Come for the Content, Stay for the Community

Alec Gewirtz

Nearness exists to explore questions about the future of religion and spirituality for people who don’t identify as religious but still carry spiritual longings, intuitions, and questions. In the United States alone, religious decline has slowed, but it hasn’t reversed. The larger story remains that there is a growing number of people who are no longer at home in traditional religious institutions, and yet they haven’t stopped caring about meaning, purpose, transcendence, or community.

From the beginning, Nearness has been deeply invested in community-building around these spiritual longings. Since we launched in 2022, we’ve created small, online groups that foster deep connection for people who feel isolated in their identities, lack local structures of belonging, or are navigating spiritual questions outside inherited religious traditions. We weren’t trying to produce content or chase attention; we were focused on creating spaces where spiritually curious people, especially those who didn’t fit neatly into existing religious boxes, could actually show up as themselves.

But community is only one part of what interests me about the future of religion and spirituality.

There are also big questions— theological, myth-making, narrative-shaping questions—that don’t always have a place to land. Questions that are too spiritual for many mainstream venues and too unorthodox for traditional religious settings. Questions that require patience, creativity, seriousness, and imagination.

For Nearness to step more fully into its mission, we wanted to create a venue for that kind of reflection. A place where spiritual exploration outside formal religion could be treated with intellectual and artistic seriousness. That’s where Kismet comes in.

I see the magazine as deeply continuous with what Nearness has always been doing.Content, when done well, creates a doorway. It reaches people we might never meet through a small group sign-up or a personal invitation. Essays, poems, stories, and reflections travel quickly. They build a new audience. The hope is that content becomes an invitation into deeper conversation, deeper reflection, and eventually, deeper community. In that sense, Kismet isn’t a departure from Nearness’s work; it’s an expansion of it. It’s another way of finding people who are already asking the questions, already feeling the ache, already looking for language and companions.

This matters because the spiritual landscape right now is fragmented. There’s no shortage of self-help writing for the “spiritual but not religious,” but too little work with real theological rigor and artistic ambition. At the same time, people who are thinking deeply about spirituality outside traditional religion are scattered across Substacks, small magazines, podcasts, and isolated projects.

Nearness exists to help gather those threads.

People may come to Nearness for the content like an essay, a podcast episode, a poem, a magazine issue. But content, on its own, is never enough. What really gets people invested is the sense that they’re not alone. That there are others willing to sit with uncertainty, to explore meaning together, to build something slowly and thoughtfully.

My Nearness co-founder, Casper ter Kuile, taught me: people come for the content, but they stay for the community.

The go-to example was CrossFit. People walk in because they want to get stronger, to work out, to improve themselves. This, in a sense, is the “content.” But what keeps them coming back is the tight-knit community that forms over time. The shared struggle, relationships, and sense of belonging.

As Nearness begins developing content, we’ll always stay focused on community.