My name is Dan Tilreath, and I’m the person behind all the writing on this site. I’ve been studying religion all my life, but that was more or less the only thing I did for six years prior to launching this site. This site is a way of finally presenting my life’s work publicly.
I grew up in an “evangelical” Protestant household. When I was eleven years old, I started to seriously question that hollowed-out approach to religion, and by the age of fourteen, I had decisively abandoned it. Since then, I’ve been pursuing my spirituality on my own. That approach has borne considerable fruit, especially an experience of spiritual enlightenment that I had in my early twenties, which changed my life forever. But I haven’t ever been able to find my way back to the full extent of what I encountered in that experience – just flickers in the shadows here and there. By this point in my life, I’m considering the possibility of embracing some specific religion or another. This site is a part of that process, in addition to all the other things it is.
I’m happy to be able to say that I have no “academic credentials” beyond a lowly BA degree that I’ve never used for anything. Academia effectively demands that you at least implicitly accept materialistic assumptions about the basic nature of reality (it calls these assumptions “science”) and apply them to an endless number of case studies in “departments” or “disciplines” that are kept separate and narrow enough that you never have an occasion to question the assumptions that underlie them and the artificial boundaries between them. But questioning those assumptions and ultimately replacing them with better, truer-to-life ones is precisely the task that interests me. Since I want to do something that the whole system is set up to prevent you from doing, I can’t do my work from within that system.
Instead, I’ve found it much more productive and fulfilling to do my work independently. This gives me the ability to integrate the scholarly, the philosophical, the spiritual, and the creative into a unified whole that gives each part its due (“integration” does not mean “muddling”) while reflecting the inherent unity of truth and the spiritual basis of that unity. Broadly speaking, this is how nonfiction writing was done in pre-modern, religious cultures, and I endeavor to write in that same spirit, if perhaps a rather “updated” way in certain formal respects.
Thus, if asked to define what I do, I’d say that I’m simply a writer in search of truth. Religion is my central topic because it’s at the heart of that quest.
I believe that a person’s work should be judged based on its quality and not by the person’s titles, diplomas, or other “credentials,” and I humbly hope that people approach my own work in the same spirit – regardless of what conclusions they reach about it in the end.
Outside of classic spiritual texts from traditional religions, some of my favorite books are Marco Pallis’s Peaks and Lamas, Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendent Unity of Religions, R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, E.A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Music has been a cherished companion and consolation for me throughout my life. I tend to gravitate toward atmospheric, “visually” colorful, emotionally intense music, regardless of what genre it comes from. A few of my favorite albums are Parviz Meshkatian and Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s Dastan, Sami Yusuf’s When Paths Meet: Volume Two, Hammock’s Departure Songs, Solarstone’s Rain Stars Eternal, and Shape of Despair’s Monotony Fields.
I also love hiking and spending time with animals, especially cats.
I’m originally from Nashville, Tennessee, United States, but these days I live in a small town in the Upper Midwest.