You’ve Deconstructed Christianity.
Now What Are You Building?
Ashes is a facilitated, book-based discussion group for Christian deconstruction veterans who are done with surface-level conversations and ready to move beyond critique into a coherent way of living.
This is about meaning after belief, ethics without dogma, identity after certainty and how power, language, trauma and reconstruction shape what comes next.
Not therapy. Not debate. Not beginner explanations.
This is a room of people who’ve already burned the old map and are building better ones.
Most People Get Stuck at Critique
Most people who deconstruct Christianity never leave critique.
They lose the old story…and never build a new one.
Ashes exists to move you from critique to construction without replacing one dogma with another.
Through sustained engagement with challenging books and facilitated dialogue, members develop a clear personal value framework, what they align with, what they reject, and use it to make decisions about work, relationships, ethics, and direction.
What We Explore
In Ashes, we wrestle seriously with questions like:
How do you decide what matters after authority collapses?
What grounds ethics without divine command?
How do power, language, and identity shape belief?
What does a coherent life philosophy look like post-faith?
How do you live forward without certainty?
This Group Is For You If…
✅ You’ve already deconstructed Christianity
✅ You want rigorous, thoughtful engagement with ideas, books, and lived experience
✅ You miss intelligent conversation without dogma
✅ You value facilitation over chaos
✅ You want peers who can keep up
This Is Not a Support Group
Ashes is:
Facilitated, not free-for-all
Dialogical, not lecture-based
Intellectually demanding, not emotionally performative
If you’re looking to vent, process early-stage grief, or rehash why Christianity is broken, this won’t be a good fit.
Why a Book Club?
Most post-Christian spaces rely on personal experience alone.
That usually leads to circular conversations and recycled conclusions.
Ashes is structured around carefully chosen books because they:
Introduce ideas bigger than any one person’s story
Give us something concrete to wrestle with
Force us to slow down, think and articulate
Turn vague feelings into examinable positions
The book isn’t the point.
The thinking it enables is.
We don’t read “deconstruction 101” books.
We read works that challenge how we think about meaning, ethics, power, identity, language and life after certainty.
Reading is expected but perfection isn’t.
Thoughtful engagement matters more than completion.
Why Facilitation Matters
Most deconstruction spaces fail because they confuse sharing with progress.
Ashes is intentionally facilitated to keep conversations:
Focused instead of circular
Curious instead of cynical
Generative instead of performative
My role isn’t to tell you what to believe.
It’s to help the group do the harder work of turning insight into orientation.
With over 7 years of experience facilitating groups like this, I consistently see participants move from strangers, to trusted peers, to genuine community often continuing relationships well beyond the group itself.
Community isn’t forced here.
It emerges through shared thinking and sustained engagement.
The Outcome
After participating in Ashes, members leave with:
Greater clarity about what they align with
Stronger boundaries around what they reject
A clearer sense of what they’re building now
And they use that framework to make real decisions about how they live.
The Structure
Weekly meetings: Mondays at 5:45 PM CST
Book-based discussions (books not included)
Ongoing membership in a high-signal intellectual space
Membership Details
$50 every 4 weeks
Ashes is a subscription-based membership, billed automatically every four weeks until canceled.
Cancel anytime
No cancellation fees
Questions or billing adjustments: contact@mikemaeshiro.com
Join Ashes
If you’re done rehashing why Christianity failed and you’re ready to think seriously about what comes next, this is your room.
