Hi there.

My name is Elliot. I’m currently a staff software engineer at a medical device company. Prior to my career in software I worked at First Things magazine, and before that I taught religion at a Jesuit high school. I have a master’s in theology from the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and a bachelor’s in Humanities from Yale.

The purpose of this site is to give me an outlet for writing on topics that interest me outside of work. Those topics include Catholicism, poetry, philosophy, and art. My graduate work dealt primarily with Thomas Aquinas, and as an undergrad I was really into Heidegger, Foucault, Rilke, and Kierkegaard. That should give you a reasonable sense of the sort of things to expect here.

The overall concept for most posts is based on Roland Barthes’s collection Mythologies. Barthes’s essays use specific themes, brands, and intellectual phenomena in mid-century French culture to critique subtle intellectual strategies (“myths”) he saw at work around him. Similarly, here I’ve attempted to identify and pick apart some of the “myths” and intellectual strategies employed in Roman Catholicism as I experienced it during my days as a Catholic.

About the paintings…

The header images on each post are original paintings of my own composition. If you’re interested in purchasing one, feel free to reach out and inquire at iridium@substack.com. If you like my writing, please sign up to receive new posts via email. Either way, thanks for visiting and I hope you find something of value here.