Alan's Notebook
A window into the working notebook behind the work.
Alan has accumulated more than 20,000 private notes over decades of reading, thinking, questioning, and doing theology.
Some are substantial reflections. Some are quotations, observations, questions, fragments, and marginalia. Most have never been published.
ReflectionDrawn from Alan's Notebook · 2012
Archive #0219“We have already said that Jesus is the Father’s Word not only when he speaks to others but in the whole of his existence, which embraces every dimension of his human life, conduct, and action. When he speaks and teaches explicitly, his words have their full meaning only insofar as they draw us into the depths of his own being: his self-understanding, his mis…”
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christian Meditation, 39
Alan's note: Jesus as the Father’s Word in the entirety of his bodily existence, not just his uttered sentences. The apex that opens out into Trinitarian infinity.
Sample entry from the member archive
Not everything Alan saved was meant to become an article.
That is part of what makes the archive interesting.
The Notebook preserves something closer to the texture of thinking itself: things noticed, questions held onto, theological connections, passages worth remembering, unfinished ideas, and reflections that never became public work.
Reflection
Longer theological thought.
Fragment
A short unfinished idea.
Quotation + note
Something Alan read, followed by why he kept it.
Question
An unresolved question worth carrying.
Marginalia
A small response to another work or idea.
Selected, not dumped.
The value is not in putting 20,000 raw notes on a screen.
Movemental uses search and AI-assisted discovery to find material worth revisiting. A human editorial process determines what actually becomes part of the member Notebook.
- 20,000+source notes
- Search & discoveryAI-assisted
- Human reviewan editor reads it in full
- Provenance checknames, quotations, dates
- Member Notebookpermanent page
AI can help find the note. It does not quietly turn the note into a new Alan Hirsch essay.
Provenance
Original note, edit, or reflection now—we tell you which.
The difference matters. We want members to know when they are reading Alan's original words, when a note has been lightly prepared for publication, and when Alan has returned to an older thought himself.
- Alan's original note · 2014
- Lightly edited for clarity
- Drawn from Alan's Notebook
- Revisited by Alan · 2026
Sometimes the old note gets a new conversation.
Sometimes Alan may choose to revisit an older note in the present. Those additions come from Alan, not an automatic AI reconstruction.
Then
Original note · 2011 · Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis
“Profunditas est homo, et cor ejus abyssus—‘Man is a depth, and his heart an abyss’ (Ps 63:6). At the very center of human existence lies the depth of the creature calling out to the infinite depth of the Creator, as like seeks after like. Homo capax Dei—man is capable of God.”
Alan's initial note: Can human desire ever find lasting peace apart from uncreated love?
Now
Alan, now · 2026
“The human capacity for God is not an optional religious inclination reserved for the mystically gifted. It is the deepest impulse of our nature, as natural as a plant turning toward the light. We cannot find lasting happiness apart from the God whose image and likeness are impressed upon the very center of our being.”
Occasional. Not every entry.
The Notebook can come to you.
Selected Notebook entries will be delivered directly to members as well as preserved in the member archive.
Some entries may fit entirely inside the email. Longer ones can continue on AlanHirsch.com.
You choose how Notebook material reaches you.
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Some things are worth keeping.
Every released Notebook entry has a permanent home. Members can save anything they want to return to later.
Kept material becomes part of your own Movemental library. It is not a public like, reaction, or popularity signal.
The member archive13 Curated Samples
Search covers material released to members. The 20,000 unpublished notes are not exposed here.Showing 13 of 13 sample entries
Quotation + noteAlan's original note · 2008
Ethics Begins in Christology (Akoloutheō)
“Our concern here is not with the Greek ideal of the imitation of God (mimēsis theou), but with the distinctly Christian conviction that ethics begins in Christology. Christian ethics takes its shape from the New Testament’s call to follow C…”
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, v.I
Alan: Akoloutheō precedes mimēsis. Following is not copying a moral ideal; it is participating in a living person. When ethics detaches from Christology, discipleship collapses into moralism.
ReflectionDrawn from Alan's Notebook · 2012
The Spoken Word as the Apex of the Triangle
“We have already said that Jesus is the Father’s Word not only when he speaks to others but in the whole of his existence, which embraces every dimension of his human life, conduct, and action. When he speaks and teaches explicitly, his word…”
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christian Meditation, 39
Alan: Jesus as the Father’s Word in the entirety of his bodily existence, not just his uttered sentences. The apex that opens out into Trinitarian infinity.
Quotation + noteAlan's original note · 2015
The Latency of Human Nature Before Christ
“For, with Lewis and the entire Christian tradition, I believe that Christ Jesus reveals to us, not only the life of the Blessed Trinity—that uncreated Community where life and love are but one thing—but also and by that very fact the deepes…”
— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Love’s Sacred Order
Alan: We cannot know what humanity truly is by looking at fallen human patterns. Christ is the baseline for humanness. Until him, human nature was in latency.
ReflectionDrawn from Alan's Notebook · 2004
Halting the Wheel of Rationality (The Doors of Perception)
“There are moments of serendipity that can briefly carry us into a reality more profound and more vibrant. An old mystic describes such moments as bringing the “wheel of his rationality” to a halt—the intense activity of the mind through whi…”
— Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism
Alan: The noise of the gramophone within vs. the song of wild birds. How much of Western church strategy is frantic gramophone noise to avoid the silence of contemplation?
Quotation + noteRevisited by Alan · 2026
Within the Beautiful: When Truth Loses Persuasive Power
“Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—the whole person quivers. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it. The more total this experience is, th…”
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. I
Alan: When beauty dies, truth becomes mechanical clatter. Apologetics without glory is just rotary presses spewing syllogisms that persuade no one.
Quotation + noteAlan's original note · 2010
Knowing God by Heart Amid the Verbosity
“Knowing God in the world means knowing God ‘by heart’ and to know God by heart is at the foundation of contemplative discipline. Finding the time and being faithful to the time with God is a very hard discipline, especially for those of us …”
— Henri J. M. Nouwen, Clowning in Rome: Reflections on Solitude, Celibacy, Prayer, and Contemplation, 102
Alan: Intellectuals are the most resistant to contemplative prayer because our defense mechanism is elaboration. Breaking through mental defenses to know God 'by heart.'
MarginaliaAlan's original note · 2016
Fleeing the Light: The Synagogue Exit
““going out . . . they took counsel against him, how they might utterly destroy him” (Matt 12:14)
The Pharisee's final action of “going out” of the synagogue diametrically contrasts with Jesus' “going beyond and entering” the synagogue at t…”
— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Vol. II
Alan: The religious impulse to leave the zone of healing in order to protect an orthodoxy that has become murderous.
ReflectionDrawn from Alan's Notebook · 2011
Homo Capax Dei: The Abyss of the Human Heart
“Before Augustine, many thinkers had already recognized the paradox that human loves, by themselves, are never enough. Even when they attain their fullest human expression—storgē, philia, and eros—they cannot satisfy the deepest longings of …”
— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Love’s Sacred Order
Alan: Homo capax Dei. Not an elective for the spiritually musical, but the constitutive structure of human being.
Quotation + noteAlan's original note · 2013
The Quiet Chamber and the Weight of Being in God
“The silence required of the Christian is not fundamentally and primarily of human making. Rather, believers must realize that they already possess within themselves and at the same time in God the quiet, hidden “chamber” into which they are…”
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christian Meditation, 19-20
Alan: Grace renders our rehearsed penitential speeches obsolete. The leap into the Father's arms without antechambers.
ReflectionRevisited by Alan · 2026
The Toppling Images and the Living Voice
“Again and again, human images of God must be shattered; “the iconoclasts must have their way.” Within human beings, iconoclasm names the impulse that rejects images once they can no longer be credibly affirmed or reverently sustained. Yet i…”
— Donald J. Moore, Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism
Alan: “The images topple, but the voice is never silenced.” Theology is permanent iconoclasm against our own mental idols of God.
FragmentAlan's original note · 2005
The Enemy as Hedonist (Screwtape on Real Pleasures)
“Screwtape complains in the Letters that all real pleasures come from the Enemy. “He is a hedonist at heart...He makes no secret of it, at His right hand are 'pleasures for evermore'....He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. There a…”
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 112
Alan: Evil cannot create a single authentic pleasure; it can only bend what is inherently good and joyful into distortion.
Quotation + noteAlan's original note · 2003
Another Name in Your Own World
“You are too old, children, said Aslan very gently, and you must begin to come close to your own world now.
It isn't Narnia, you know, sobbed Lucy. It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?
But you shall m…”
— C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Alan: The whole purpose of myth and holy imagination: to prepare the heart to recognize Christ under his true name in ordinary reality.
Quotation + noteDrawn from Alan's Notebook · 2009
Reason in the Employment of Love
“History, in the Bible, is the story of successive divine visitations. Its mystery is the mystery of continuing divine election, wherein God discloses his purposes. Each visit and each call is oriented toward a particular end. He confronts m…”
— Paul Minear (quoting Paul Ramsey), Eyes of Faith, 45
Alan: “Reason is always in the employment of some love.” We are liturgical, desiring creatures before we are thinking machines.
Over 20,000 curated research notes preserved across Alan's working archive.
A note can lead back into the whole body of work.
The Notebook is not a separate stream of content. It is another way into Alan's wider body of work.
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