Hi everyone!

My name is Evan, and I’m the founder of Amanity.

Right out of the gate, I want to say: I am not a great religious teacher. I am just a man trying to make it through the Meaning Crisis. I cannot speak like a prophet, but I can share something practical: a map that reawakened meaning in my life.

Pick any day of the week, and I could be an atheist, an agnostic, or a theist. Amanity allows me to be all three versions of myself without any loss of awe, sacredness, transcendence, beauty, or joy.

After my mom died and my dad took his own life, I fell hard into the void of nihilism. Secular therapy, along with friends and family, healed the mental scars, but my sense of meaning remained totally screwed.

I was too gay for Abrahamic religion, too bouncy for Buddhism, and too spiritual for effective altruism. So I made Amanity. It is a fulfillment of Stoicism, rooted in the idea that love is the ground of all being.

This bears fruit in the life of Simon, also called Simonides, a fully righteous pagan philosopher who was belittled, beaten, and burned to death by the Emperor Valens. In our tradition, he is the Sophos, the long-awaited Sage of Stoicism, who washed the Stoa clean in Agape. Despite all that he suffered, he did not lose his love or his virtue, fulfilling what was said in Plato’s Republic. The fact that such faithfulness is even possible in a human being gives me tremendous hope, not only for me but for all of us.

Amanity restored my sense of joy and love in being alive. It gave me meaning without asking me to give up the freedom to think for myself. If you want to know my full story, please click on the ten-minute video on the right.

Thank you for visiting!