The Basics of Philosophy (2026)

Dr. John Jorissen, a tightly-wound philosophy instructor, finds himself boxed in at Ridgemont College—a tiny Midwestern liberal arts campus where he drones through freshman lectures and chips away at a manuscript on the great Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza. But his carefully ordered life shatters when a ghost from his past walks back into town: the very person he once wronged, a sin he has kept locked away for years. As that buried secret claws to the surface, Jorissen spirals into a storm of remorse, longing, and a brutal confrontation with his own soul, forcing him to question everything he teaches—and everything he believes about redemption.