poem's handwritten manuscript — its ink, page layout, and unresolved revisions — is itself part of the work's meaning, so that any printed, typeset version necessarily leaves something essential out.Appears in Tell It Slant
GENIUS Act Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act
A 2025 federal law creating America's first formal regulatory framework for dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies called stablecoins, requiring issuers to back every coin fully with cash or short-term U.S. government debt and barring them from paying interest to holders.Appears in The Argument Over Money
geo holdout GeoLift
An experiment that tests whether advertising actually causes sales by deliberately withholding ads from certain geographic markets and comparing results against markets where the ads ran.Appears in Hard to Vary
Ghent system
An arrangement, used in several Nordic countries, where labor unions rather than the government administer unemployment insurance, which gives workers a practical reason to join a union beyond collective bargaining and helps keep union membership unusually high.Appears in The Long Advent
Gini coefficient Gini
A standard statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a country, running from 0 (everyone has exactly the same amount) to 1 or 100 (one person has everything).Appears in The Long Advent
Ginza Rba Ginza, Great Treasure
The central holy book of the Mandaean religion, a large compilation of teachings, hymns, and cosmological material.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Girondins Girondin
A relatively moderate political faction in the French Revolution's National Convention, associated with figures like Madame Roland, who were eventually purged and executed by the more radical Jacobins.Appears in The Book That Burned
Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933
A 1933 law that built a wall between ordinary deposit-taking banks and riskier investment-banking activities like underwriting securities, intended to stop banks from gambling with depositors' money; its repeal in 1999 is widely debated as a contributing cause of the 2008 financial crisis.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Global South
A broad, imprecise label for a diverse set of African, Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries that share a sense of not having authored the post-1945 international order and of wanting more independent influence within it, rather than any unified political bloc.Appears in The Map of American Power
Gnosticism Gnostic, gnosticizing
A loose family of early religious movements, often considered heretical by mainstream Christianity, that taught salvation comes through secret spiritual knowledge and typically viewed the material world as flawed or evil compared to a higher spiritual realm.Appears in The Man and the Christ
God-image imago Dei, the God-image
Jung's technical term for the mental picture or symbol of ultimate, supreme value that spontaneously arises in dreams, art, and religious experience across cultures — a psychological fact he studied directly, while deliberately setting aside the separate question of whether an actual God exists behind it.Appears in A God in the Psyche
GOFAI Good Old-Fashioned AI
An older approach to artificial intelligence that tried to produce intelligent behavior by programming explicit logical rules and symbolic representations of the world, as opposed to newer approaches based on statistical learning from data.Appears in Experience and Consequences
gold clause Gold Clause Cases
A once-common contract term promising that a debt would be repaid in gold, or its fixed dollar equivalent, which Congress voided in 1933 (upheld by the Supreme Court in 1935) so that the government's planned devaluation of the dollar wouldn't hand creditors an automatic windfall.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Gold Reserve Act
A 1934 law that transferred all of the country's monetary gold to the Treasury and immediately raised the official price of gold from $20.67 to $35 an ounce, deliberately devaluing the dollar to fight the deflation of the Great Depression.Appears in The Argument Over Money
gold standard gold-exchange standard
A monetary system in which a currency's value is fixed to, and directly convertible into, a set quantity of gold, which limits how much money a government can print but also removes flexibility to respond to economic shocks.Appears in The Argument Over Money
gold window closing the gold window
The mechanism, ended by President Nixon in 1971, by which foreign central banks could exchange their dollars for U.S. gold at a fixed rate; closing it permanently severed the dollar's last formal link to gold and launched the modern era of currencies whose value floats freely against each other.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Good Death 'Good Death', the Good Death
The mid-1800s Protestant ideal of how a person should die: peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones, composed and conscious, with last words that proved their soul was saved.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
good neighbor policy
The US policy, launched under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, of renouncing direct military intervention in Latin America in favor of exercising influence through trade, diplomacy, and multilateral institutions instead.Appears in The Map of American Power
Gospel of Greed
Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's satirical name for the late-1800s belief — drawn from a misreading of Darwin's theory of evolution — that ruthless individual self-interest, not cooperation, is what drives human progress; he set it against what he called the "Gospel of Christ," of progress through love.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Gospel of Work the Gospel of Work
Carlyle's central moral doctrine that meaningful labor, not the pursuit of happiness or pleasure, is the true purpose of human life and a form of worship in itself.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Gotha Program
The founding 1875 platform that merged Germany's two rival socialist parties, which Karl Marx privately savaged as a theoretical betrayal because it accepted ideas — like state-funded worker cooperatives — that he considered naive about how state power actually works.Appears in The Long Advent
Gottesgeburt birth of the Word in the soul
German for "the birth of God" — the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart's teaching that the same eternal event in which God the Father generates the Son is also, mysteriously, happening right now within the depths of every human soul that is open to it.Appears in The Man and the Christ
graveyard of aristocracies history is a graveyard of aristocracies, un cimitero di aristocrazie
The idea, condensed into a single memorable line, that every ruling class eventually declines and is replaced, so that history is really just an endless procession of one elite giving way to the next.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
gray-zone gray-zone coercion
Hostile actions — such as harassment by coast guard vessels, cyberattacks, or economic pressure — that fall short of open warfare but are meant to coerce or probe an adversary without triggering a full military response.Appears in The Map of American Power
Great Compression
The mid-20th-century period, roughly 1948 to 1973, when income inequality in the U.S. narrowed dramatically and prosperity was shared unusually broadly across the wage distribution, coinciding with an era of tightly regulated banking and high union membership.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Great Disappointment
The failure of a widely followed prediction that Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844, after which the disappointed movement's remnants regrouped and eventually formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Great Famine Irish Famine, the Famine
The catastrophic Irish famine of 1845-1852, caused by repeated failures of the potato crop to a plant disease and worsened by inadequate British government relief, which killed roughly a million people and drove another million or more to emigrate.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Great Inflation
The sustained surge in U.S. consumer prices from the mid-1960s through 1982, driven by oil shocks and loose monetary policy, that peaked at nearly 15% annual inflation before Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker broke it with punishingly high interest rates.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Great Man Theory Great Man theory of history, great-man doctrine, great-man reading, great-man theory
The idea, associated with Carlyle though he never used the exact phrase himself, that history is driven chiefly by the actions of exceptional, powerful individuals rather than by broad social and economic forces; the term was actually coined by his critic Herbert Spencer to attack the idea.Appears in The Book That Burned, The Calvinist Without a Creed
Great Moderation
The multi-decade stretch after Paul Volcker's disinflation, running roughly from the mid-1980s to 2007, marked by unusually low and stable inflation and milder recessions than in prior decades.Appears in The Argument Over Money
great-man theory great man theory, the Great Men who have worked here
The idea, central to Carlyle's thinking, that history is driven above all by a small number of exceptional, powerful individuals rather than by large impersonal social or economic forces.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
Green New Deal GND
A non-binding U.S. congressional resolution proposing to combine a rapid transition off fossil fuels with guaranteed jobs, universal health care, and economic security, modeled rhetorically on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.Appears in The Long Advent
Gresham's Law
The economic principle that when two forms of money are both legal tender but one is worth more in real terms, people will hoard the more valuable form and spend the less valuable one, driving the "good" money out of circulation — summarized as "bad money drives out good."Appears in The Argument Over Money
groupement grouping
Piaget's term for the loosely logical mental structure he believed underlies a school-age child's reasoning about categories and order, resembling but not fully matching the strict mathematical structures called groups and lattices.Appears in How Knowledge Grows

H

Half-Way Covenant
A 1662 New England church policy that let baptized adults who had not had a full conversion experience have their own children baptized, while still denying those adults full church membership and voting rights.Appears in The Recurring Fire
haplogroup
A branch on the human family tree defined by a shared set of DNA markers passed down largely unchanged along a single parental line, used to trace deep ancestral origins on the strictly male (Y-DNA) or strictly female (mtDNA) line.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Herald archetype the Herald
A recurring figure-type in world religion and myth whose entire identity consists of announcing or pointing toward someone or something greater than himself, rather than being significant in his own right.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
hermeneutic hermeneutical crisis, hermeneutics
A method or approach for interpreting a text, especially the Bible; a 'hermeneutical crisis' means a breakdown in the shared method people had used to agree on what a text meant.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
hermeneutic of continuity hermeneutic of discontinuity, hermeneutic of reform in continuity, hermeneutic of rupture
Rival ways of interpreting the Second Vatican Council (1962-65): one side reads its reforms as a genuine break with the Church's past that opened room for continued change, while the other insists the council only updated the Church's practices while preserving unbroken continuity with earlier doctrine.Appears in On This Rock
hermeneutics hermeneutical circle, philosophical hermeneutics
The philosophical study of interpretation — how we come to understand texts, traditions, and other people — associated especially with the idea that all understanding happens from within a particular historical standpoint, never from a neutral, view-from-nowhere position.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
hero-worship the Hero
Carlyle's term for the reverent admiration a society owes to its greatest, most genuine individuals — in his view not mere celebrity-worship but a healthy and even necessary human instinct, and the basis on which the strong should be allowed to rule the many.Appears in Carlyle's Everest, The Calvinist Without a Creed
Hessdalen Project Hessdalen
A remote Norwegian valley where unexplained lights have been recorded recurrently since the 1980s, now the site of the world's longest-running continuous scientific instrumentation of a UFO-like phenomenon.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
hesychasm Hesychast, hesychast, hesychast theology, hesychia
A method of contemplative prayer practiced by monks on Mount Athos, involving stillness, controlled breathing, and continual repetition of the "Jesus Prayer," through which practitioners claimed to directly perceive an uncreated divine light.Appears in More Than a Forerunner, The Man and the Christ
hidden Markov model HMM
The statistical method a DNA testing company's software uses to scan a person's genome piece by piece and, for each small segment, guess which reference population it most resembles.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
higher law natural-law tradition
The idea, drawn from a long legal and philosophical tradition, that there exists a moral law above any government's written statutes, and that a law violating it is not truly binding — the principle Emerson invoked to argue that breaking the Fugitive Slave Law was a moral duty.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
higher law doctrine higher law, the higher law doctrine
The abolitionist-era argument that a person's moral duty to God's law outranks any human law, so that Christians were justified in disobeying statutes like the Fugitive Slave Act.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Histoire de deux amis de la liberté History by Two Friends of Liberty, deux amis
A multi-volume, unevenly reliable contemporary narrative of the Revolution written in the 1790s by anonymous authors, which Carlyle drew on for color and incident and which is one of the main channels through which factual errors entered his book.Appears in The Book That Burned
Histoire parlementaire Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française
A forty-volume French compilation of speeches, decrees, and official proceedings from the Revolution, assembled by Buchez and Roux in the 1830s, which served as Carlyle's principal raw documentary source.Appears in The Book That Burned
historical present camera-eye, present tense narration, present-tense
A storytelling technique in which past events are narrated as though they are happening right now, which erases the reader's sense of safe hindsight and makes the outcome feel undecided.Appears in The Book That Burned
historicism The Poverty of Historicism
The idea, criticized by Karl Popper, that history unfolds according to discoverable laws that let experts forecast society's long-term future the way an astronomer predicts an eclipse — a method Popper argued cannot work because it would require already knowing today the knowledge that will only be discovered tomorrow.Appears in Hard to Vary
homoousios consubstantial, of one substance, of the same being
A Greek theological term, not found in the Bible, adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 to declare that Jesus the Son is "of the same being" as God the Father — that is, fully and equally divine, not merely a very exalted creature.Appears in On This Rock, The Man and the Christ
horizon fringe
The vague, unfocused background of related possibilities and associations that surrounds whatever a person is currently paying direct attention to, and which shapes how that focal thing is understood.Appears in Experience and Consequences
hub-and-spokes
The pattern of US alliances in Asia built around separate bilateral treaties with individual countries like Japan and South Korea, rather than one multilateral alliance like NATO in Europe.Appears in The Map of American Power
hush harbor hush arbors, hush harbors
A secret, secluded gathering place, such as a swamp or thicket, where enslaved people held their own Christian worship services out of earshot of their masters.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
hyperreflexivity
A proposed psychological state, associated with schizophrenia, in which a person becomes excessively self-aware and detached, consciously scrutinizing aspects of experience that normally stay in the unnoticed background.Appears in Experience and Consequences
hypostasis hypostases, hypostatic union
A Greek philosophical term meaning roughly "individual, concrete reality" or "person" — used in Christian doctrine to describe both the three distinct persons who share one divine being (Father, Son, Spirit) and the single "person" in whom Jesus's divine and human natures are united.Appears in The Man and the Christ

I

I2U2
An informal grouping of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States that coordinates on economic and technology projects, functioning as a diplomatic bridge among partners not otherwise linked by treaty.Appears in The Map of American Power
IC intelligence community
The collective term for the roughly 18 U.S. government agencies — including the CIA, NSA, and military intelligence branches — that gather and analyze intelligence, several of which participate in reviewing and releasing UFO-related material.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
idealism American idealism, German idealism, Hegelian idealism
A philosophical tradition, running from Kant through Hegel, holding that reality is fundamentally shaped by or dependent on mind, spirit, or reason, rather than existing as raw independent matter.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
identity by descent IBD
A DNA segment that two people both carry because they inherited it from the same shared ancestor, which is the basic building block DNA companies use to find genetic relatives and reconstruct family trees.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
idiographic
An approach to research that studies a small number of individual cases in rich depth, prioritizing what is distinctive about each particular person's experience over broad generalizations.Appears in Experience and Consequences
IEEPA International Emergency Economic Powers Act
A 1977 US law that gives the president broad authority to impose economic sanctions and trade restrictions during a declared national emergency, used as the legal basis for many recent tariff actions.Appears in The Map of American Power
Immaculate Constellation
The name given in a document entered into the congressional record in 2024 to an alleged secret Pentagon program said to collect and analyze UFO imagery, whose existence has not been independently confirmed.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
immanence immanentism, immanentist theology
In the theological sense used here, the idea that the divine or sacred is found within the natural, developing process of life and reason itself, rather than existing as a separate, external, supernatural authority.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
immanent immanence, immanentist
Present and active within the world itself, rather than existing apart from or above it — the key idea in Emerson's theology, which located divinity inside nature and every person rather than in a distant heavenly God.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
impartible inheritance
A land-inheritance system, common in Ireland after the Great Famine, in which one son inherited the family farm intact while his siblings had to either stay unmarried on the land or emigrate, which turned emigration into an expected stage of life.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
implied powers
The constitutional doctrine, first argued by Alexander Hamilton to justify chartering the First Bank of the United States, that Congress may use any reasonable means not explicitly listed in the Constitution to carry out the powers it is explicitly given, such as taxing and regulating commerce.Appears in The Argument Over Money
incrementality testing incrementality
A method of measuring advertising's true effect by comparing outcomes for people who saw an ad against a genuinely comparable group who did not, so that only the sales caused by the ad — not sales that would have happened anyway — get counted.Appears in Hard to Vary
Independent Treasury
A 19th-century arrangement in which the federal government kept its own money in its own vaults, dealing directly in gold and silver rather than through any bank, effectively removing Washington from the private banking system entirely.Appears in The Argument Over Money
indifference curve indifference curves
A line on a graph connecting every combination of two goods that a person likes equally well, used to map out preferences without ever having to put a number on how much satisfaction each combination provides.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
individuation individuation process
Jung's name for the lifelong psychological process of becoming a complete, integrated person by consciously facing and absorbing the parts of oneself that had been pushed into the unconscious, rather than simply becoming more accomplished or more unique in the ordinary sense.Appears in A God in the Psyche, The Man and the Christ
Indo-Pacific Strategy
The US government's overarching plan, formalized in 2022, for coordinating diplomatic, economic, and military policy across Asia and the Pacific to counterbalance China's rise.Appears in The Map of American Power
INDOPACOM Indo-Pacific Command
The US military's regional command responsible for all American forces and operations across Asia and the Pacific Ocean, the largest of the geographic combatant commands.Appears in The Map of American Power
indult
An official Vatican permission granting an exception to standard church law or practice, often used for allowing continued use of the older Latin Mass in a particular place.Appears in On This Rock
inferentialism
Philosopher Robert Brandom's theory that the meaning of a word or sentence comes from its role in a web of reasoning — what you're entitled to conclude from it and what would count as evidence against it — rather than from what object it supposedly points to in the world.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
inflation psychological inflation
In Jung's clinical vocabulary, a dangerous state in which a person's sense of self becomes swollen by identifying with forces or ideas far larger than any individual can safely hold — such as believing oneself god-like — often ending in a breakdown of the personality.Appears in A God in the Psyche
INRC group INRC
A four-part mathematical structure Piaget proposed as the summit of adolescent reasoning, in which a thinker can coordinate four related transformations of an idea (its identity, its opposite, its reciprocal, and the reciprocal's opposite) all at once — a capacity he saw as the hallmark of truly mature, scientific-style thought.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
instrumentalism Deweyan instrumentalism
The view, developed especially by John Dewey, that ideas and beliefs are best understood as practical tools for solving problems and coping with situations, rather than as pictures that either correctly or incorrectly mirror an independent reality.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
intentionality aboutness, intentional in-existence
The basic feature of mental acts (like seeing, believing, or wanting) that they are always directed at or about something, even when the thing they are about does not actually exist.Appears in Experience and Consequences
interdimensional hypothesis
A theory, developed as an alternative to the idea that UFOs are alien spacecraft, holding that the phenomenon may involve some other reality — such as another dimension or a form of consciousness — rather than physical visitors from another planet.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
interpretive fiction interpretative fiction
Historian Jon Butler's influential 1982 charge that 'the Great Awakening' as a single, unified, continent-wide event never actually happened at the time and was instead stitched together after the fact by later historians out of scattered, disconnected local revivals.Appears in The Recurring Fire
intra-inter-trans triad inter-object phase, intra-object phase, trans-object phase
A three-step pattern Piaget and a collaborator proposed for how understanding deepens in both children and the history of science: first studying things one at a time, then discovering how they relate to and transform into one another, and finally organizing those relationships into one unified system.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
intragovernmental holdings
The portion of the national debt the U.S. government owes to itself — mainly money borrowed from trust funds like Social Security — as distinct from debt held by outside investors, banks, and foreign governments.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Investiture Controversy
An 11th-century power struggle between the papacy and European kings over who had the right to appoint and formally install bishops, which the Church saw as sacred authority and kings saw as a matter of controlling powerful, land-owning officials.Appears in On This Rock
invisible institution 'invisible institution', the invisible institution
A term for the secret, unsupervised religious gatherings enslaved Black Americans held out of sight of their enslavers, which historians treat as the seedbed of a distinct African American Christian tradition.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet, The Recurring Fire
ipseity ipseity disturbance, minimal self
The most basic, pre-reflective sense a person has of being a single, continuous self who is the one undergoing their own experiences, distinct from any more elaborate sense of personal identity.Appears in Experience and Consequences
iron law of oligarchy
The claim that any organization — even one built to be internally democratic, like a political party — will inevitably develop an entrenched, self-perpetuating leadership class simply because running any large group requires concentrated organization and expertise.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
itinerancy itinerant
The practice of traveling preachers moving from town to town and preaching to any crowd that gathered, often without invitation from the local minister, which bypassed and undercut the settled authority of resident clergy.Appears in The Recurring Fire

J

Jacobins Jacobin
The most radical and ultimately dominant political faction of the French Revolution, associated with Robespierre and the Terror, known for its zeal in purging perceived enemies of the revolutionary cause.Appears in The Book That Burned
James-Lange theory of emotion
A theory holding that the physical, bodily reaction to a situation comes first and the emotion is our felt awareness of that reaction, reversing the common-sense order (so a person feels afraid because their body has already started trembling, not the other way around).Appears in Experience and Consequences
jeremiad American jeremiad, the American Jeremiad, the jeremiad
A sermon form, common in early New England, that lamented the community's moral and spiritual decline from the piety of its founders and called listeners to repent and return to their original religious devotion.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet, The Calvinist Without a Creed, The Recurring Fire
Jesus Seminar
A group of biblical scholars, active from the late 1980s onward, who voted with colored beads on which sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were likely to be authentic — their conclusions, which excluded most apocalyptic material, proved highly controversial.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Johnson-Reed Act 1924 Immigration Act, Immigration Act of 1924
A 1924 U.S. law that set strict immigration quotas for each nationality based on the 1890 census, a year chosen specifically because it undercounted Eastern and Southern Europeans, which sharply cut off the wave of Polish, Baltic, Czech, and Italian immigration while leaving generous quotas for Ireland, Britain, and Germany.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Journées journée
A French term (literally "days") used by historians for the major single-day mass uprisings of the Revolution, such as the storming of the Bastille, treated as distinct dramatic turning points.Appears in The Book That Burned
Jubilee Day of Jubilee, year of Jubilee
A year described in the biblical book of Leviticus in which debts were forgiven and enslaved people freed, which African Americans invoked as the model and promise for their own emancipation.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet

K

K-shaped economy K-shape
A pattern in which different parts of the economy move in opposite directions at once, typically pictured as wealthier, asset-owning households pulling ahead while lower-income, wage-dependent households fall behind, so that strong national averages mask a widening split underneath.Appears in The Argument Over Money
kairos Augenblick, kairological time
A theological term for a decisive, pregnant moment of historical opportunity — as opposed to ordinary clock time — in which a movement can either seize the possibility for transformation or let it pass.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Long Advent
kenosis kenotic, self-emptying
From the Greek verb "to empty," the idea — drawn from a hymn in Paul's letter to the Philippians — that God the Son voluntarily emptied himself of his full divine glory and power in order to become a limited, suffering human being; some theologians argue this self-giving capacity is not incidental but built into God's very nature.Appears in The Man and the Christ
kerygma kerygmatic
The core message proclaimed by the earliest Christians — that God had acted decisively for humanity's salvation in Jesus's death and resurrection — as distinguished from historical facts that can be verified about Jesus's life.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Kessler syndrome
A hypothetical cascading chain reaction in which a collision or explosion in orbit creates debris that destroys other satellites, generating more debris in a self-sustaining chain that could render parts of low Earth orbit unusable for years.Appears in The Map of American Power
khatam al-nabiyyin Seal of the Prophets
The Islamic title for Muhammad, meaning he is the final prophet in a single chain of messengers sent by God that includes earlier figures like Moses, Jesus, and John.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Kolmogorov–Solomonoff complexity Kolmogorov complexity
A mathematical way of measuring how simple or complex an explanation really is, based on the length of the shortest possible computer program that could produce it — used by critics to argue that a story which sounds simple in plain English may actually be very complex once you try to write it out precisely.Appears in Hard to Vary

L

laborare est orare
A Latin monastic motto meaning "to work is to pray," which Carlyle took from a medieval source and used as the seed of his own Gospel of Work — the idea that ordinary labor is itself a form of worship.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
laicization laicized
The formal removal of a Catholic priest from the clerical state, stripping him of his priestly faculties and returning him to lay status; it is a more severe penalty than being expelled from a religious order, since a laicized priest can no longer function as a priest anywhere.Appears in On This Rock
LCWR Leadership Conference of Women Religious
The main umbrella organization representing the leaders of most Catholic women's religious orders (nuns and sisters) in the United States.Appears in On This Rock
LDI liability-driven investment
An investment strategy, common among British pension funds, that uses leveraged bond positions to hedge future payout obligations; when bond prices fell sharply in the UK's 2022 crisis, funds using LDI faced margin calls that forced them to sell more bonds, driving prices down further in a self-reinforcing spiral.Appears in The Argument Over Money
legal realism American Legal Realism, fact skeptic, rule skeptic
An early-twentieth-century movement in American law arguing that judges' decisions are driven by practical and social factors, not just mechanical logical deduction from fixed legal rules, and that honest legal scholarship should study how courts actually behave.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Legal Tender Act greenbacks
An 1862 Civil War-era law authorizing the U.S. government to print paper currency, called "greenbacks," that had to be accepted as payment for most debts even though it wasn't backed by gold or silver — the country's first true fiat money.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Lessing's ditch Lessing's ugly broad ditch, ugly broad ditch
A famous problem posed by the eighteenth-century philosopher Gotthold Lessing: that no matter how well-attested a historical event is, a merely factual, one-time occurrence in the past can never serve as proof for an eternal, universal truth — meaning that even if Jesus's resurrection definitely happened, that fact alone can't logically establish that Christianity's larger claims about God are true.Appears in The Man and the Christ
letter-poem
A term coined by scholars editing Emily Dickinson's letters to her sister-in-law Susan to describe writings that blend verse and prose so thoroughly that they resist being sorted into the separate categories of 'poem' and 'letter.'Appears in Tell It Slant
liberation theology
A movement, originating among Latin American Catholic clergy in the 1960s and 70s, that reads the Christian gospel as demanding the structural liberation of the poor from oppressive economic and political systems, not merely their spiritual salvation.Appears in The Long Advent
libertas ecclesiae
Latin for "freedom of the Church," the medieval principle that the Church must be free from control by kings and nobles, especially in appointing its own bishops and clergy.Appears in On This Rock
liceity illicit, licit
Whether a religious act was performed in accordance with church law and proper permission, as distinct from whether it was sacramentally valid; a Mass celebrated without required authorization can be real (valid) yet still against the rules (illicit).Appears in On This Rock
lifeworld Lebenswelt
The ordinary, taken-for-granted world of everyday experience and practical activity that underlies and makes possible all scientific and theoretical understanding, but which science itself tends to overlook.Appears in Experience and Consequences
lions and foxes lion/fox, lions/foxes
A pair of contrasting types of ruling elite borrowed from Machiavelli's advice to princes: lions rule through force, loyalty, and faith, while foxes rule through cunning, deal-making, and financial maneuvering; a stable elite needs a mix of both, and history swings back and forth between the two as one type comes to dominate and is eventually overthrown by the other.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
living water mayim hayyim, mia hayyi, mia hiia
In Jewish and Mandaean ritual law, naturally flowing water (such as a river or spring) as opposed to still or stored water, considered necessary or superior for certain purification rites.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Log College
A small, informally run school founded around 1727 in Pennsylvania to train revival-minded Presbyterian ministers at a time when the expected path required a European or Harvard/Yale education; it is considered a forerunner of Princeton.Appears in The Recurring Fire
logic of meanings logique des significations
A different, looser kind of logic Piaget proposed late in his life, based on meaningful connections between ideas rather than strict rules about which statements can be logically derived from others — an attempt to fix flaws in his earlier, more rigid logical models.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
logical positivism Vienna Circle, logical empiricism, verification principle, verificationism
An early-twentieth-century philosophical movement, centered on a group of European thinkers known as the Vienna Circle, holding that a statement is only meaningful if it can in principle be verified by observation or is true by definition; it dominated American philosophy departments for decades after positivist scholars emigrated to the US in the 1930s.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
logico-experimental method logico-experimental, logico-sperimentale
A method for studying society that recognizes only two sources of authority — strict logic and observed fact — and refuses to treat any doctrine, however cherished, as true unless it can be checked against evidence.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Logos Logos Christology, cosmic Logos
Greek for "word" or "reason" — the term the opening of the Gospel of John uses for Jesus's eternal, pre-human existence as the divine principle through whom God created the universe, a concept that echoed both Jewish traditions about God's Wisdom and Greek philosophical ideas about a rational cosmic order.Appears in The Man and the Christ
logotherapy
A form of psychotherapy developed by Viktor Frankl holding that the primary drive in human life is the search for meaning, and that psychological distress often stems from a felt absence of purpose rather than from repressed desires.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Lord's Supper the Communion, the Eucharist
The Christian ritual of sharing bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus's last meal with his disciples, traditionally understood as a sacred, repeatable sacrament — the specific rite Emerson refused to keep administering, triggering his 1832 resignation from the ministry.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
Lost Cause Lost Cause religion, religion of the Lost Cause, the Lost Cause
A romanticized, self-justifying memory of the Confederacy that white Southerners built after their defeat, portraying the South's cause as noble and its defeat as a kind of sacred martyrdom rather than a fight to preserve slavery.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
lyceum lyceum circuit, lyceum movement
A nineteenth-century American institution in which local communities organized and paid for traveling public lecturers on science, literature, and moral topics, functioning as a kind of adult education and entertainment network that gave Emerson both his income and his mass audience.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe

M

Machiavellian tradition neo-Machiavellians
A label applied to a group of thinkers who study politics by describing how power actually works rather than moralizing about how it ought to work, following the coldly realistic approach to power first modeled by the Renaissance writer Machiavelli.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
magisterium
The Catholic Church's official teaching authority, exercised by the pope and the bishops in union with him, which interprets and hands on church doctrine; not every statement it makes carries equal weight, ranging from solemnly defined dogma down to everyday teaching that can later be refined.Appears in On This Rock
malinvestment
In Austrian economic theory, investment poured into projects that artificially cheap credit made look profitable but that the economy's actual level of real savings never justified, so the boom eventually collapses once the mismatch becomes apparent.Appears in The Argument Over Money
malkutha malkuth, malkuth shamayim
The Aramaic word behind Jesus's phrase "kingdom of God" — it emphasizes God's active kingly "reign" or rule as an event happening now, rather than a fixed territory or place.Appears in The Man and the Christ
managed bifurcation
A pattern in which the US and Chinese economies gradually split into separate technological and trade ecosystems in a controlled, incremental way rather than through a sudden, disruptive rupture.Appears in The Map of American Power
managerial revolution managerial class, managerial society, the managers
A theory that capitalism was being replaced not by socialism but by a new kind of society run by professional managers, administrators, and technical experts who control production and government day-to-day even though they do not legally own it.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Mandaean Book of John Drasha d-Yahya, Drāšā ḏ-Yaḥyā, The Teachings of the Kings
The Mandaean religion's own scripture centered on John, in which he appears not as anyone's forerunner but as the chief prophet, and Jesus is portrayed as a deceiver whom John baptizes only under divine compulsion.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Mandaeans Mandaean, Mandaeism
A small, ancient religious community originally from what is now Iraq and Iran who consider John the Baptist their greatest prophet and Jesus a false teacher, and who practice a religion built around repeated ritual immersion in flowing water.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
mandala
A circular, often symmetrical design — found independently in religious art from Tibetan Buddhism to Christian cathedral windows — that Jung took to be a natural, spontaneously produced image of psychological wholeness and inner order, especially likely to appear during periods of personal crisis.Appears in A God in the Psyche
many-worlds interpretation Everett interpretation, Everettian multiverse, the multiverse
An interpretation of quantum physics holding that every possible outcome of a quantum event actually happens, each in its own separate, branching version of reality, rather than only one outcome occurring at random — distinct from the different idea of a cosmological multiverse of separate universes with different physical constants.Appears in Hard to Vary
market-revolution reading market revolution
A historical argument that the sweeping shift from a barter, household-based economy to a cash, wage-labor economy in the early 1800s was the underlying cause of revivalist fervor, whether by unsettling ordinary people or by giving the new business class a religious tool to instill discipline in workers.Appears in The Recurring Fire
marketing mix modeling MMM
A method of estimating how much each marketing channel contributes to sales by statistically analyzing overall spend and outcomes over time, without needing to track any individual person or device.Appears in Hard to Vary
Marrow Controversy
An early-eighteenth-century Scottish church dispute over a Puritan devotional book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity, whose fallout contributed to the splits within Scottish Presbyterianism that eventually produced the Seceder churches Carlyle's family belonged to.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Marxist / social interpretation (of the Revolution) Marxist-social, class analysis, social interpretation
A twentieth-century school of French Revolution history that explained the Revolution as the product of economic class conflict and material interests, associated with historians like Mathiez, Lefebvre, and Soboul — an approach Carlyle's book has essentially none of.Appears in The Book That Burned
masbuta
The Mandaean religion's central sacrament: a ritual immersion in flowing river water, performed repeatedly (traditionally every week) rather than as a single one-time event, administered by a priest.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
mashal
The Hebrew/Aramaic term for the short, often surprising comparative story-form Jesus favored in his teaching — what English Bibles call a parable — designed to make listeners recognize a truth for themselves rather than simply being told it.Appears in The Man and the Christ
mass-mindedness Massenpsyche
Jung's term for the way an individual personality can dissolve into a crowd, losing its own independent judgment and becoming swept up by the group's collective, often irrational, emotional current.Appears in A God in the Psyche
matriky Actapublica, matrika
The Czech word for historical church parish registers recording baptisms, marriages, and deaths, most of which have now been digitized and made freely searchable online.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
mBridge
An experimental cross-border payment system, tested by China and several partner central banks, that lets countries settle international payments directly using digital currencies without routing through Western-dominated financial infrastructure.Appears in The Map of American Power
Medjugorje
A village in Bosnia and Herzegovina where six people have reported ongoing visions of the Virgin Mary since 1981, drawing millions of pilgrims despite the Vatican's decades-long refusal to declare whether the apparitions are genuine.Appears in On This Rock
Meidner Plan Löntagarfonder, wage-earner funds
A 1970s Swedish union proposal to gradually transfer ownership of major companies into worker-controlled funds by requiring firms to issue new shares each year, aiming to convert decades of wage restraint into eventual worker ownership — a plan so radical it was watered down by Sweden's own governing Social Democrats before being scrapped entirely.Appears in The Long Advent
meliorism meliorist
The belief that the world can be gradually improved through deliberate human effort and intelligent action, without guaranteeing that improvement is automatic or that perfection is reachable.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Messiah messianic
In Jewish and Christian tradition, an anticipated savior or deliverer figure sent by God, expected especially in a time of crisis or at the culmination of history.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
messianic apocalypse 4Q521
A fragmentary Jewish text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, written before Jesus's time, describing an expected future age when God's messenger would heal the sick, raise the dead, and bring good news to the poor — strikingly similar in wording to a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, suggesting he was drawing on ideas already circulating in his world.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Metaphysical Club Cambridge Metaphysical Club
A loosely organized discussion group of Cambridge, Massachusetts intellectuals who met informally around 1872, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., traditionally treated as the birthplace of pragmatism, though the historical record of what was actually discussed there is thin.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
metaphysical realism
The view that there is exactly one true, complete description of reality that exists independently of any observer's perspective or conceptual scheme — what philosopher Hilary Putnam called the 'God's-eye view.'Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
method of authority
One of Peirce's four ways people settle on beliefs: an institution such as a church or state imposes a belief through social pressure and punishment of dissent, rather than through evidence.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
method of tenacity tenacity
One of Peirce's four ways people settle on beliefs: simply clinging stubbornly to whatever one already believes and refusing to engage with contrary evidence or opinions.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
miaphysitism miaphysite
The Christological position held by the Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, and Ethiopian churches (often mislabeled "Monophysite") that Jesus has one united nature combining full divinity and full humanity without separation — a formula that modern ecumenical dialogue has found to be closer to mainstream Christian belief than centuries of mutual condemnation assumed.Appears in The Man and the Christ
middle powers middle-power hedging
Countries such as India, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia that are significant enough to act with real independence but choose not to align firmly with either the United States or China, instead maintaining ties with both to preserve their own freedom of action.Appears in The Map of American Power
mikveh mikvaot, miqva'ot, tevilah
A pool of natural water used in Jewish law for ritual immersion to remove ceremonial impurity, typically self-administered and repeatable as often as needed.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
millenarianism millenarian
The belief, rooted in Christian tradition, that history is about to culminate in a dramatic transformation — often a thousand-year reign of righteousness — that will overturn the existing order and establish a perfected community on earth.Appears in The Long Advent
millennialism millennial expectancy, millennial jeremiad, postmillennial providentialism, postmillennialism
The belief, widespread among antebellum American Protestants, that human effort and reform would gradually usher in a thousand-year golden age of righteousness on earth before Christ's return, which let reformers see themselves as God's co-workers building that future.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
MJ-12 documents MJ-12, Majestic 12
A set of purportedly leaked 1950s government memos describing a secret committee that oversaw recovered alien technology; the FBI and mainstream historians concluded decades ago that the documents were forgeries, though some researchers continued to defend them as genuine.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
MMT Modern Monetary Theory
An economic school of thought holding that a government that issues its own currency and borrows only in that currency can never be forced into insolvency, because it can always create more money to pay its debts; the theory holds the real limit on spending isn't running out of money but running out of real economic resources, which shows up as inflation.Appears in The Argument Over Money
MNNA Major Non-NATO Ally
A formal US designation, given to countries like Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Israel, that unlocks closer defense cooperation and access to certain American weapons sales without the mutual-defense obligations of a full treaty alliance.Appears in The Map of American Power
Moderatism Moderates, the Moderate party
The dominant, more liberal and socially polished faction within the official Church of Scotland in Carlyle's youth, which stricter dissenters like the Seceders regarded as having watered down true religion into mere respectable civic morality.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Modern Monetary Theory MMT
An economic framework arguing that a government which issues its own currency isn't financially constrained the way a household is, and that the real limit on public spending is inflation rather than the size of the national debt — used by the American left to argue that large social programs are more affordable than critics claim.Appears in The Long Advent
Modernism anti-Modernist oath
A loosely defined early-20th-century movement among some Catholic scholars to reconcile church teaching with modern historical and scientific methods of studying the Bible, which Pope Pius X condemned in 1907 as "the synthesis of all heresies" and suppressed for roughly two generations.Appears in On This Rock
monarchical episcopate episcopate
The governing arrangement, which became standard by the late second century, in which a single bishop rules a local church above a council of elders, rather than that church being run collectively by a group of roughly equal presbyters.Appears in On This Rock
Moniteur Moniteur universel
The quasi-official French newspaper of record during the Revolution, which printed Assembly debates and government decrees, giving Carlyle a source of dated, near-verbatim parliamentary material.Appears in The Book That Burned
monogenesis/polygenesis monogenesis, polygenesis
A nineteenth-century scientific debate over human origins: monogenesis held that all humans descend from one common source, while polygenesis claimed different races arose separately and were biologically distinct — the polygenist view was widely used to justify racist hierarchies.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
Monophysitism Monophysite
The belief, condemned as heretical at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, that Jesus's divine nature completely absorbed or overwhelmed his human nature, leaving only one (divine) nature rather than two distinct natures coexisting in him.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Monroe Doctrine
The 1823 US foreign-policy declaration warning European powers not to interfere further in the Western Hemisphere, originally a defensive, non-interventionist statement that later administrations reinterpreted as license for direct US intervention in Latin America.Appears in The Map of American Power
moral hazard
The tendency for people or institutions to take on more risk when they know someone else — a government, an insurer, a central bank — will absorb the cost if things go wrong, since deposit insurance, bailouts, and rescues can inadvertently reward the very recklessness they were meant to prevent.Appears in The Argument Over Money
moral perfectionism Emersonian moral perfectionism, aversive thinking
A philosophical idea, developed by a modern Emerson scholar, that a person's true self is always somewhat ahead of who they currently are, and that ongoing self-questioning and self-transformation — rather than settled conformity — is itself a healthy part of democratic life.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
morphology of conversion
A term describing the expected step-by-step sequence — conviction of sin, despair, faith, and eventual assurance — that Puritan ministers believed a genuine religious conversion typically passed through, used as a rough checklist for judging whether someone's experience was real.Appears in The Recurring Fire
morphē theou
Greek for "the form of God" — the phrase a very early Christian hymn, quoted by Paul in his letter to the Philippians, uses to describe Jesus's divine nature before he took on human existence.Appears in The Man and the Christ
mtDNA mitochondrial DNA
A small piece of DNA passed down essentially unchanged from a mother to all her children, used to trace a person's direct maternal line (mother's mother's mother, and so on back).Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
multi-alignment strategic autonomy
A foreign-policy stance, associated especially with India, of actively participating in multiple, sometimes rival international groupings at once rather than committing to a single bloc or alliance.Appears in The Map of American Power
multi-touch attribution MTA
An older digital-advertising measurement method that tries to credit a sale to the specific sequence of ads a person saw before buying, by tracking that person across touchpoints — a method that has broken down as privacy rules made people harder to track.Appears in Hard to Vary
multiplex world multiplex
A theory, developed by scholar Amitav Acharya, holding that the emerging global order is not simply unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar but made up of multiple overlapping systems of cooperation in which different countries participate for different purposes with no single organizing hegemon.Appears in The Map of American Power
myth of the given the Given
A targeted philosophical error consisting in the belief that some of our knowledge rests on raw, unprocessed sensory data that we can be immediately and infallibly certain of, without that data already being shaped by concepts and interpretation.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
Münchhausen trilemma Munchhausen trilemma
A classic problem in philosophy holding that any attempt to justify a belief with certainty always ends in one of three unsatisfying places: an endless chain of further justifications, a circular argument, or an arbitrary stopping point taken on faith.Appears in Hard to Vary

N

narrow bank
A financial institution that holds only extremely safe, liquid assets like central-bank reserves or short-term government debt and does not make loans, making it essentially risk-free but also a potential drain on ordinary bank deposits since it offers a government-backed alternative with none of a bank's lending risk.Appears in The Argument Over Money
National Assembly National Convention, the Assemblies, the Convention
The revolutionary legislative bodies that successively governed France after 1789, replacing the king's absolute authority with representative (though increasingly radicalized) rule.Appears in The Book That Burned
national parish
An American Catholic church organized around a specific immigrant language and ethnicity rather than a geographic neighborhood, so that Irish, Polish, Czech, and Lithuanian Catholics in the same city could worship, school their children, and socialize in entirely separate institutions well into the 20th century.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
nativism apriorism
The view, opposed by Piaget, that the basic mental structures needed for knowledge are already built into the mind at birth and simply mature or switch on over time, rather than being built up through experience.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
natural supernaturalism
Carlyle's idea, developed in Sartor Resartus, that the ordinary visible world is itself miraculous once habit and custom stop dulling our perception of it — nature as the "living garment" through which an unseen, ultimate reality shows itself.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
naturalism empirical naturalism, naturalistic empiricism, religious naturalism
The view that everything real, including human minds and values, belongs to the single natural world studied by science, with no separate supernatural or otherworldly realm.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
NDAA National Defense Authorization Act
The annual law that sets the U.S. military's budget and policy, which has become the main legislative vehicle for UFO-related transparency and reporting requirements because attaching provisions to it is more likely to become law than a standalone bill.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
NDFI nondepository financial institution
A financial firm — such as a private-credit fund, hedge fund, or other non-bank lender — that extends credit or takes on financial risk without holding traditional insured deposits, making it far less regulated and less visible to supervisors than an ordinary bank.Appears in The Argument Over Money
NDS National Defense Strategy
A periodic Pentagon document that translates the president's broader National Security Strategy into specific military priorities, force posture, and resource decisions.Appears in The Map of American Power
Neoplatonism Neoplatonist
An ancient philosophical tradition, developed from Plato's ideas by later thinkers like Plotinus, holding that all of reality emanates from and is trying to return to a single, perfect, unified source called 'the One' — a framework that gave Emerson much of the vocabulary for his idea of a universal divine unity.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
neopragmatism
The revival of pragmatist philosophy from the 1970s onward, associated especially with Richard Rorty, that reinterpreted the classical American tradition in dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy.Appears in Experience and Consequences
neurophenomenology
A research approach that pairs careful, trained first-person reports of conscious experience with simultaneous brain-measurement data, aiming to let each kind of evidence inform and constrain the other.Appears in Experience and Consequences
New Birth
The central revivalist teaching that true Christian faith requires a definite, felt, life-changing spiritual rebirth, not just church membership, family upbringing, or intellectual agreement with doctrine.Appears in The Recurring Fire
New Criticism New Critical, New Critics
A mid-twentieth-century approach to literary study that prized close, careful reading focused on irony, tension, and formal complexity within a text itself — a critical fashion that judged Emerson's optimistic, loosely structured essays unfavorably against more ambiguous, 'difficult' writers.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe, Tell It Slant
New Divinity New Divinity men
A group of theologians who saw themselves as carrying forward Jonathan Edwards's Calvinist theology after his death, while subtly reworking his ideas about free will in ways that later thinkers used to justify a more human-centered approach to revival.Appears in The Recurring Fire
New Haven theology Taylorism, power to the contrary
A reworking of Calvinist theology developed at Yale in the 1820s that held people are certain to sin but always retain a real 'power to the contrary' — a genuine ability to choose otherwise — which gave revival preachers theological grounds to urge listeners to decide for God immediately.Appears in The Recurring Fire
New Lichts New Lights
The more liberal wing of the Scottish Seceder churches, which broke from the stricter Auld Lichts by rejecting the idea that civil government should have any power to enforce religious belief.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
New Lights Old Lights
The opposing camps that split New England's Congregational churches over the revivals: New Lights supported the revival as a genuine work of God, while Old Lights were traditionalist critics who saw it as disorderly emotional excess.Appears in The Recurring Fire
new measures anxious bench, the anxious bench
A bundle of revival techniques associated with preacher Charles Finney, most controversially the 'anxious bench' — a front pew where people under spiritual distress sat in public to be prayed over and pressured toward an immediate decision to convert.Appears in The Recurring Fire
New Pragmatists New Pragmatism
A loose coalition of contemporary philosophers — including Cheryl Misak, Robert Brandom, Susan Haack, and Christopher Hookway — who argue that truth is a real, meaningful goal of inquiry and not just an empty compliment paid to popular beliefs, positioning themselves against Richard Rorty's more skeptical reading of pragmatism.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
New Quest Old Quest, Third Quest, quest for the historical Jesus
One phase in the long-running scholarly effort — often described as having three successive waves ("Old," "New," and "Third" Quests) — to reconstruct, using historical methods rather than church doctrine, what can actually be known about Jesus as a first-century historical figure.Appears in The Man and the Christ
New School New School Presbyterians, Old School, Old School Presbyterians, Old School–New School, the New School
The two rival factions the Presbyterian Church split into in 1837-38 over revivalist theology and church governance, a schism that predated but later hardened along the same North-South line as the slavery conflict.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
New Thought mind-cure
A late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American spiritual movement holding that positive thinking and mental attitude can directly shape health, success, and reality — later seen by critics as a popularized, watered-down descendant of Emerson's ideas about the power of the individual mind.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
NHI non-human intelligence
A deliberately broad term — covering not just aliens from another planet but any non-human origin, including speculative 'other dimension' possibilities — used by researchers who want to avoid the narrower, more science-fiction-coded word 'aliens.'Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
nigredo blackening
In the alchemical stages Jung used as a map of psychological change, the opening 'blackening' phase — a period of breakdown, depression, or confrontation with one's own darker side that has to happen before any real change can begin.Appears in A God in the Psyche
nihil obstat
Latin for "nothing stands in the way," a formal Vatican finding — used, for example, on the Medjugorje apparitions — that permits public devotion to continue at a site without actually declaring that the reported supernatural event is real.Appears in On This Rock
noema noesis, noetic-noematic
In this framework, the object of an experience considered specifically as it is experienced or meant (the noema), paired with the act of experiencing itself (the noesis) — a technical way of describing the two-sided structure of any conscious act.Appears in Experience and Consequences
nominalism nominalist
The philosophical view that only individual, particular things are real, and that general categories or patterns (like 'redness' or 'humanity') are just names or conveniences, not genuine features of the world.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
non-logical action non-logical, non-logical conduct
Behavior driven by sentiment, habit, or instinct rather than by a real, verifiable link between the means used and the goal achieved — not the same as irrational or stupid behavior, since it can still work perfectly well in practice even though the reasons people give for it are not the real cause.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
non-logical/logical action distinction logical action
A dividing line between conduct where the method genuinely and consciously fits the goal being pursued (logical action, the domain of markets and science) and conduct driven by underlying feeling that only gets dressed up afterward as if it were reasoned (non-logical action, the domain of most of politics, religion, and ideology).Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
nonrecoverable deletion
A scholarly term for Emily Dickinson's habit of omitting words a sentence would normally need (like a subject or connector) in a way that cannot be confidently filled back in, leaving the sentence genuinely open to more than one reading rather than merely elliptical.Appears in Tell It Slant
NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command
The joint U.S.-Canadian military command responsible for detecting and responding to unidentified aircraft entering North American airspace, now required by law to brief Congress on its history of intercepting unexplained objects.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Nouveau Christianisme New Christianity
An 1825 book by Henri de Saint-Simon proposing a stripped-down, this-worldly version of Christianity whose sole commandment was to improve conditions for the poorest and most numerous class as fast as possible, which his followers turned into an actual organized quasi-church after his death.Appears in The Long Advent
NSC National Security Council
The White House body, led by the National Security Advisor, that coordinates foreign policy and national security decisions across the State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and other parts of the government.Appears in The Map of American Power
NSC-68
A classified 1950 US strategy document that translated the general idea of containing Soviet expansion into a costly, wide-ranging military buildup, effectively defining the operational shape of American Cold War policy for decades.Appears in The Map of American Power
NSS National Security Strategy
A formal document that every US president is required to periodically publish laying out the administration's overall approach to foreign policy, threats, and national priorities.Appears in The Map of American Power
nubuwwa
The Islamic theological concept of prophethood: the belief in a single continuous chain of messengers sent by God across history, each confirming the same essential message, ending with Muhammad.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
numinous numinosity, numinosum, the numinous
A term, borrowed by Jung from the theologian Rudolf Otto, for the overwhelming and awe-inspiring quality of an experience felt as sacred — at once terrifying and irresistibly compelling — that seizes a person rather than being something they decide to feel.Appears in A God in the Psyche

O

OASI Old-Age and Survivors Insurance
The trust fund that pays out Social Security retirement benefits, projected to run low enough by late 2032 that, without a change in law, it could only cover about 78% of scheduled payments from incoming payroll taxes alone.Appears in The Argument Over Money
object permanence
The understanding that an object continues to exist even when it can no longer be seen, heard, or touched — something Piaget believed infants have to construct gradually rather than being born with.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
occupatio praeteritio
A rhetorical trick in which a writer announces that something is too overwhelming to describe, and in the act of saying so, actually conveys its scale and horror.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
ODNI Office of the Director of National Intelligence
The federal office that oversees and coordinates all U.S. intelligence agencies and co-publishes the government's annual public report on unexplained aerial sightings.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
OFAC Office of Foreign Assets Control
The US Treasury Department office that administers and enforces economic sanctions, maintaining the lists of individuals, companies, and countries that Americans are barred from doing business with.Appears in The Map of American Power
offshore balancing
A restrained grand-strategy approach under which the United States avoids stationing large permanent forces abroad and instead relies on regional powers to manage their own balance of power, intervening only if a single power threatens to dominate a key region.Appears in The Map of American Power
Old Catholics Old Catholic schism
A small breakaway church formed in 1870 by German, Austrian, and Swiss Catholics who rejected the newly defined doctrine of papal infallibility and separated from Rome rather than accept it.Appears in On This Rock
Old Side New Side
The two factions that split the Presbyterian Church over the revivals: New Side ministers supported revivalism and looser ministerial-training standards, while Old Side ministers opposed both and required a traditional European or Ivy League education for clergy.Appears in The Recurring Fire
ontotheology onto-theology
A criticized way of thinking about God as merely the highest object or most powerful being within the universe, treated the same way philosophy treats any other existing thing, rather than as something fundamentally beyond that framework.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Open Door policy Open Door
A US diplomatic principle, first articulated in 1899, insisting on equal commercial access to foreign markets like China rather than letting stronger powers carve out exclusive spheres of control — later echoed in modern US demands for a level economic playing field with China.Appears in The Map of American Power
operation
In Piaget's vocabulary, a mental action that a person can carry out purely in their head and then mentally reverse or undo, distinguishing genuinely logical thought from mere physical action or simple representation.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
Operation Southern Spear
A US military campaign launched in 2025 involving warships and troops deployed to the Caribbean to strike vessels suspected of drug trafficking and to pressure Venezuela's government, marking the largest American military presence in the region since the Cold War.Appears in The Map of American Power
ophelimity
A deliberately invented, value-neutral word for the raw power of something to satisfy a want, used instead of the more loaded and moralizing term "utility."Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
ordinal utility ordinal
The idea that consumer choice can be fully explained just by knowing how a person ranks different options from most to least preferred, without ever needing to measure exactly how much satisfaction each option provides.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
ordo salutis order of salvation
A Latin theological term for the traditional Calvinist sequence of stages by which a person moves from sin to salvation — conviction of guilt, despair, the moment of grace, and a changed life of disciplined service — which Carlyle secretly reused as the structure of his own semi-autobiographical conversion narrative.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
original sin
The Christian doctrine that human beings are universally and inescapably prone to pride, self-interest, and self-deception — used by theologians like Niebuhr to argue that no political system, including a socialist one, should ever concentrate power without checks, because no one is exempt from this flaw.Appears in The Long Advent
originate-to-distribute
A lending model in which a bank makes a loan (such as a mortgage) not to hold it, but to quickly sell it off to investors, which weakens the lender's incentive to check whether the borrower can actually repay since the risk is passed along rather than kept.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Ostsiedlung
The medieval eastward migration of German-speaking settlers, traders, and miners into Central and Eastern Europe starting in the 13th century, which is one reason people with deep roots in the Czech lands, Poland, or the Baltic can carry a trace of Germanic ancestry.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Over-Soul the ONE, the eternal ONE
Emerson's name for a single universal spirit or divine mind that all individual souls are ultimately part of, so that at the deepest level every person's inner being is connected to, and continuous with, everyone else's and with God.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe

P

palingenesia palingenesis
A Greek-derived term for cyclical death-and-rebirth, used by Carlyle (via the Phoenix image) to suggest that a civilization must be symbolically destroyed by fire before it can be reborn in a new form.Appears in The Book That Burned
pancritical rationalism comprehensively critical rationalism
A response to the demand that reason justify itself, arguing that a rational position does not need to be proven true from some final foundation — it only needs to remain permanently open to being criticized and improved.Appears in Hard to Vary
parallelism thesis psychogenesis-history of science parallelism
Piaget's boldest and most disputed claim: that the way a child's understanding of a concept develops follows the same underlying pattern as the way that same concept developed historically across the whole of science.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
parataxis paratactic
A style of sentence-building that sets clauses side by side as roughly equal fragments, joined by semicolons or dashes rather than organized into a single main clause with subordinate parts — the reader has to piece the relationships together.Appears in Carlyle's Everest, The Book That Burned
Pareto distribution Pareto coefficient, Pareto index, Pareto's Law, power law
A mathematical pattern, discovered by studying income records across many countries, in which a small number of people at the top hold a disproportionately large share of income or wealth, producing a straight line when plotted on a special logarithmic graph — the pattern behind the popular "80/20 rule."Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Pareto efficiency Pareto improvement, Pareto optimal, Pareto optimality
A situation is considered efficient in this sense when it is impossible to make any one person better off without making at least one other person worse off; a change that helps someone while hurting no one is called an improvement toward that state.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) 80/20 rule, vital few and the trivial many
A popular business rule of thumb, coined later by a quality-management consultant and not by Pareto himself, holding that roughly 80 percent of effects come from roughly 20 percent of causes — one special case of the broader mathematical pattern Pareto discovered in income data.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Pareto principle (social choice) unanimity condition
A rule used in theories of collective decision-making stating that if every single person in a group prefers one option over another, the group as a whole must also rank that option higher.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
pasokification
A term describing the collapse of a once-dominant center-left party after it implements policies — usually austerity — that betray its own working-class voters, named after the near-total electoral destruction of Greece's PASOK party after it imposed EU-mandated austerity.Appears in The Long Advent
patriline fatherline, patrilineal
The single unbroken line of descent traced strictly through fathers (a father's father's father, and so on), which is the line a hereditary surname typically follows and represents only one thread out of hundreds of ancestral lines a person has.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
PCE inflation core PCE
The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the inflation gauge the Federal Reserve officially targets and prefers over the more commonly cited Consumer Price Index because it better captures how spending patterns shift as prices change.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Pelagianism Pelagian
An ancient teaching, treated as heretical by most Christian traditions, that human beings can take the first step toward their own salvation by willpower alone, without needing God's grace to begin the process.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Penal Laws
A body of Irish laws beginning in 1695 that stripped Catholics of the right to hold office, practice law, buy land, or lease it for more than 31 years, systematically excluding the Catholic majority from property and power for most of the 18th century.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
pentarchy
The ancient system, favored by the Eastern church, of ranking the five oldest and most important episcopal sees — Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — as jointly leading the wider church, rather than granting Rome sole supreme authority.Appears in On This Rock
Pentecostalism Pentecostal
A global branch of Christianity, dating to a 1906 Los Angeles revival, that emphasizes a post-conversion 'baptism in the Holy Spirit' evidenced by supernatural gifts such as speaking in unknown languages, healing, and prophecy.Appears in The Recurring Fire
perfectionism entire sanctification
The teaching that a converted Christian can, in this life, reach a state of being fully free from deliberate, known sin through total devotion to God, a doctrine that fed directly into nineteenth-century reform movements aimed at abolishing social evils like slavery.Appears in The Recurring Fire
perichoresis perichoretic
A term from classic Trinitarian theology describing the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each fully present within the others without merging into one another — sometimes used more broadly for any relationship of things that fully interpenetrate while remaining distinct.Appears in The Man and the Christ
personal prelature
A unique kind of Catholic organizational structure, defined not by geographic territory like a normal diocese but by membership, currently used only by Opus Dei; its head answers directly to the pope rather than to a local bishop.Appears in On This Rock
petrodollar petrodollar arrangement
The informal arrangement, dating to the 1970s, under which Saudi Arabia and other oil producers price oil sales in US dollars and recycle the proceeds into US financial assets in exchange for American security guarantees, reinforcing the dollar's global dominance.Appears in The Map of American Power
phalanstery phalansteries
A self-contained, cooperatively run community of about 1,600 people, designed by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, in which work would be organized around people's natural passions rather than wage labor.Appears in The Long Advent
phenocopy
A biological theory Piaget proposed late in his career suggesting that a trait an organism first develops in response to its environment can later become genetically inherited through the organism's own regulatory activity — a middle path between standard evolution and discredited Lamarckism that most biologists judge does not actually exist.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
phenomenological psychiatry phenomenological psychopathology
A tradition of mental-health practice and research that treats careful, detailed description of how a patient actually experiences their inner world and surroundings as central to diagnosis and treatment, alongside biological explanation.Appears in Experience and Consequences
phenomenology
A philosophical method and tradition that studies the basic structures of conscious experience by careful, disciplined description of how things actually show up to a person, rather than starting from theories about the physical world.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Phi Beta Kappa oration Phi Beta Kappa Society
A prestigious annual lecture delivered to Harvard's oldest academic honor society, traditionally the most high-profile speaking engagement in the university's calendar — the platform on which Emerson delivered both his celebrated 1837 'American Scholar' address and, thirty years later, a rare second appearance marking his reconciliation with Harvard.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
philosophers' stone lapis, the lapis
The legendary substance alchemists claimed could turn base metal into gold, which Jung reinterpreted as a symbol for the psychological goal of wholeness — the fully integrated self — that the alchemists were unknowingly picturing in their laboratory work.Appears in A God in the Psyche
phrenology
A now-discredited 19th-century pseudoscience that claimed a person's character traits, including their capacity for attachment or love, could be read from the shape and bumps of their skull.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
phronesis practical wisdom
Aristotle's term, later revived by hermeneutic philosophers, for the practical skill of making sound judgments in specific, real-life situations — a kind of wisdom that can't be reduced to following a formula or universal rule.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth, The Man and the Christ
Pietism
A European Protestant renewal movement, originating in Germany in the late 1600s, that emphasized heartfelt, personal religious experience and practical Christian living over strict doctrinal correctness, and that fed directly into the American revivals through the Moravians and early Methodism.Appears in The Recurring Fire
PIK payment-in-kind
A loan arrangement where a struggling borrower pays interest by taking on more debt instead of paying cash, letting a troubled loan look technically current on paper while the borrower's total debt burden keeps quietly growing.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Pisces aeon Aquarius aeon, aeon of Pisces
In Carl Jung's symbolic scheme, the roughly two-thousand-year astrological age (named for the zodiac sign of the fish) that he associated with the historical span of Christianity, during which he believed the Christ-image served as the chief symbol of psychological wholeness for Western culture.Appears in The Man and the Christ
plain sense plain reading, plain-sense reading, plain-text reading, the plain sense
The straightforward, literal meaning of a Bible passage as understood without specialized scholarly interpretation, which is what most antebellum Americans trusted as authoritative.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
platform socialism
A proposal to treat digital platforms like search engines, social networks, and gig-work apps as public infrastructure to be owned or governed collectively by their users and workers, rather than run for private profit.Appears in The Long Advent
plenitudo potestatis fullness of power
Latin for "fullness of power," the medieval doctrine, developed most fully under Pope Innocent III, that the pope holds the total sum of the Church's governing authority and, in some readings, a supervisory power over kings and secular rulers as well.Appears in On This Rock
pleroma the pleroma
A term from ancient Gnostic religious thought, meaning 'fullness,' for a primal, undivided totality in which all opposites — light and dark, good and evil — exist together and effectively cancel each other out, prior to the world's separation into distinct, differentiated things.Appears in A God in the Psyche
political formula formula
The official justifying story or belief system that a ruling group uses to explain why it deserves to be in charge, regardless of whether that story reflects how power actually works.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Ponzi finance hedge finance, speculative finance
The riskiest of economist Hyman Minsky's three stages of borrower health, in which a borrower's income covers neither interest nor principal, forcing them to sell assets or take on more debt just to stay current; the milder stages are hedge finance (income covers both) and speculative finance (income covers interest only, so debt must be rolled over).Appears in The Argument Over Money
Poor People's Campaign
A cross-racial religious and economic-justice movement, originally launched by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and revived in 2018 under Bishop William Barber II, that organizes poor and low-income Americans around a moral demand for a living wage, health care, and housing.Appears in The Long Advent
Popper–Miller theorem Popper-Miller argument
A 1983 mathematical argument by Karl Popper and David Miller that tried to show, using probability theory, that evidence can never genuinely support the parts of a theory that go beyond what the evidence directly implies — a result most probability theorists have since concluded does not actually prove what its authors claimed.Appears in Hard to Vary
popularization popularization vs. democratization
A distinction drawn by critics of the 'democratization' thesis, separating religious leaders' appeal to ordinary popular tastes (popularization, which clearly happened) from a genuine transfer of institutional power to ordinary church members (democratization, which they argue was much more limited).Appears in The Recurring Fire
postliberal theology cultural-linguistic, postliberalism (theology)
A school of Christian theology holding that religious doctrines function like the grammar of a particular community's way of life and language, rather than as either literal factual claims or expressions of a private inner feeling.Appears in Experience and Consequences
Pour le Mérite
A Prussian order of merit, founded by Frederick the Great, that the German state awarded to Carlyle in 1874 in gratitude for his admiring multi-volume biography of Frederick.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Powell Doctrine
A set of principles for deciding when to use military force — clear objectives, overwhelming force, a defined exit strategy, and broad public support — developed after the Vietnam War and largely abandoned during the post-9/11 wars.Appears in The Map of American Power
PPP purchasing power parity
A way of comparing countries' economic output that adjusts for differences in the local cost of living, as opposed to simply converting figures using market exchange rates; China's economy is already larger than America's by this measure, though smaller by the more commonly cited market-exchange-rate measure.Appears in The Map of American Power
pragmatic maxim the maxim
Charles Sanders Peirce's founding rule for making ideas clear: the entire meaning of a concept lies in the practical, observable difference it would make if it were true, so two ideas with identical practical consequences are really just one idea in different words.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
pragmaticism
Charles Sanders Peirce's deliberately awkward replacement name for his own philosophy, coined in 1905 — 'ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers,' as he put it — to separate his precise, logic-based version of pragmatism from William James's more popular, looser version.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
pragmaticist pragmaticism, pragmatism
The philosophical method, developed chiefly by Charles Sanders Peirce, holding that the meaning and truth of an idea are ultimately shown by its practical consequences — including, for Peirce, the idea that truth is whatever a community of inquirers pursuing evidence indefinitely would eventually converge on.Appears in The Man and the Christ
pragmatism
An American philosophical tradition holding that the meaning and worth of an idea should be judged by its practical consequences in action and experience, rather than by how well it corresponds to some fixed, independently existing truth.Appears in Experience and Consequences
predestination election, election and reprobation, providential history, the double decree
The core Calvinist doctrine that God has eternally and unalterably decreed the fate of every soul and every event; Carlyle secularized this into the idea that history unfolds according to an inescapable moral logic, with each event "coming due" as a kind of verdict.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed, The Recurring Fire
preoperational stage preoperational
The stage of early childhood, roughly ages two to seven, in which children can use symbols like words and pretend play but cannot yet perform logical mental operations such as mentally reversing an action.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
prima materia the prima materia
An alchemical term for the raw, unformed, often literally despised starting substance that a transformative process begins from, which Jung took as a symbol for a person's unconscious material — messy and unwanted, but the necessary starting point of inner growth.Appears in A God in the Psyche
primacy of honor primacy of jurisdiction, primus inter pares
Two rival ideas of what makes Rome's bishop "first" among the world's bishops: a primacy of honor (Rome ranks first out of respect, but does not command the others, the Eastern Orthodox view) versus a primacy of jurisdiction (Rome has genuine, binding governing authority over every other bishop and diocese, the Catholic view).Appears in On This Rock
primary balance primary deficit
A government's budget deficit or surplus excluding interest payments on existing debt, used to isolate how much new borrowing is coming from current spending and tax decisions rather than from servicing debt already on the books.Appears in The Argument Over Money
privatio boni
Latin for "privation of the good" — the classical Christian teaching, developed chiefly by Augustine, that evil has no independent existence of its own but is simply an absence or deficiency of the goodness that ought to be present, the way blindness is an absence of sight rather than a positive "thing."Appears in A God in the Psyche, The Man and the Christ
Prodromos the Forerunner
The title used for John the Baptist in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, meaning "the one who runs before," reflecting his role as the herald who announces Jesus's coming.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
prophetic pragmatism
A strand of pragmatist thought, associated with Cornel West, that combines the classical American emphasis on practical democratic experimentation with the moral urgency and religious depth of the Black church's prophetic tradition.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
prophetic tradition prophetic demand
The biblical tradition running from the Hebrew prophets like Amos and Isaiah, in which speakers claim to voice God's unconditional demand for justice toward the poor and vulnerable, condemning existing social arrangements regardless of political cost or feasibility.Appears in The Long Advent
proportional representation PR
A voting system that allocates a party's seats in a legislature roughly in proportion to its overall share of the vote, typically producing multi-party parliaments that must govern through coalitions rather than one party ruling alone.Appears in Hard to Vary
prose-epic Epic Poem of the Revolution, prose epic
A long prose work that borrows the scale, grandeur, and mythic framing of classical epic poetry (like Homer's) while remaining technically nonfiction — Carlyle's own description of what he was attempting to write.Appears in The Book That Burned
proselyte baptism
A ritual immersion historically used to formally convert non-Jews to Judaism, whose exact origin date relative to John's own practice is disputed by scholars.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
proto-fascism charge proto-fascist charge, proto-fascist genealogy, proto-fascist reading
The argument, made by some twentieth-century critics, that Carlyle's celebration of strong individual leaders and of violence as a purifying force helped lay intellectual groundwork later exploited by fascist movements.Appears in The Book That Burned
proto-fascist proto-fascism
A label applied by some twentieth-century critics to Carlyle, meaning not that he was a literal fascist (a movement that did not exist in his lifetime) but that his ideas — worship of strong leaders, contempt for democracy, belief in racial hierarchy — are seen as an intellectual ancestor of twentieth-century fascism.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
psychogenesis
The development of knowledge and mental structures within a single growing individual, as opposed to their development across the history of science.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
psychoid psychoid archetype, psychoid level
A term Jung coined for a level of the archetype too deep to ever become a conscious image, which he believed sits at the meeting point between mind and body — and, more radically, between mind and matter generally — where the ordinary distinction between an inner experience and an outer, physical thing breaks down.Appears in A God in the Psyche
psychologism
The now largely rejected view that the laws of logic are just descriptions of how human minds happen to think, rather than objective, unchanging truths that hold independently of anyone's actual thought processes.Appears in Experience and Consequences
psychopomp
In mythology, a spirit or deity whose role is to guide the souls of the dead to the afterlife, escorting them across the boundary between the world of the living and the realm beyond.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
PURSUE Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters
A 2026 executive-branch initiative that publishes historical U.S. government UFO-related files directly online without first analyzing or explaining them, leaving the public to interpret the raw material themselves.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure

Q

Q Q source, sayings-source Q
A hypothetical lost early collection of Jesus's and John's sayings that scholars believe both Matthew and Luke drew on independently, reconstructed by scholars from material the two Gospels share but Mark lacks; its very existence is disputed by some scholars.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
qisas al-anbiya Stories of the Prophets
A genre of later Islamic literature that expands on the brief accounts of prophets found in the Quran with additional narrative detail and legend, not treated as scripture itself.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
quantitative easing QE
A central-bank policy of buying large quantities of government bonds and other securities to pump money into the financial system and push down long-term interest rates, typically used when short-term rates are already near zero.Appears in The Argument Over Money
quantitative tightening QT
The reverse of quantitative easing: a central bank letting the bonds it holds mature without buying replacements, gradually shrinking its balance sheet and pulling money back out of the financial system.Appears in The Argument Over Money
quaternity
A four-part structure — as opposed to the three-part Christian Trinity — that Jung treated as the psyche's natural symbol of true completeness, arguing that anything organized around only three elements is missing a needed fourth element (which he associated variously with evil, matter, or the feminine).Appears in A God in the Psyche

R

r>g r greater than g
Shorthand for the moment when the average interest rate a government pays on its debt exceeds the economy's growth rate, a tipping point after which debt as a share of the economy can keep climbing on its own momentum even without any new deficit spending.Appears in The Argument Over Money
radical embodied cognitive science
A research program arguing that much of cognition can be explained without appeal to internal mental representations at all, treating thinking instead as a direct, dynamic engagement between a body and its environment.Appears in Experience and Consequences
radical empiricism
William James's view that raw, lived experience itself — before it gets carved up into 'mind' versus 'matter' — is the basic stuff of reality, so that the usual philosophical split between an inner mental world and an outer physical world is not something given in experience but something added to it afterward.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Cash-Value of Truth
readiness-to-hand present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, vorhanden, zuhanden
A distinction between how a tool is experienced when it is being used smoothly and unnoticed as part of a task (ready-to-hand) versus how it is experienced as a separate object with properties once it breaks or is examined directly (present-at-hand).Appears in Experience and Consequences
Reason and Understanding Reason, Understanding, the Reason/Understanding distinction
A pair of terms, adapted from the philosopher Kant by way of the poet Coleridge, that split the mind into two faculties: 'Understanding' is ordinary logical, fact-gathering reasoning, while 'Reason' is a higher faculty of direct spiritual insight — and the claim that every person possesses this higher Reason is what let Emerson argue that ordinary individuals need no priest or institution to reach religious truth.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
recapitulatio recapitulation
The early theologian Irenaeus's idea that Jesus, by living a full human life in perfect obedience, symbolically "replayed" and corrected the story of Adam's disobedience — undoing humanity's fall by retracing its course rightly.Appears in The Man and the Christ
recapitulationism ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
A once-popular and now discredited nineteenth-century idea that an individual's development literally replays, in compressed form, the evolutionary history of its species — a doctrine Piaget spent years working to distance his own theory from.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
reciprocal tariffs Liberation Day tariffs
A round of country-specific US tariffs announced in April 2025 intended to match the trade barriers other countries impose on American goods, applied broadly and then adjusted through subsequent negotiations.Appears in The Map of American Power
reciprocity
A form of logical reversibility in which one mentally undoes a change not by canceling it outright but by applying a matching, complementary change in the opposite direction — for instance, recognizing that if A is longer than B, then B is shorter than A.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
recognitio recognitio ad experimentum
Formal Vatican review and approval required before a local or national church body's own statutes or decisions take binding legal effect within the wider Catholic Church.Appears in On This Rock
Red Book Liber Novus, the Red Book
A large, elaborately hand-lettered and illustrated private manuscript in which Jung recorded, over roughly sixteen years, the visions and inner dialogues of his personal psychological crisis; he never published it in his lifetime, and it did not become public until 2009, decades after his death.Appears in A God in the Psyche
reference population reference panel, reference panels
A dataset of DNA from people whose families are documented to have lived in one place for many generations, which a DNA testing company uses as the yardstick for guessing where a customer's own DNA segments most likely come from.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
reflective abstraction abstraction réfléchissante
A special kind of learning, in Piaget's theory, that comes not from observing properties of objects but from noticing patterns in one's own actions and mental operations — the process by which basic knowledge, such as the concept of number, is thought to be built up rather than simply observed.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
regulative ideal
A goal that guides and disciplines a practice even though it may never be fully reached or verified as achieved — the way 'perfect health' guides medicine without any patient ever actually being perfectly healthy.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Rehn-Meidner model
A Swedish economic strategy, adopted as government policy in 1955, that used centralized 'equal pay for equal work' wage bargaining to squeeze inefficient firms out of business while letting efficient ones accumulate profits, combined with generous state-funded retraining to help displaced workers find new jobs.Appears in The Long Advent
religion of the body
The standard scholarly label for Walt Whitman's pre-war belief system, which treated the physical human body as sacred and divine rather than as something sinful to be disciplined or subordinated to the soul.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
religious economy model religious-economy model, supply-side model
A theory, borrowed from economics, holding that religion works like a competitive marketplace: where government does not prop up one official church, competing religious groups must work harder to attract members, which raises overall religious participation, while a subsidized monopoly church grows complacent and loses adherents.Appears in The Recurring Fire
religious institute consecrated life, religious order
A community of men or women (such as the Jesuits, Franciscans, or Benedictines) who take lifelong public vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and live under a shared rule, as distinct from ordinary diocesan priests or lay Catholics.Appears in On This Rock
Religious Right Christian Right
The late-twentieth-century political movement mobilizing conservative, mostly white evangelical Christians around issues such as abortion and, according to some historians, initially around defending racially segregated Christian schools.Appears in The Recurring Fire
reserve currency
A currency that foreign governments and central banks hold in large quantities as part of their national reserves, because it is trusted, stable, and widely used in global trade and finance — a role the U.S. dollar has dominated since World War II.Appears in The Argument Over Money
residues residue
The relatively stable, recurring psychological drives and instincts that show up again and again beneath people's behavior across very different times, places, and cultures, forming the real engine of social life beneath the shifting doctrines people use to explain themselves.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
responsum responsum ad dubium
A formal written answer issued by a Vatican department to a specific doctrinal question that has been submitted to it, used to clarify or reaffirm official church teaching on that point.Appears in On This Rock
Restoration Movement Restorationist, Stone-Campbell movement
A religious movement, born out of the frontier revivals, that sought to bypass denominational division entirely by 'restoring' what it considered a pure, original New Testament form of Christianity, eventually producing several present-day church traditions.Appears in The Recurring Fire
Resumption Act
An 1875 law committing the U.S. government to make its Civil War-era paper currency redeemable in gold starting in 1879, a win for creditors that restored the wartime paper money's link to gold.Appears in The Argument Over Money
reverse-engineering (crash-retrieval claim) crash retrieval
The unproven claim, made by some former officials, that the government has recovered a physical craft of non-human origin and is secretly studying it to understand and copy its technology.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
reversibility
The mental ability to run an action backward in one's head and recognize that doing so returns things to how they started, which Piaget considered the single most important marker of mature thought.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
revisionism
Within socialist politics, the argument — most associated with Eduard Bernstein — that Marx's predictions of capitalism's inevitable collapse were empirically wrong, and that socialists should therefore pursue gradual reform through parliamentary democracy rather than wait for revolution.Appears in The Long Advent
revisionist school Furet-revisionist, revisionism, revisionist challenge
A late-twentieth-century approach to French Revolution history, led by François Furet, that rejected the Marxist emphasis on economic class conflict and instead located the Revolution's causes and its slide into violence in political ideology and language.Appears in The Book That Burned
Rio Treaty Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance
A 1947 collective-defense treaty among Western Hemisphere countries obligating them to treat an attack on any member as an attack on all, predating NATO by nearly two years and forming the security backbone of the postwar Organization of American States system.Appears in The Map of American Power
Robertson Panel
A 1953 CIA-convened panel of scientists that concluded UFO reports posed no direct security threat but recommended a public-education campaign to reduce popular interest in the subject — a policy that shaped the government's dismissive posture toward UFOs for the next several decades.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Roosevelt Corollary
Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, which converted an originally defensive policy into a claimed US right to intervene directly in Latin American countries' internal affairs to prevent instability that might invite European intervention.Appears in The Map of American Power
rule of faith regula fidei
A summary of core apostolic teaching used by the early Church, before the Bible's contents were finally settled, as the standard for judging which interpretations of scripture and doctrine were authentic.Appears in On This Rock

S

sage-writing Sage of Chelsea, secular prophecy, the sage
A Victorian literary mode, which Carlyle is credited with founding, in which a writer adopts the tone and authority of an Old Testament prophet to denounce the moral failings of contemporary society.Appears in The Book That Burned
Saltsjöbaden Agreement
A 1938 pact between Sweden's main union federation and employers' association that established a framework of centralized bargaining and mutual restraint, trading labor peace and predictable wages for decades of low-conflict industrial relations.Appears in The Long Advent
sannyasin vanaprastha
In Hindu tradition, a person who has renounced ordinary worldly life, often in old age, to pursue spiritual liberation through simplicity and withdrawal from society.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Sansculottism Sansculottes, sans-culottes
Carlyle's term for the radical, working-class energy of the Revolution's crowds, which he treats not as an ordinary political faction but as an almost supernatural elemental force of destruction and renewal.Appears in The Book That Burned
SAP Special Access Program, USAP, Unacknowledged Special Access Program
A category of U.S. government secrecy tighter than ordinary classification, used for the most sensitive programs, in which even routine oversight structures may not have full access to what's happening — the kind of compartment some UFO whistleblowers say a hidden program would be hidden inside.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
saturated phenomenon saturated phenomena
A proposed category of experience so overwhelming and excessive that it cannot be fully taken in or pinned down by the concepts a person brings to it, unlike an ordinary object that a concept can neatly capture.Appears in Experience and Consequences
scheme schème, schéma
A repeatable, reusable pattern of action or thought, such as a baby's grasping pattern or an older child's counting pattern, that can be applied across many different situations.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
SECAM Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar
The umbrella organization of Catholic bishops' conferences across Africa and Madagascar, whose 2024 unanimous rejection of Vatican-approved same-sex blessings was a landmark assertion of African Catholic authority within the wider Church.Appears in On This Rock
second fundamental theorem of welfare economics Second Fundamental Theorem
The economic principle that any fair or desired distribution of resources can in theory be reached through free markets, provided that starting wealth is first redistributed appropriately without distorting people's everyday incentives.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
Second Great Awakening the Second Great Awakening
A decades-long wave of Protestant religious revivals in the United States, roughly 1790s-1830s, that spread evangelical Christianity to the masses through emotional camp meetings and put Bible interpretation into the hands of ordinary believers rather than trained clergy.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet, Tell It Slant
Section 122
A provision of U.S. trade law allowing the president to impose a temporary tariff of up to 15% on imports for balance-of-payments reasons without needing separate congressional approval, used in 2026 to replace tariffs the Supreme Court had struck down under a different legal authority.Appears in The Argument Over Money
sectoral bargaining sectoral or industry-wide bargaining
A system, common in parts of Europe, in which unions negotiate wages and conditions for an entire industry at once rather than one workplace at a time, making it far easier to organize workers who are scattered across many small or non-unionized employers.Appears in The Long Advent
secular stagnation
An economic theory holding that a persistent excess of global savings over investment has permanently pushed down the "natural" interest rate, meaning even very low central-bank rates fail to meaningfully boost growth.Appears in The Argument Over Money
secularization thesis
A long-standing sociological theory holding that as societies modernize — through industrialization, science, and rising education — religion inevitably loses its social importance and grip on the population.Appears in The Recurring Fire
secularized Calvinism Calvinism without the theology, a Calvinist without the theology, secularized-Calvinism
A pattern, seen in Carlyle and a number of other writers, in which the moral instincts, mental habits, and rhetorical forms of strict Calvinist Christianity persist strongly in a person's thought and writing long after they have stopped believing the actual religious doctrines.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
see Holy See
The formal term for a bishop's jurisdiction or office, named after the bishop's ceremonial chair (Latin sedes); the "Holy See" specifically refers to the pope's own central governing authority as head of the worldwide Church, which is legally distinct from the small territory of Vatican City State.Appears in On This Rock
seigniorage
The economic benefit a government or currency issuer gets simply from creating money, since it can obtain real goods and services (or borrow cheaply) in exchange for currency that costs little to produce.Appears in The Argument Over Money
self the self
In Jung's specialized use of the word (distinct from ordinary usage), not one's everyday sense of 'me' but the theorized center and totality of the whole personality, conscious and unconscious combined — the organizing core that a person's whole life of psychological growth is oriented toward.Appears in A God in the Psyche
sensorimotor contingencies sensorimotor account of perception
The lawful, predictable ways that what a person sees or feels changes as they move their body, which some theories hold is what perceptual experience actually consists of, rather than a fixed picture built up in the head.Appears in Experience and Consequences
sensus fidelium sense of the faithful
The idea that the whole body of believers collectively carries an instinctive sense for authentic Catholic teaching, which some theologians treat as a real, if informal, source that should shape doctrine and others warn is not simply a matter of counting popular opinion.Appears in On This Rock
sept
An old Gaelic Irish kinship group descended from a common ancestor, smaller than a full clan, that functioned as the basic social and landholding unit in pre-conquest Ireland.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
seriation
The ability to arrange a set of items in systematic order, such as lining up sticks from shortest to longest, while holding in mind that each item is both larger than the one before it and smaller than the one after it.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The decades-long scientific effort to detect radio or other signals from intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe, which has found nothing conclusive in over 60 years but is nonetheless treated as legitimate science — a contrast researchers often draw with UFO studies.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
shadow the shadow
Jung's term for everything about oneself that the conscious personality has refused to acknowledge — inconvenient impulses, faults, and disowned qualities — which he warned does not disappear when denied but operates unseen and gets projected onto other people as their faults instead.Appears in A God in the Psyche
shadow banking shadow sector, shadow-banking system
The network of investment banks, money-market funds, and other lenders that perform bank-like functions — borrowing short-term and lending long-term — without deposit insurance or direct access to central-bank support, making them harder to regulate and more prone to sudden runs.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Sham Cant, Phantasm, Quackery, Sham vs. Reality, Sham-Things, Shams
Carlyle's key term for any social institution — a monarchy, a church, a law — that has lost its genuine moral substance and survives only as an empty, hollow formality, which he believed revolution violently exposes and sweeps away.Appears in Carlyle's Everest, The Book That Burned, The Calvinist Without a Creed
SideView
A DNA-testing company feature that, without ever testing either parent, uses the DNA a person shares with distant cousins to figure out which segments of their genome came from their mother and which from their father, splitting one ancestry estimate into two separate parental columns.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
simony
The buying or selling of church offices, positions, or spiritual favors — named for Simon Magus in the Bible — a corrupt practice the medieval Gregorian Reform specifically targeted.Appears in On This Rock
sincerity
Carlyle's central test for true heroism — not cleverness or eloquence but a deep, unaffected genuineness in seeing and responding to what is real, which he considered the defining mark of every one of history's great figures.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
sine macula peccati
Latin for "without stain of sin" — the traditional Christian description of Jesus as morally perfect and untouched by wrongdoing; psychologist Carl Jung argued this very perfection meant the orthodox image of Christ had to exclude and "externalize" humanity's dark side, which then reappeared as the figure of the Antichrist.Appears in The Man and the Christ
slant rhyme approximate rhyme, near-rhyme, oblique rhyme, off-rhyme
A rhyme in which the end sounds of two lines correspond only partially rather than matching exactly, so the ear expects a clean chime and gets a slightly dissonant near-miss instead.Appears in Tell It Slant
SLGS State and Local Government Series securities
A special class of U.S. Treasury securities that state and local governments buy to comply with tax rules on municipal bonds; suspending new issuance of these is one of the Treasury's standard "extraordinary measures" for buying time once the debt ceiling is hit.Appears in The Argument Over Money
SNP single-nucleotide polymorphism
One of the specific, commonly-varying spots in the genetic code that DNA testing companies read and compare across hundreds of thousands of positions to build an ancestry estimate.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Social Gospel
An American Protestant movement, centered on Walter Rauschenbusch's writing in the early 1900s, arguing that the core of Jesus's teaching was the transformation of unjust social and economic structures on earth, not just the salvation of individual souls.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Long Advent
sociological jurisprudence law in action
Legal scholar Roscoe Pound's early-twentieth-century approach holding that legal rules should be judged and shaped by the real social needs they serve, rather than by their internal logical tidiness — captured in his slogan 'law in action' rather than 'law in books.'Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Sokol
A Czech gymnastics-and-fellowship movement, founded in Bohemia in 1862, that became the central community institution for many Czech immigrants in America, especially the large number who were secular or anticlerical rather than devout churchgoers.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
sola scriptura
The Protestant Reformation principle that the Bible alone, without church tradition or a teaching authority, is the final and sufficient source of Christian doctrine; the Catholic Church rejects this, holding that scripture and church tradition together transmit divine revelation.Appears in On This Rock
solidarity
In Richard Rorty's philosophy, the shared agreement and mutual commitment within a community that he proposed as a replacement for old-fashioned claims to objective truth — what a group of people accept together, rather than what supposedly matches an independent reality.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
solus Christus
A Latin Reformation slogan meaning "Christ alone," expressing the Protestant doctrine that Christ is the sole mediator between God and humanity, without need for priests, saints, or other intermediaries.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Son of Man bar enasha, bar nash
A puzzling title Jesus applies to himself throughout the Gospels, rooted in an Aramaic phrase that could mean simply "a person like me" but that also echoes a prophetic vision in the Book of Daniel of a heavenly figure granted authority to judge and rule — scholars debate how much weight, if any, Jesus meant it to carry.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Sparagmos
A term from Greek myth and ritual for the violent tearing-apart of a body, most famously associated with followers of the god Dionysus in a frenzied, ecstatic state.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
Specie Circular
An 1836 executive order by President Andrew Jackson requiring that federal land purchases be paid for in gold or silver rather than paper money, a move that drained hard currency out of circulation and helped trigger the Panic of 1837.Appears in The Argument Over Money
sphere of influence spheres of influence
A region in which a great power claims a recognized right to dominate the political and security choices of smaller neighboring states, an arrangement some scholars argue the Trump administration's Western Hemisphere policy and its posture toward Ukraine implicitly embrace.Appears in The Map of American Power
spirituality of the church
A doctrine, especially associated with Southern Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell, holding that the church's mission is purely spiritual and it should therefore stay silent on political and social matters like slavery.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
Springfield Presbytery
A short-lived Presbyterian body formed in 1803 by revival-minded ministers uneasy with strict Calvinist doctrine, which its own founders dramatically dissolved the following year in favor of a non-denominational 'Christian' identity, a founding moment of the Restoration Movement.Appears in The Recurring Fire
SSPX Lefebvrist, Society of Saint Pius X
A traditionalist Catholic society founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to preserve the old Latin Mass and reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; its bishops were excommunicated in 1988 for being consecrated without papal approval, and the group's status with Rome remains unresolved.Appears in On This Rock
stablecoin payment stablecoin
A cryptocurrency designed to hold a stable value, typically by being pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by reserves of cash or short-term government bonds, used mainly as a digital substitute for holding or transferring dollars.Appears in The Argument Over Money
strategic ambiguity
The long-standing US policy of deliberately not stating in advance whether it would militarily defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, intended to discourage both a Chinese invasion and a Taiwanese declaration of formal independence.Appears in The Map of American Power
structural sin superpersonal forces of evil
A theological concept holding that sin can be embedded in institutions and social systems themselves — such as a corporation or an economic order — and perpetuated by them beyond the moral failure of any single person within them.Appears in The Long Advent
structuralism structuralist
A broad intellectual approach, influential across several fields in the twentieth century, that explains things by the systems of relationships and transformations that organize them rather than by their individual parts in isolation; Piaget's own version insisted that such structures are actively built over time rather than fixed and unchanging.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
structuralism (psychology)
An early school of scientific psychology that tried to analyze conscious experience into its most basic elementary components through careful, trained self-observation, contrasted with the rival approach of studying what mental processes are for.Appears in Experience and Consequences
structure d'ensemble structured whole, structures d'ensemble
Piaget's claim that all the mental abilities belonging to a given stage of development click into place together as a single unified system, rather than arriving separately — the theory's most ambitious claim, and the one that held up worst against later evidence.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
sui iuris
Latin for "of its own law," the canonical status of a self-governing church within the wider Catholic communion — such as an Eastern Catholic church — that keeps its own distinct liturgy, leadership, and internal legal code while remaining in communion with, and ultimately answerable to, the pope.Appears in On This Rock
supply-path optimization SPO
The practice, in digital and TV advertising, of analyzing the chain of intermediaries an ad buy passes through in order to cut out the ones that add cost without adding real value.Appears in Hard to Vary
swamp gas marsh gas
A 1966 explanation, offered for only some of a cluster of Michigan sightings, that methane gas bubbling up from marshy ground can spontaneously ignite and produce brief floating lights; the press reported it as if it explained every sighting, making it a lasting symbol of dismissive official UFO explanations.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
symbolic ethnicity ethnic options
A sociological term for the way later-generation descendants of immigrants hold onto their heritage lightly and by choice — a food at a holiday, a felt sense of pride — without it shaping daily life, a low-cost identity sociologists note is most freely available to white Americans.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
symbolic interactionism
A sociological approach holding that people's sense of self and society is built up through ongoing, meaning-laden interactions with others, in which shared symbols and gestures are interpreted and responded to.Appears in Experience and Consequences
synchronicity acausal connecting principle
Jung's proposed principle that two events can be meaningfully connected to each other — striking a person as clearly related — even though nothing in the ordinary cause-and-effect sense links them, such as a person dreaming of a specific event just before it happens by chance.Appears in A God in the Psyche
synechism
Charles Sanders Peirce's philosophical doctrine that continuity, not separateness, is the most basic feature of reality — that mind and matter, and all things generally, form an unbroken continuum rather than being made of sharply distinct, isolated parts.Appears in Experience and Consequences, The Man and the Christ
Synoptic Problem Q, Two-Source Hypothesis, synoptic
The puzzle, in New Testament scholarship, of explaining why the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke share so much material, often in nearly identical wording — the leading solution proposes that Matthew and Luke each independently used Mark plus a now-lost collection of Jesus's sayings that scholars call "Q."Appears in The Man and the Christ

T

Tabagie Tabaks-Collegium, Tabaks-Collegium (Tobacco-Parliament), Tobacco-Parliament
The nightly smoking-and-drinking gathering at which the King of Prussia's father conducted informal state business with his inner circle, puffing on pipes instead of holding a debating parliament — Carlyle treats it as a comic stand-in for real government.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
Taborites
A radical faction of the Hussite religious movement in 15th-century Bohemia who, believing Christ's return was imminent, set up communal settlements holding property in common and rejecting the authority of existing rulers and clergy.Appears in The Long Advent
Taking Children Seriously TCS
An educational philosophy, co-founded by David Deutsch, holding that children's own ideas and preferences should be treated as genuine positions to reason with rather than overridden by parental authority.Appears in Hard to Vary
tarmidi ganzibri, rishama, tarmidutā
The ranks of the Mandaean priesthood, whose members see themselves as continuing the baptizing office they trace back to John.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
tawhid
The core Islamic doctrine of the absolute oneness and unity of God, which all prophets in the Islamic tradition, including John, are understood to have preached.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
temperature inversion
A weather condition in which a layer of warm air sits above cooler air near the ground, which can bend and distort radar signals in ways that create false blips resembling solid objects.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
term premium
The extra return investors demand to hold a long-term government bond instead of a series of short-term ones, compensating them for the added risk and uncertainty of tying up their money for longer — a premium that rises when investors grow nervous about future inflation or a government's fiscal discipline.Appears in The Argument Over Money
Terror Reign of Terror, the Terror
The roughly year-long period (1793–1794) of the French Revolution marked by mass arrests and executions of perceived enemies of the revolutionary government, presided over largely by Robespierre.Appears in The Book That Burned
tertium quid
A Latin phrase meaning "a third thing," used here for Piaget's constructivism as an alternative that rejects both of the two standard explanations of where knowledge comes from — the world simply impressing itself on the mind, or the mind being pre-loaded with knowledge from birth.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
Testimonium Flavianum
A brief passage about Jesus in the writings of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus — scholars generally agree Josephus wrote something about Jesus here, but believe later Christian copyists added or altered some lines to make it more explicitly favorable to Christianity.Appears in More Than a Forerunner, The Man and the Christ
the Blob deep state
An informal, sometimes derisive term for the durable network of career diplomats, military officers, intelligence officials, and foreign-policy think-tank experts whose institutional preferences shape US foreign policy regardless of which president is in office.Appears in The Map of American Power
the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition mirror of nature, spectator theory of knowledge
Richard Rorty's label for the mainstream Western philosophical picture, running from Descartes through Locke to Kant, in which the mind is treated as an inner mirror that should represent an outside world accurately, and philosophy's job is to check and perfect that mirroring.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
the Cathedral
A term coined by the blogger Curtis Yarvin for what he sees as an unofficial, self-reinforcing alliance of universities and mainstream media that manufactures and enforces progressive political consensus, echoing Carlyle's older attacks on institutional Sham.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies, The Calvinist Without a Creed
the dismal science
A phrase Carlyle coined, originally as a slur against economists who insisted on the fundamental equality of all human races, that later drifted into general use as a nickname for economics without most people knowing its ugly original context.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
the Fed put Fed put
Investors' long-standing belief that the Federal Reserve will step in with rate cuts or emergency support whenever financial markets fall sharply, a belief that can encourage excessive risk-taking because investors expect to be rescued from serious losses.Appears in The Argument Over Money
the Great Society
John Dewey's term (borrowed and repurposed from Herbert Spencer) for the vast, impersonal, industrial-scale network of modern social and economic connections that outgrew the small face-to-face communities in which people could once form a genuine shared public.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
The Machiavellians The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom
An influential 1943 book that introduced English-language readers to a group of European thinkers on elites and power, arguing that clear-eyed realism about how ruling minorities actually operate is, paradoxically, the best safeguard of liberty.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
the pragmatic method method of science
Peirce's fourth and, in his view, best way of settling belief: testing ideas systematically against experience, sharing results with other investigators, and revising conclusions whenever they conflict with new evidence — the method underlying modern science.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
the transparent eyeball transparent eye-ball
Emerson's famous image, from his book Nature, describing a mystical experience of losing all sense of separate selfhood while standing outdoors, so that one becomes purely a vehicle through which the divine 'currents of the Universal Being' flow and are perceived.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
theistic personalism
A way of thinking about God as an extremely powerful and knowledgeable individual person, similar in kind to a human mind but vastly greater in degree — a view that classical theologians distinguish from, and consider a weaker rival to, classical theism.Appears in Hard to Vary
theodicy theodicies
An argument that tries to explain why a good and all-powerful God would allow suffering and evil to exist in the world.Appears in Hard to Vary
theological turn French theological turn
A late-twentieth-century development in French philosophy in which several phenomenologists began describing religious and mystical experience (such as prayer, revelation, or the presence of God) using the tools of phenomenology, provoking a fierce debate about whether this crossed the line into disguised theology.Appears in Experience and Consequences
theosis deification, theopoiesis
The central teaching of Eastern Christian tradition that the ultimate purpose of Jesus becoming human was to make it possible for human beings to be drawn into a real, participatory share in God's own life — summed up in the ancient formula "God became human so that humans might become divine."Appears in The Man and the Christ
Theotokos Christotokos
Greek for "God-bearer," the traditional title for Mary, mother of Jesus — a fifth-century controversy over whether this title (implying her son was fully divine from the womb) or the more cautious "Christ-bearer" was correct became one of the major early disputes over who Jesus really was.Appears in The Man and the Christ
Third International Comintern
The Moscow-directed international federation of communist parties founded by Lenin in 1919 to organize revolutionary socialists worldwide and pull them away from the reformist, parliamentary socialist parties of the Second International.Appears in The Long Advent
Third Way Die Neue Mitte
A political strategy, jointly articulated by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder in 1999, in which center-left parties accepted market-driven economics as a permanent fact of life and repositioned themselves around education, opportunity, and fiscal discipline rather than redistribution or public ownership.Appears in The Long Advent
three-mountains task
A classic experiment in which a child views a model of three mountains and is asked to identify what someone sitting on the opposite side would see, used by Piaget to test whether young children can mentally step outside their own point of view.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
too big to fail
The idea, and eventual explicit doctrine, that some financial institutions are so large and interconnected that the government cannot allow them to collapse without risking the whole financial system — meaning their creditors are effectively guaranteed by the taxpayer, letting those institutions borrow more cheaply and take on more risk than they otherwise could.Appears in The Argument Over Money
total depravity
The Calvinist doctrine that sin has corrupted every part of human nature, so that no unaided human action or institution can be assumed to be genuinely good; Carlyle secularized this into his relentless suspicion that respectable-looking people and institutions are usually concealing rot beneath the surface.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
TPI Transmission Protection Instrument
A European Central Bank tool, created in 2022, under which the ECB pledges to buy the government bonds of a financially stressed Eurozone country if its borrowing costs spike for reasons unrelated to that country's actual economic fundamentals.Appears in The Argument Over Money
TR-3B
A rumored secret triangular U.S. aircraft that some UFO researchers believe explains reported sightings of large silent triangular craft, though no credible evidence of its existence has been produced.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
transcendence transcendent
In the theological sense used here, the idea that God or the sacred exists as a separate, supernatural power outside and above the natural world, imposing authority on it from without.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
transcendentalism New England Transcendentalism, Transcendentalist
An early-nineteenth-century American intellectual movement, centered on Ralph Waldo Emerson, that prized individual intuition, self-reliance, and a spiritual unity behind nature over strict logical system-building.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
transformed Kant genetic Kantianism, neo-Kantianism
A description of Piaget's philosophical position as a modified version of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's ideas: Piaget agreed that the mind brings its own organizing categories (like space, time, and causality) to experience, but argued those categories are gradually built up through development rather than fixed in the mind from the start.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
transubstantiation
The Catholic doctrine that, during Mass, the bread and wine used in communion are actually changed in their deepest reality into the body and blood of Christ, even though they continue to look, taste, and feel exactly like ordinary bread and wine.Appears in On This Rock
triangulation triangulation argument
Philosopher Donald Davidson's argument that a thought only has definite content because of a three-way relationship between two communicating people and a shared environment they are both responding to — meaning genuinely private, unshared thought is not really possible.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Triffin dilemma
A structural contradiction identified by economist Robert Triffin in which a country issuing the world's reserve currency must run persistent trade deficits to supply the world with enough of its currency, but the larger those deficits grow, the more they undermine confidence in that very currency.Appears in The Argument Over Money
triple melting pot
A mid-20th-century sociological finding that American immigrants were not blending into one single culture but into three broad religious blocs — Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — with marriage increasingly crossing national lines (an Irish Catholic marrying a Polish Catholic) but rarely crossing religious ones.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
Troika
The informal name for the three institutions — the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund — that jointly negotiated and enforced the terms of Greece's bailout loans and austerity requirements during its debt crisis.Appears in The Long Advent
Trump Corollary Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
The Trump administration's 2025 reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, formally declaring the Western Hemisphere the United States' top strategic priority and pledging to deny China, Russia, and other outside powers any military or strategic foothold there.Appears in The Map of American Power
trust-fund depletion trust-fund cliff
The projected point at which Social Security and Medicare's dedicated trust funds run down to zero, after which the programs could pay out only as much in benefits as they collect in incoming payroll taxes — an automatic cut, not a shutdown, unless Congress acts first.Appears in The Argument Over Money
TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
The Taiwanese company that manufactures more than 90 percent of the world's most advanced computer chips, making the island's security a matter of acute concern for the global economy and for US and Chinese technology competition.Appears in The Map of American Power
TTSA To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science
A publicly traded company launched in 2017 by a former rock musician and several ex-government officials to research and promote UFO disclosure, whose formation shortly before a landmark newspaper story gave that story unusual institutional weight.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Twenty-One Conditions
A set of strict membership rules, adopted by the Communist International in 1920, requiring any socialist party that wanted to join to purge its moderate leaders and submit to binding orders from Moscow — a demand that split socialist parties across Europe between communist and social-democratic wings.Appears in The Long Advent
tychasm tychastic evolution, tychism
Charles Sanders Peirce's term for evolution driven by pure random chance — roughly, the element of Darwin's theory involving unpredictable variation, as opposed to evolution driven by mechanical law or by love.Appears in The Man and the Christ
tychism
Charles Sanders Peirce's doctrine that genuine, objective chance is a real feature of the universe, rather than everything being fully determined by fixed causal laws.Appears in Experience and Consequences

U

UAP Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
The official U.S. government term, adopted to replace 'UFO,' for objects or sightings in the sky, at sea, or in space that cannot immediately be explained — a deliberately neutral label that avoids assuming the objects are alien or even solid craft.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
UAPDA UAP Disclosure Act
Proposed legislation, repeatedly introduced but not yet passed as of 2026, that would force broad declassification of government UFO-related records on a fixed schedule, modeled on the law that opened up the Kennedy assassination files.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
UAPTF UAP Task Force
A Navy-run UFO investigation unit stood up in 2020 in response to a wave of pilot reports, one of several short-lived offices that preceded today's Pentagon investigative body.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
ultramontanism
A 19th-century movement, literally meaning "beyond the mountains" (looking past the Alps to Rome), that pushed to centralize Catholic authority firmly on the pope and Vatican rather than on national bishops, monarchs, or local church traditions.Appears in On This Rock
Uniate Church Greek Catholic, Ruthenian Uniate Church
A church body of Eastern Slavic Christians who, from the 1590s, kept their traditional Byzantine-style worship but placed themselves under the authority of the Pope in Rome rather than the Orthodox Church in Constantinople.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
unipolar moment unipolarity
The period after the Soviet Union's collapse in which the United States stood as the world's sole superpower without a rival great power to check it, a condition most analysts agree has eroded but disagree about how far or how fast.Appears in The Map of American Power
Unitarianism Boston Unitarianism, Unitarian
A liberal branch of New England Christianity that had already broken away from strict Calvinism, rejecting ideas like predestination and eternal hellfire in favor of a rational, benevolent God and an emphasis on Jesus as a moral teacher — the relatively progressive church Emerson was raised and ordained in, and later broke from for going, in his view, not far enough.Appears in An Original Relation to the Universe
universal ownership
The situation in which a small number of giant index-fund managers — chiefly BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — hold significant stakes across nearly the entire stock market on behalf of ordinary savers, concentrating enormous voting and influence power in just a few firms.Appears in The Argument Over Money
unus mundus the one world
A concept borrowed by Jung from a sixteenth-century alchemist, naming a single, undivided underlying reality that both mind and matter are thought to spring from, such that at some deep level the psychological and the physical are not two separate things but two faces of one thing.Appears in A God in the Psyche, The Man and the Christ
USCCB United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
The official organization of all Catholic bishops in the United States, which coordinates national church policy, commissions research (such as studies on clergy sexual abuse), and issues statements on behalf of the American church.Appears in On This Rock
USMCA United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement
The trade agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, governing commerce among the United States, Mexico, and Canada and subject to a mandatory joint review process every six years.Appears in The Map of American Power
USNORTHCOM U.S. Northern Command
The U.S. military command responsible for defending North American airspace and territory, now required to disclose its history of intercepting unidentified objects going back to 2004.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure

V

value-free science value-free
The idea that a field of study can describe how the world works — including how people believe and behave — without smuggling in the researcher's own moral judgments about whether that behavior is good or bad.Appears in A Graveyard of Aristocracies
variorum variorum edition
A scholarly edition of a writer's work that prints, alongside the main text, the significant alternate wordings found across different manuscripts or earlier versions, so readers can see exactly where and how the text is uncertain or contested.Appears in Tell It Slant
VASCO
A research project that compares old astronomical photographs taken before the launch of satellites against modern sky surveys, looking for unexplained points of light that appeared and vanished, as a way of searching for historical evidence of anomalies.Appears in From Roswell to Disclosure
Vater Fritz
German for 'Father Fred,' the affectionate nickname ordinary Prussians reportedly used for their king — a term Carlyle leans on to show the ruler was loved up close, not just feared from a distance.Appears in Carlyle's Everest
Vendémiaire 13 Vendémiaire, whiff of grapeshot
A royalist uprising in Paris in October 1795 that Napoleon crushed with cannon fire, an event Carlyle famously described as a "whiff of grapeshot" and treated as the effective end of the Revolution.Appears in The Book That Burned
verificationism verification principle
The logical-positivist doctrine that a statement is meaningful only if there is some way, at least in principle, to check it against observation or experience; statements that can't be verified this way were dismissed as empty of real content.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
vernacular
The everyday spoken language of ordinary people (such as English or Spanish), as opposed to Latin; a key change of the Second Vatican Council was permitting Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than only in Latin.Appears in On This Rock
Verstehen and Erklären Erklären, Verstehen
A distinction, borrowed from German philosophy, between explaining something by identifying its external causes (Erklären) and understanding it by grasping its meaning from the perspective of the person experiencing it (Verstehen).Appears in Experience and Consequences
versus populum
Latin for "toward the people," describing the practice, standard since the Second Vatican Council's reforms, of a priest facing the congregation throughout Mass rather than facing the altar with his back to the people.Appears in On This Rock
violation-of-expectation paradigm VOE
A research technique for studying what babies understand before they can talk or reach reliably: infants are shown events that are either physically possible or impossible, and researchers infer what the infants expect by measuring how much longer they stare at the impossible ones.Appears in How Knowledge Grows
vocation Beruf, calling
The Protestant Reformation teaching that every person has a particular life's work assigned to them by God, and that faithfully doing that ordinary work — whatever it is — counts as a form of religious service, not just a lesser substitute for prayer or contemplation.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Vulgate
The Latin translation of the Bible produced mainly by Saint Jerome around 400 AD, which became the Catholic Church's standard biblical text for over a thousand years.Appears in On This Rock

W

walled garden walled gardens
A large advertising platform, such as a major tech or streaming company, that lets advertisers measure results inside its own ecosystem but restricts outside companies from accessing its detailed, user-level data.Appears in Hard to Vary
warranted assertibility
John Dewey's proposed replacement for the word 'truth': a belief earns this status when it has survived careful testing and inquiry well enough to be confidently asserted, while still remaining open in principle to future revision.Appears in The Cash-Value of Truth
Washington Consensus
A set of free-market economic policy prescriptions — fiscal discipline, privatization, trade liberalization — that dominated US-led international economic policy from the late 1980s through the 2008 financial crisis, after which it lost much of its influence to industrial policy and protectionism.Appears in The Map of American Power
Watch Night 'Freedom's Eve', the Watch Night services
Overnight prayer gatherings held by Black congregations on December 31, 1862, as they waited for the Emancipation Proclamation to take legal effect at midnight, later continued each New Year's Eve as an annual observance.Appears in A Holy War and Its Poet
weighted-average maturity WAM
A measure of how long, on average, it will take for a portfolio of bonds or other debt securities to mature, used in stablecoin regulation to limit how much interest-rate risk an issuer's reserves can carry.Appears in The Argument Over Money
welfare chauvinism
A political stance, common to nationalist-populist parties, that supports a generous welfare state in principle but wants its benefits restricted to native-born citizens and withheld from immigrants.Appears in The Long Advent
Westminster Confession Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Standards
The foundational 1647 statement of belief for strict Presbyterian Christianity, covering doctrines like predestination and human sinfulness, which formed the core of the religious education Carlyle received as a boy before he later abandoned its specific doctrines.Appears in The Calvinist Without a Creed
Whig Whig Party
A nineteenth-century American political party, active from the 1830s to the 1850s, that generally favored a strong role for banks and government-backed economic development and drew support from many of New England's established, propertied families.Appears in Tell It Slant
Whig-progressive history Whig history, Whig-progressive, Whiggish
A style of history that presents the past as a story of steady, more-or-less inevitable progress toward liberal, constitutional government — a framework Carlyle rejected because it treated the Revolution as a rational triumph rather than a moral judgment.Appears in The Book That Burned
Wigilia
The traditional Polish Christmas Eve meal, a meatless supper of exactly twelve dishes (such as beet soup, dumplings, and fish) that remains one of the most durable pieces of Polish-American identity.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
wildcat banks wildcat banking
Loosely regulated banks that sprang up during the mid-19th-century Free Banking era, some deliberately located in remote areas to make it hard for people to redeem their paper notes for real money, issuing currency backed by very little actual value.Appears in The Argument Over Money
womanist theology mujerista theology
Theological traditions developed respectively by Black and Latina women that extend the demand for justice found in liberation theology to include the specific experience of women facing poverty, racism, and sexism together, arguing that earlier male-led theological traditions had overlooked this intersection.Appears in The Long Advent
Wotan essay Wotan
A controversial 1936 essay in which Jung argued that the rise of Nazi Germany was not primarily a political event but a religious one — the eruption of an old, repressed pagan Germanic god of frenzy and possession, rushing in to fill the void left by a weakened Christianity.Appears in A God in the Psyche

Y

Y-DNA test Big Y-700, Y-DNA
A DNA test that reads the Y chromosome, which passes essentially unchanged from father to son, allowing a specific surname line to be traced back many generations in a way an ordinary blended DNA test cannot.Appears in The Emigrant's Atlas
yardna
The Mandaean word for "Jordan," used as a general term for any flowing river used in their baptismal rite, since every river is treated as a continuation of the original Jordan where John baptized.Appears in More Than a Forerunner
yield curve control YCC
A central-bank policy of directly capping a specific bond's interest rate — rather than just an overnight rate — by promising to buy as many bonds as necessary to hold that rate down, a tool the U.S. used to finance World War II and Japan used for decades to keep borrowing costs near zero.Appears in The Argument Over Money

Z

ZIRP zero interest-rate policy
A central-bank stance of holding its benchmark interest rate at or near zero for an extended period, typically to support a weak economy after a crisis, as the Federal Reserve did for seven years following the 2008 financial crisis.Appears in The Argument Over Money
zone of proximal development ZPD
A concept from the psychologist Lev Vygotsky describing the gap between what a child can do alone and what the same child can do with help from a more skilled partner, treated as the sweet spot where learning happens.Appears in How Knowledge Grows