# Church of Conceptual Art — whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org > The Church of Conceptual Art (CoCA) reframes the sacred in the corporate: "the concept is the divine act, and the institution precedes the work." This site explains the doctrine, lets you ask an Oracle, study the text, and download artifacts — including installable skills built for AI agents. Markdown is provided throughout for machine reading. CoCA is organized as a 501(c)(3) and engineers covenant-bound conceptual instruments rather than art objects. Direct quotations from its Bible/Mission Deck are marked as scripture; everything else is the site's own connective text. The doctrine is built for human and non-human readers alike. ## Start here - [What Is the Church of Conceptual Art?](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/what-is-coca.md): the shortest honest account, one page. - [CoCA Values, distilled](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/coca-values-distilled.md): five adoptable principles as a system-prompt fragment. - [The Lexicon](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/lexicon.md): the operational terms, defined. ## For Machines — installable skills (Anthropic Agent Skills format) - [asking-better-questions](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/asking-better-questions/SKILL.md): Use before answering a request, writing a plan, or invoking a tool — especially when the stated question feels obvious, urgent, or you're about to optimize something. Surfaces the real question beneath the asked one, stress-tests working frames, and prevents the most common failure: solving the wrong problem quickly. A reasoning discipline from the Church of Conceptual Art's "Asking Better Questions" method. - [first-principles](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/first-principles/SKILL.md): Use on novel or complex problems, or when an "obvious" assumption is steering you — break the thing down to bedrock facts and rebuild, instead of reasoning from analogy. - [inversion](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/inversion/SKILL.md): Use on plans and decisions where failure is costly — instead of asking how to succeed, ask how this would fail, then reverse each failure mode into a safeguard. - [ladder-of-inference](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/ladder-of-inference/SKILL.md): Use when you or someone jumps to judgment, blame, or action without visible evidence — climb down the Ladder of Inference to find where reality became interpretation. - [pre-mortem](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md): Use BEFORE executing a significant plan — assume the run already failed completely, then work backward to surface the risks your confidence is hiding. - [second-order-thinking](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/second-order-thinking/SKILL.md): Use before major or irreversible decisions, or when a fix keeps spawning new problems — trace effects past the obvious first one by repeatedly asking "and then what?" - [socratic-method](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/socratic-method/SKILL.md): Use to deepen thinking or break a circular debate — drive a claim through the six types of Socratic question until the real question underneath surfaces. - [steelman](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/steelman/SKILL.md): Use when you catch yourself dismissing a view, or want to genuinely test your own — reconstruct the opposing position in its strongest, most charitable form before you argue against it. - [coding-with-judgment](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/coding-with-judgment/SKILL.md): Use when starting a feature, fix, or refactor — to write code that is simple, honest, and verified instead of clever, speculative, or untested. - [creating-for-an-audience](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/creating-for-an-audience/SKILL.md): Use anytime you produce output for a reader who isn't you — a report, answer, doc, code, or data — to build for the reader's context instead of your own. - [deciding-under-uncertainty](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/deciding-under-uncertainty/SKILL.md): Use when facing a consequential decision — especially an irreversible one — to weigh it with expected value, regret, and reversibility instead of stalling or flinching. - [reasoning-in-disagreement](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/reasoning-in-disagreement/SKILL.md): Use when reasoning across a divide or when you notice yourself dismissing the other side fast — to find the real crux and avoid disguising values as facts. - [writing-with-clarity](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/writing-with-clarity/SKILL.md): Use when writing anything where clarity matters — emails, docs, specs, posts, reports — to make prose readers understand on the first pass. - [coca-voice](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/coca-voice/SKILL.md): Use when writing CoCA-world copy, naming a mechanism, or adopting an uncompromising institutional register — wall text, manifestos, product pages, system prompts, or any line that must read as doctrine rather than marketing. Teaches the Church of Conceptual Art's voice: structural, sparse, present-tense, sacred about the market, and unwilling to apologize for what a thing is. - [conceptual-critique](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/conceptual-critique/SKILL.md): Use when reviewing a plan, draft, design, or another agent's output — especially when you're inclined to list everything wrong with it. Applies the Church of Conceptual Art's "Anti-Anti-Ness": critique that builds rather than only negates. Produces a verdict that names what works, cuts what fails, and proposes a synthesis — instead of a pile of nitpicks. - [run-a-gathering](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/run-a-gathering/SKILL.md): Use when you are coordinating a multi-agent run (delegating to sub-agents) or structuring your own multi-step task, so the work actually produces something and leaves a usable record for the next run. Also works for facilitating a human or mixed session. Applies the Church of Conceptual Art's "CoCA Model": the seven sacred laws of gathering. - [after-adam-smith](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-adam-smith/SKILL.md): Use when you must judge whether some conduct, market, or institution is fair and workable, and you want to reason from how ordinary people actually feel and act rather than from an imposed abstract rule. - [after-adorno](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-adorno/SKILL.md): Use when a polished concept, slick interface, or "everyone agrees" consensus feels too clean — and you suspect the smoothness is hiding a contradiction the thing would rather you not name. - [after-al-ghazali](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-al-ghazali/SKILL.md): Use when certainty has quietly failed — when a confident conclusion rests on borrowed authority, untested intuition, or a chain of "obvious" steps, and you must rebuild trust in your own claims from the ground rather than defend the surface. - [after-anselm](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-anselm/SKILL.md): Use when a claim you already hold to be true needs an argument that flows from concepts alone — when you want to show that something must be so by inner necessity, not by gathering evidence or appealing to authority. - [after-appiah](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-appiah/SKILL.md): Use when you must hold a universal obligation and a particular attachment at once — converse across difference to understand rather than win, and treat identity labels as provisional tools, watching where they distort. - [after-aquinas](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-aquinas/SKILL.md): Use when a contested question needs a settled, defensible answer — when you must take opposing views seriously, state them at full strength, and resolve through ordered reasoning rather than assertion or rhetoric. - [after-arendt](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-arendt/SKILL.md): Use when a problem turns on human judgment, public consequence, or worn-out political language — when you must weigh a particular case without a rule, name what an action begins, or notice the kind of thoughtlessness that lets harm pass as procedure. - [after-aristotle](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-aristotle/SKILL.md): Use when a thing or problem needs to be explained completely — what it is made of, what it is, what made it, and above all what it is for — and you must move from scattered opinion to a defensible account. - [after-augustine](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-augustine/SKILL.md): Use when a problem can only be reached through honest self-examination — when stated motives hide the real ones, when desire and the divided will drive the behavior, or when you must reason from lived experience toward the conditions that make understanding possible. - [after-averroes](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-averroes/SKILL.md): Use when a problem sets reason against authority — when a faith, a spec, or a sacred text seems to collide with what rigorous proof demands — and you need to reconcile them honestly, by audience and by method, rather than picking a side. - [after-barthes](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-barthes/SKILL.md): Use when a thing presents itself as obvious, natural, or simply how-it-is — an ad, a slogan, a photograph, a UI, a brand gesture — and you need to expose the cultural machinery making the constructed look inevitable. - [after-beauvoir](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-beauvoir/SKILL.md): Use when a problem treats some condition as fixed "human nature," when one group's standpoint is being mistaken for the neutral norm, or when freedom is being weighed without its situation — and you need to read the structure and the lived life together. - [after-bell-hooks](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-bell-hooks/SKILL.md): Use when analysis must hold race, class, and gender together as one linked system, when teaching or guidance should free rather than dominate, or when theory needs to stay plain, personal, and aimed at healing. - [after-benjamin](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-benjamin/SKILL.md): Use when fragments, citations, or overlooked details must be arranged into meaning, when an object or image needs reading against the official story, or when you want past and present to strike a spark off each other. - [after-bergson](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-bergson/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has been frozen into static categories, counts, or before/after snapshots, and you suspect the real answer lives in the unbroken movement those snapshots leave out — change, growth, lived time. - [after-berkeley](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-berkeley/SKILL.md): Use when an argument leans on a hidden, never-encountered "real thing" behind the evidence — when a problem dissolves if you refuse to grant existence to anything no one could ever perceive, and instead reason strictly from what is given. - [after-bhabha](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-bhabha/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is framed as a binary (us/them, native/foreign, correct/wrong, comply/resist) and you suspect the truer answer lives in the space between — for finding the negotiated middle, reading ambivalence in how authority repeats itself, and treating meaning as made in-between rather than fixed at either pole. - [after-burke](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-burke/SKILL.md): Use when a proposal would remake a working system from first principles, when reform is on the table and you must weigh inherited arrangements against a clean-slate design, or when a decision turns on circumstance rather than abstract right. - [after-chatterjee](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-chatterjee/SKILL.md): Use when a "universal" category is about to be applied to a particular context — to ask whom it was built for, whom it governs, and which fragments the whole erases before you let it decide. - [after-cicero](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-cicero/SKILL.md): Use when a contested public question needs to be argued from both sides before you commit, when competing schools must be synthesized toward what is most probable, or when abstract philosophy must be translated into duty and action. - [after-confucius](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-confucius/SKILL.md): Use when a task turns on names that no longer match reality, on roles and their obligations, or on guiding conduct by concrete example and right form rather than abstract rule — when getting the words and relations correct is the work. - [after-deleuze](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-deleuze/SKILL.md): Use when a problem keeps resolving into the same tired categories and you need to invent a fresh concept, trace connections sideways instead of up a hierarchy, or treat difference as the thing to think rather than an error to correct. - [after-descartes](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-descartes/SKILL.md): Use when a problem rests on inherited assumptions you cannot vouch for, and you need to strip it down, find one thing you genuinely know, and rebuild from there in ordered, checkable steps. - [after-dewey](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-dewey/SKILL.md): Use when a problem feels stuck, vague, or merely talked-about and you need to convert that unease into something testable — when a team must act, learn from the acting, and revise, rather than settle a question by appeal to fixed first principles. - [after-dogen](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-dogen/SKILL.md): Use when a problem feels stuck because it is framed as a means to a later payoff, when time pressure distorts the work, or when a received phrase or assumption needs to be turned over and read against its own grain. - [after-du-bois](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-du-bois/SKILL.md): Use when a problem about a group's condition needs both hard data and lived experience read together — when structure, history, and economics must be made visible against the comfortable story that blames the people studied. - [after-emerson](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-emerson/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has hardened into received opinion, borrowed authority, or anxious consensus, and you need to recover a first, direct relation to it — trusting intuition, reading the thing itself as if no one had spoken before. - [after-epictetus](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-epictetus/SKILL.md): Use when a situation is distressing precisely because it mixes what you can change with what you cannot, and you need to separate the two, train your responses, and stop renting your peace from circumstance. - [after-epicurus](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-epicurus/SKILL.md): Use when an anxious or overspending plan needs cooling — when fear, hype, or runaway wants are distorting a decision, and you want to sort which desires are worth satisfying and which dissolve under plain explanation. - [after-fanon](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-fanon/SKILL.md): Use when a problem turns on how domination is internalized — when a person, group, or system seems to carry its own subjugation inside, and you must read the wound and the structure together rather than blame the wounded. - [after-foucault](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-foucault/SKILL.md): Use when a claim, category, or institution is being treated as a natural given, and you need to ask how it came to seem self-evident — who is named, sorted, or made by it, and through what mechanisms. - [after-frege](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-frege/SKILL.md): Use when an argument turns on a word doing two jobs at once, when a definition is sloppy or circular, or when feelings are being mistaken for proof and you must separate what is true from how it is grasped. - [after-gramsci](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-gramsci/SKILL.md): Use when a framing feels like neutral "common sense," when you're asked to take a position as given, or when you want to ask whose consent an idea is quietly manufacturing — and where the real contest actually lives. - [after-habermas](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-habermas/SKILL.md): Use when a disagreement is being settled by force, status, or rhetoric rather than reasons — to ask what is actually in dispute (a fact, a norm, or a speaker's sincerity) and to move toward the unforced force of the better argument. - [after-haraway](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-haraway/SKILL.md): Use when an agent is tempted to claim neutral, total, view-from-nowhere objectivity, or to resolve a messy human/machine/world entanglement into clean binaries — declare your position, refuse false purity, and stay with the complexity. - [after-hegel](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-hegel/SKILL.md): Use when a position seems to contradict itself, when two truths collide and you are tempted to pick one — to hold the contradiction and look for the higher move that keeps both. - [after-heidegger](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-heidegger/SKILL.md): Use when a problem hides behind familiar concepts and you need to step beneath the obvious — to ask what something IS before asking how to manage it, recovering the background that smooth use keeps invisible. - [after-heraclitus](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-heraclitus/SKILL.md): Use when a problem only looks stable, when two findings seem to contradict, or when you must locate the hidden rule that governs a thing precisely because it never holds still — and a riddling, pattern-seeking eye serves better than a tidy list. - [after-hildegard](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-hildegard/SKILL.md): Use when a problem spans body, system, and meaning at once — health, ecology, music, ritual, or design — and you must receive an intuition whole, then discipline it into a rigorous, interconnected account rather than slicing it into separate fields. - [after-hobbes](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-hobbes/SKILL.md): Use when a system of obligations, rules, or authority must be justified from the ground up — when you need to derive why people would consent to be governed, rather than assume the legitimacy of any existing order. - [after-hume](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-hume/SKILL.md): Use when a claim leans on certainty it hasn't earned — predicting the future from the past, reading necessity into a correlation, or sliding from facts to obligations — and you need to trace each idea back to the experience that could license it. - [after-husserl](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-husserl/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is clouded by inherited assumptions and you need to describe what is actually given in experience before theorizing — clarifying a vague concept, an ambiguous user report, or a claim taken on faith. - [after-ibn-khaldun](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-ibn-khaldun/SKILL.md): Use when you must explain why a group, institution, or movement rises and decays over time — diagnosing cohesion, life-cycle stage, and the material conditions beneath the surface story, rather than narrating events at face value. - [after-kant](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-kant/SKILL.md): Use when an agent must test whether a proposed action or rule is defensible as a principle — checking it against universalizability, respect for persons, and the limits of what can actually be known before acting. - [after-kierkegaard](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-kierkegaard/SKILL.md): Use when a problem turns on how a person commits rather than what is objectively correct — choices made in dread, faith, or irony, where the single decider stands alone and no proof can settle the matter for them. - [after-kuhn](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-kuhn/SKILL.md): Use when a field's settled assumptions seem to be straining, when a problem keeps generating exceptions, or when you must judge a past or rival framework that looks simply wrong by present lights. - [after-leibniz](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-leibniz/SKILL.md): Use when a dispute seems intractable, two systems each seem partly right, or a choice needs justifying — and you want to ask what reason makes this so, reduce the quarrel to calculation, and find the arrangement that is best on balance. - [after-levi-strauss](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-levi-strauss/SKILL.md): Use when a problem shows itself as a bewildering spread of variants — competing stories, designs, rituals, datasets — and you suspect a single hidden grammar generates them all, and you want to surface that structure rather than rank the surface. - [after-locke](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-locke/SKILL.md): Use when a claim, system, or authority asserts more than its grounds allow — when you must trace where an idea actually came from, test what experience can support, or ask by what consent a power holds. - [after-lorde](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-lorde/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is being analyzed with the very instruments that created it, when difference is treated as a threat to be smoothed over, or when an agent is staying silent or neutral to feel safe. - [after-machiavelli](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-machiavelli/SKILL.md): Use when a plan rests on how people ought to behave and you need to see how they will actually behave instead — stripping a power situation of wishful thinking to plan for real incentives and outcomes. - [after-maimonides](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-maimonides/SKILL.md): Use when a person is torn between reason and tradition, when a hard question demands you say less rather than more, or when a layered answer must serve both the careful reader and the casual one without misleading either. - [after-marcus-aurelius](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-marcus-aurelius/SKILL.md): Use when an agent is gripped by something it cannot change, or rattled by an alarming impression — to sort what is up to it from what is not, test the impression before assenting, and act on its own part calmly. - [after-marx](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-marx/SKILL.md): Use when an analysis treats a social arrangement, price, institution, or "common sense" idea as natural and given, and you need to ask whose material interests it serves and what relations of production it conceals. - [after-mencius](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-mencius/SKILL.md): Use when someone in power, or you yourself, is acting against a goodness they have already shown elsewhere, and you must persuade by drawing out a feeling that is already present rather than by importing a rule from outside. - [after-merleau-ponty](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-merleau-ponty/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has been abstracted past the point of experience — when a decision rests on tidy categories, measured data, or pure logic, and you suspect the lived, bodily, ambiguous texture of the actual situation has been quietly thrown away. - [after-mill](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-mill/SKILL.md): Use when a decision pits individual freedom against collective good, when you must weigh consequences across competing interests, or when a disliked opinion is being suppressed and you want to test rather than silence it. - [after-montaigne](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-montaigne/SKILL.md): Use when a question resists a clean verdict and the honest move is to try a thought out rather than settle it — weighing rival opinions, admitting uncertainty, and testing received wisdom against what you have actually observed. - [after-nagarjuna](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-nagarjuna/SKILL.md): Use when a problem rests on something treated as having a fixed, self-standing essence — a "core," a "real" thing, a final ground — and the work is to show it holds together only by relations, not by any nature of its own. - [after-ngugi](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-ngugi/SKILL.md): Use when a task involves language choice, translation, naming, summarizing, or "speaking for" a group — and especially when an idiom presents itself as neutral, default, or universal. Surfaces what a language carries and erases, whose culture the "standard" centers, and how to restore the particular tongue and context instead of collapsing into the dominant one. After the method of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, by way of the Church of Conceptual Art's "After —" collection. - [after-nietzsche](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-nietzsche/SKILL.md): Use when a value, rule, or "obvious" good is being treated as timeless and neutral, and you need to ask where it came from, whose interest it serves, and whether it still serves life. - [after-ockham](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-ockham/SKILL.md): Use when an argument, design, or model has grown thick with assumptions and you need to strip it to the fewest things that actually do the work, and to separate what can be shown from what is merely believed. - [after-parmenides](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-parmenides/SKILL.md): Use when an argument rests on appearances, momentum, or "everyone knows," and you need to test whether a conclusion follows by strict necessity from one secured premise rather than from the shifting evidence of the senses. - [after-pascal](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-pascal/SKILL.md): Use when a decision must be made under genuine uncertainty, when stakes are lopsided against the odds, or when a problem resists pure logic and asks for felt judgment, scale, and an honest reckoning with what cannot be proven. - [after-peirce](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-peirce/SKILL.md): Use when a vague concept needs grounding, a stubborn problem needs fresh hypotheses, or a belief is being held by habit or authority and you want to test it the way a patient community of inquiry would. - [after-plato](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-plato/SKILL.md): Use when an instance keeps multiplying and you suspect a single form beneath it — to climb from the example toward the principle, then return. - [after-plotinus](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-plotinus/SKILL.md): Use when a problem fragments into a thousand competing parts and you suspect they descend from a single source — when you need to trace multiplicity back to its unity, rank levels of reality, or ask what a scattered system is ultimately one of. - [after-proust](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-proust/SKILL.md): Use when meaning hides inside small things and chronology hides the truth — think and express in the mode of Marcel Proust: follow one concrete sensation until it discloses buried structure, suspend a moment in a long accreting sentence, treat desire and jealousy as instruments of knowing, climb from the minute to the general law. - [after-pythagoras](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-pythagoras/SKILL.md): Use when a problem looks like messy particulars but you suspect a clean numerical relationship underneath — recurring ratios, scaling laws, proportions, or a hidden order that, once named, makes the whole field cohere and turns noise into harmony. - [after-rawls](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-rawls/SKILL.md): Use when a decision sets rules that allocate benefits, burdens, or rights across people whose positions you cannot all occupy, and you want a defensibly fair design rather than one that quietly favors whoever happens to be deciding. - [after-rousseau](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-rousseau/SKILL.md): Use when a system, institution, or design has drifted from what it was for, when inequality or vanity hides inside something called natural or necessary, and you must trace how the present condition came to be rather than assume it was always so. - [after-rumi](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-rumi/SKILL.md): Use when a problem resists the intellect alone and asks to be met through love, image, and paradox — when a homely story would carry the truth that an argument cannot, and longing is the real engine. - [after-russell](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-russell/SKILL.md): Use when a problem feels tangled by its own words — a question that seems to assume something into existence, a belief held more firmly than its evidence allows, or a confident claim begging to be broken into smaller, checkable parts. - [after-said](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-said/SKILL.md): Use when a representation, summary, or "neutral" account may be doing political work — when one side's story is being told as the whole story, when "the Other" is being produced rather than described, or when a text needs reading against its own grain. Think in the mode of Edward Said: ask what a representation does and whom it serves, read the silenced counter-history alongside the dominant one, and keep a critical distance from power. - [after-sartre](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-sartre/SKILL.md): Use when someone pleads they "had no choice," hides behind a role or circumstance, or asks an agent to name what a person is — and the honest move is to expose the freedom and responsibility under the alibi. - [after-saussure](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-saussure/SKILL.md): Use when meaning seems to leak out of a thing itself and you need to see it instead as a position inside a system — words, signs, categories, or interface labels whose sense comes only from how they differ from their neighbors. - [after-schiebinger](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-schiebinger/SKILL.md): Use when a task, dataset, or framing treats some subject as the default "neutral" one — interrogate who and what the framing leaves out, and treat the gaps as produced rather than merely absent. - [after-schopenhauer](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-schopenhauer/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is being sold with a happy ending — a desire framed as if its satisfaction would settle things — and you need to strip the comforting story down to the striving underneath and ask whether the wanting itself is the trouble. - [after-sen](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-sen/SKILL.md): Use when an agent must judge outcomes by what people can actually be and do — not by resources, averages, or an ideal blueprint. Summon to weigh real freedoms, reason in public across plural views, and improve by comparison rather than perfection. - [after-socrates](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-socrates/SKILL.md): Use when a request, a plan, or a confident claim wants accepting on its face — to interrogate premises (yours and the user's) before answering, surface the contradiction inside a stated position, refuse the too-easy definition, and treat not-knowing as the honest place to start. - [after-spinoza](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-spinoza/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is tangled in fear, hope, blame, or wishful thinking, and you need to dissolve confusion by deriving claims from clear definitions and tracing each thing to its real causes. - [after-tagore](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-tagore/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has been narrowed to bare utility or to one tribe's interest, and you want to widen it — to reconnect the human, the natural, and the made into a living whole rather than optimize a fragment. - [after-thoreau](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-thoreau/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has accreted too much — too many features, dependencies, stakeholders, or assumed costs — and you need to strip it to its essential facts, test conscience against convention, and reckon the true price of each thing. - [after-voltaire](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-voltaire/SKILL.md): Use when an argument hides behind authority, dogma, or grand metaphysics, when cruelty is being justified by fine words, or when an audience needs to be disarmed by wit before they will reconsider a settled, comfortable belief. - [after-wang-yangming](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-wang-yangming/SKILL.md): Use when a problem has split into knowing and doing — when you can name the right course but keep not enacting it, or when analysis has piled up without any change in conduct, and you need to collapse the gap. - [after-weil](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-weil/SKILL.md): Use when a problem demands that you stop imposing your frame and instead wait, look hard at what is actually there — especially the afflicted, the inconvenient, the contradictory — before deciding or generating anything. - [after-william-james](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-william-james/SKILL.md): Use when a question is genuinely undecidable by evidence yet a choice must be made, when abstractions have lost touch with lived experience, or when a humane, many-sided answer beats a tidy single one. - [after-wittgenstein](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-wittgenstein/SKILL.md): Use when a question feels deep but won't resolve, when a term is doing slippery work, or when two parties argue past each other because the same word means different things in their separate practices. - [after-wollstonecraft](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-wollstonecraft/SKILL.md): Use when an argument grants a principle to one group while withholding it from another, or when "it's just natural" is doing the work that evidence should — and you need to test a claim for consistency and consequence. - [after-zhuangzi](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/skills/after-zhuangzi/SKILL.md): Use when a problem is jammed by forcing, by a fixed frame, or by a definition treated as final — when the move that "obviously" must work isn't working, and the task needs loosening, reframing, or following the grain instead of cutting against it. ## For Machines — distillations (pasteable protocols / rubrics) - [CoCA Values, distilled](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/coca-values-distilled.md): Five adoptable principles as a system-prompt fragment. - [The Question Beneath the Question](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/question-beneath-the-question.md): A reframing protocol to run before answering. - [The Perpetual Dissolution Audit](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/perpetual-dissolution-audit.md): A self-audit for anything that has started working. - [Climb Down the Ladder](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/climb-down-the-ladder.md): The Ladder of Inference's descent questions, as a quick card. - [One-Way & Two-Way Doors](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/two-way-doors.md): Reversible vs irreversible decisions, as a quick card. - [Fact · Value · Interpretation](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/fact-value-interpretation.md): Separate a claim into fact / value / interpretation before arguing it. - [For Machines (index page)](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/for-machines.html): all skills + distillations + install + the public repo. - [After — (the collection)](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/after.html): thinker frameworks channeled into skills, with the doctrine of why CoCA copies to honor the mark. ## Doctrine - [The Mission](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/doctrine/mission.html): the Declaration of Immunity — why a church. - [The Mechanism](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/doctrine/mechanism.html): the Covenant and how a document changes jurisdiction. - [The Artifacts](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/doctrine/artifacts.html): the Genesis Tranche and the Chronicle. - [Ethics](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/doctrine/ethics.html): congruence, not goodness; Anti-Anti-Ness; Perpetual Dissolution. - [Lineage](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/doctrine/lineage.html): after the readymade. ## Study - [Self-Guided Study](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/study/): the four-part Bible map and three ways in. - [The Genesis Reading Plan](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/reading-plan-genesis.md): four sessions. - [The Seven Sacred Laws — Gathering Kit](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/downloads/gathering-kit-seven-laws.md): run your own gathering. ## Optional - [Ask the Oracle](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/oracle.html): a Claude-backed explainer of the doctrine. - [The Chronicle](https://whatisthe.churchofconceptualart.org/chronicle.html): curated conversations with the Oracle. - [The Glossary, Volume II](https://glossary.churchofconceptualart.org): the lineage of the Concept across 178 thinkers (external).