Some projects you carry for years before you can set them down on the page. This is one of them. The name came to me a long while ago, long enough that I secured it early, the way you reach for something you’re afraid will be taken before you’re ready for it. Then life did what life does, and the launch I kept imagining receded into next month, next season, next year. Kierkegaard would have smiled. The man who taught that truth is not a possession but a striving, that the most earnest thing a person can do is not to have arrived but to be becoming, would not be scandalized by a beginning that took its time. He might even have called it honest.

So let me begin, and say who is speaking.

Juan Climacus is a borrowed name, and borrowed twice over. First from John of the Ladder (Ἰωάννης τῆς Κλίμακος), the seventh-century monk of Sinai who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent and gave the Church an image it has never quite put down: the life of faith as a climb, rung by rung, none of us yet at the top. Then borrowed again by Søren Kierkegaard, who took the ladder-climber’s name as a pseudonym and wrote under it some of the most serious playful books ever composed, books by a man who insisted he was not a Christian in the highest sense, only someone preoccupied, to the point of trembling, with the difficulty of becoming one.

That is the name I have chosen, and I chose it because it tells a truth about me before I can write a word. I am a pastor who reads philosophy and a man who suspects philosophy has been quietly pastoring him all along. I am Puerto Rican by birth and San Antonian by grace, bilingual in tongue and, if I am honest, in soul. I am not writing from the top of the ladder. I am writing from somewhere in the middle of the climb, where the view is partial, the wind is real, and the next rung is not always obvious. Climacus is the only honest name for a man in that position.

And Thinkronizing? It is a pun, and I make no apology for it: irony and wordplay are not the enemies of seriousness but sometimes its smugglers. To think and to synchronize: to bring thought back into time with life. Too much of what passes for thinking runs on a track parallel to living and never touches it. What I want to do here is the harder, slower thing. I want to sync the wondrous with the tragic, philosophy with faith, the questions I cannot answer with the One I have come to trust anyway. Kierkegaard’s line has become my epigraph and my confession: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The long delay between the idea and this first word was not the project failing. It was life being lived forwards (the only direction it can be lived) until I had understood enough of it, backward, to begin.

So here is what this place will be. Some of it will be musings, short turns around the strange fact of being alive, in the Kierkegaardian key of irony, where life is at once a gift too large to hold and a wound too deep to name. Some of it will be formation, the overflow of a preaching, teaching life, the Gospel worked out loud where a city can overhear it. And some of it will be marginalia, notes scribbled in the margins of the thinkers I keep company with: Gadamer and his patience with tradition, Ricoeur and his second naïveté, Heidegger and the questions he asked better than he answered, and always, underneath, the Scriptures that judge and outlast them all.

I make no promises about frequency that I cannot keep, and Climacus of all names would forbid me the pretense. But I do promise this: what appears here will be thought and lived, or it will not appear. That is the whole wager of the ladder, that the climb is real, that the rungs hold, and that the One at the top came down to meet us on the way.

I am glad you are here. Let us climb a little, con confianza (a trust that is more than trust), following, as I always have and always will, the living crucified.

Juan Climacus