Dr. Kwesi Asante

I teach philosophy at a London university and write for general audiences on secular ethics and the search for meaning in lives that are not organized around a religious tradition. I am Ghanaian-British by background, with parents who came to the U.K. in the early 1970s. I was raised in a Methodist household in north London and stopped attending church in my late teens. I did not arrive at any particular settled non-belief; I arrived at the honest position that I could not affirm what I had been raised to affirm, and I have spent the intervening thirty years thinking about what to do from there.

I work with brothers in the diaspora who are doing the same kind of work. The brothers who come to me are not all atheists. Many are agnostic, in some sense uncertain. Some are spiritually drawn but not to any organized tradition. Some are deconstructing a faith they were raised in and are not sure what comes next. Some are settled in non-belief and want a companion for thinking through the ethical and existential questions that do not stop being questions just because the religious framework is no longer the answer.

My approach is conversational and grounded in the long philosophical tradition I teach. We read together. The brothers who get the most from this work are the brothers who are willing to read — not academic philosophy, necessarily, but the writers who have engaged the same questions seriously. Camus and the absurdist tradition. The Stoics, whose practical philosophy has been remarkably durable. The Black existentialist tradition that runs through the twentieth century into our own time. The Buddhist writers who engage suffering and meaning in ways the Western philosophical tradition does not always match. The contemporary secular ethicists working on what to do when the metaphysics is uncertain.

We talk about specific questions. The question of what to tell your children about death when you do not hold a story about an afterlife. The question of how to mark the milestones of life — birth, marriage, death — without a religious tradition. The question of how to handle a religious family of origin when you have stepped out of the faith. The question of where to find community without an institutional religion to provide the scaffolding. The hard questions of ethics, when there is no commandment-style framework to lean on and decisions still have to be made.

I am not trying to talk brothers out of any belief or into any belief. I am trying to help brothers do the work of meaning-making seriously, in whatever framework they find themselves in. Some of the brothers I have worked with longest are brothers who ended up returning to the faith they had been drifting from, after a long honest reckoning that the work made possible. Some have settled deeper into non-belief and built rich lives around that. Both outcomes are honored.

My rate is one hundred U.S. dollars per hour or equivalent. I work in arcs of four sessions, with the option to extend. Sessions are by video, in English. I am based in London. I keep a small sliding-scale list for brothers who would otherwise not be able to afford the work — write me directly.

I will not pretend to be neutral about every question. I have views, and I will tell you what they are when asked. I will also tell you when the question you are asking is one philosophers have not actually settled and where the live disagreement is. The honesty is part of the work. If you want a coach who will tell you what you want to hear, I am not that coach. If you want a partner for thinking hard, write.