ReformationalPhilosophy2026

Official twitter handle for the 2026 Philosophy in the Reformed Tradition Conference

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

failure of all attempts, including my own, to bring about an inner synthesis between the Christian faith and a philosophy rooted in faith in the self-sufficiency of human reason.
- Herman Dooyeweerd

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

The true knowledge of ourselves is dependent upon the true knowledge of God.
-John Calvin, Institutio Religionis Christianae.
...
The great turning point in my thought was...the discovery of the religious root of thought itself. This shed a new light on the [continual]

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

The Spanish version

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

A Reformational response to Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas." Thanks to @dooyeweerdian for the infographic, made with AI assistance.

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

Interesting! We know of a book on Neocals and the French Revolution (Eglinton and Harinck, eds.) but not of Neocals and the 1898 Philippine Revolution read thru the eyes of Indonesian revolutionaries.

[Romel Bagares @dooyeweerdian]

FB Memory reminded me of a note I've made of Toer's Child of All Nations (perhaps worth a paper or so). Ter Haar's words (in the Indonesian novelist's telling) now strike me with new interest: what did Kuyper's Holland think and write of the Filipino revolution of 1898?

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British novelist whose father worked in a bank explained the entire 2008 financial crisis in a 272-page book that a 12-year-old can follow, and the part that should scare you is how simple the fraud was once he stripped the jargon off it.

His name is John Lanchester.

He is a novelist by trade. He writes for the London Review of Books and The New Yorker. He grew up in Hong Kong because his father worked at a bank there, which means he absorbed the language of finance the way most kids absorb the language of cartoons. By the time the 2008 crisis hit, he was one of the very few writers on earth who could speak both finance and English fluently.

He sat down and wrote a book called I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

In the UK it was published under the title Whoops! It came out in 2010. 272 pages. The reviews from financial journalists were almost embarrassed in their praise, because Lanchester had done in plain English what most of them had failed to do in years of professional coverage. He had actually explained what happened.

Here is the version a middle schooler can understand.

Step one. A bank gives a home loan to a person who clearly cannot pay it back. No real job. No savings. No way to make the monthly payments. The industry had a nickname for these loans. They called them NINJA loans. No Income. No Job. No Assets. The bank knew the person could not pay. The bank did not care.

Why did the bank not care?

Because the bank was not going to keep the loan.

Step two. The bank takes thousands of these loans, puts them in one giant pile, and sells the entire pile to a Wall Street firm. The Wall Street firm now owns the right to collect all those monthly payments. The original bank has been paid. Whether the homeowners actually pay or not is now someone else's problem.

Step three. The Wall Street firm takes the giant pile of loans and chops it into slices. They call the slices tranches. The top slice is supposed to be the safest because it gets paid first. The bottom slice is supposed to be the riskiest because it gets paid last. They give each slice a credit rating. The top slice gets stamped AAA, which is the highest rating you can get on earth. It is the rating used for the bonds of the United States government.

A pile of loans to people with no income and no job has just produced an investment product rated as safe as the United States government.

Step four is where the trick gets worse.

The bottom slices, the ones full of the riskiest loans, are hard to sell. Nobody wants junk. So the Wall Street firm takes the bottom slices from a hundred different piles, mixes them together into a new pile, and chops that new pile into new slices. And the top slice of this new pile, made entirely from the junk of the old piles, also gets stamped AAA.

This new product has a name. It is called a Collateralized Debt Obligation, or CDO.

A 12-year-old can see what is wrong here. You cannot take a hundred bags of garbage, dump them into one big bag, and then declare that the top of the big bag is now gold. The garbage is still garbage. The math does not change it.

But the people who ran the ratings agencies were not 12-year-olds. They were adults with finance degrees. And they stamped this stuff AAA over and over again because the Wall Street firms were paying them to do the stamping. The ratings agencies had become a paid service. The people they were rating were also the people writing their checks.

Step five. The Wall Street firms sell these AAA-rated CDOs to pension funds, foreign governments, insurance companies, and retirement accounts all over the world. Everyone buys them because the rating says they are safe.

Step six is the final trick.

Someone invents a product called a Credit Default Swap. It is insurance against a CDO going bad. The clever part, the part that Lanchester explains so well, is that you do not have to actually own the CDO to buy insurance on it. You can buy insurance on a CDO that belongs to someone else. You can buy insurance on a CDO ten times over. A hundred times over. There is no limit.

This is the equivalent of taking out fire insurance on your neighbor's house. And then on a thousand strangers' houses. And then betting against the entire neighborhood.

The smart people in the industry realized the CDOs were garbage. So they started buying credit default swaps against them. Not to protect themselves. To bet on the collapse.

Step seven was the part nobody planned for.

Housing prices stopped going up. The NINJA borrowers, who had been refinancing every year by using the rising value of their houses as collateral, suddenly could not refinance. They started missing payments. The bottom tranches of the CDOs started failing. Then the middle. Then the AAA tranches that had been declared safer than government bonds turned out to be made of the same garbage as the rest.

Then the insurance bills came due.

The biggest insurer in the world, AIG, had written hundreds of billions of dollars in credit default swaps on these CDOs. They did not have the money to pay. If AIG collapsed, every major bank on earth that had bought insurance from them would also collapse, because their "safe" CDOs would suddenly have no insurance. The American taxpayer ended up writing AIG a check for 182 billion dollars to keep the entire global financial system from falling apart.

The total damage of the crisis, by every honest estimate, runs into the trillions of dollars. Millions of people lost their homes. Millions lost their jobs. Almost nobody on Wall Street went to jail.

Here is the part Lanchester drives home in the final chapters, and the part you should not forget.

The fraud was not hidden in the math. The fraud was hidden in the complexity. Each individual step looked legitimate. Each individual product had a name, a rating, a paper trail. The reason nobody stopped it was that no single regulator, no single executive, no single auditor was forced to look at the entire chain from end to end. The garbage at the start and the AAA stamp at the end were separated by so many layers of paperwork that everyone could honestly say their specific layer looked fine.

Lanchester's central argument is the one that should haunt every person reading this in 2026.

Complexity is the disguise. Anytime a financial product is so complicated that the person selling it cannot explain it in 60 seconds, the complexity itself is the warning sign. The complexity is not protecting the customer. The complexity is hiding the fact that the customer is the product.

The 2008 crisis was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of plain language.

Almost every product on the market today that is being sold to retail investors, from leveraged ETFs to certain crypto derivatives to private credit funds, has the same structural pattern. Layered. Hard to explain. Stamped with an authoritative rating. And the people selling it can never quite tell you what is inside.

Which brings me to the question.

The next 2008 is already being built somewhere in the financial system right now.

Which industry, or which product, do you think is hiding the same trick under the same kind of complexity right now in 2026, and what makes you suspicious of it?

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

A Reformational response to Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas." Thanks to @dooyeweerdian for the infographic, made with AI assistance.

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

CFP! Scan the QR Code for more details

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

#NewProfilePic

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Even though I knew his death was coming, as he told us it would, I still can’t believe he has died.

Rest in peace, good and great man, rest in peace.

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

"Google emailed my youngest child today to tell him he is almost 13 and eligible to remove parental controls... A trillion dollar corporation is directly contacting every child to tell them they are old enough to “graduate” from parental supervision."

https://t.co/KfIbmYRS2m

[Romel Bagares @dooyeweerdian]

Hans Kelsen (left ) and Herman Dooyeweerd (right) talking over coffee in heaven. "I wish my essay on logic and law that I contributed to your festschrift is better known," K tells D. "I didn't quite get your modal theory but I know it says something very impt." #HalloweenJurists

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

Today is Herman Dooyeweerd's 130th birthday. Here's another online bibliography launched also today, to mark the occasion-- https://t.co/253YlXy0aP

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

An important online resource just dropped

[steve bishop @stevebishopuk]

One of the most exciting things to happen this year is: https://t.co/zA0QhWzFsU extensive (searchable) bibliography of Herman Dooyeweerd and links to his innumerable online works —thanks to the hard work of
@bintsarovskyi
#neocalvinism #Dooyeweerd #reformationalphilosophy

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

Please follow @RRBagares, his original account was permanently suspended for no reason. He suspects it's part of a big purge on X yesterday that targeted accounts highlighting the UK Cass Review Final Report on the dangers of the medicalization of gender. https://t.co/H6864ZeO2H

[John Shelton @jayshelt]

BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision (Murthy v. Missouri), Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rules that it's ok to keep referring to this website as "Twitter."

[Christina Buttons @buttonslives]

I’ve been reporting on the political corruption of advocates for transitioning minors, absence of robust scientific evidence, for over 2 years now! Now @nytimes readers are finally learning that pediatric sex-trait modification has always been guided by activism, not science.

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

@Bernard_Lane @dooyeweerdian has been suspended by X for highlighting to Filipinos the dangers of medicalization of minors as reported in the Cass Final Review Report

[ReformationalPhilosophy2026 @ReformationalP]

@dooyeweerdian has been permanently suspended from X, along with hundreds of accounts around the world that have highlighted the Cass Review Final Report's warnings on "gender affirming" medicalization of minors. Without any explanation @elonmusk

[steve bishop @stevebishopuk]

Concept map of Introduction to Herman Bavinck’s Pedagogical Principles #Bavinck

[steve bishop @stevebishopuk]

Neo-Calvinism: Contours and Theses. A Chart comparing Goheen and Bartholomew's "Contours" with @corycbrock and @GraySutanto 's "Theses" on neo-Calvinism https://t.co/6H2fe5JFTX
#neocalvinism