What happens to a person who tries to live one coherent moral life across every domain of existence when reality
stops cooperating with that coherence.
THE PHILOSOPHY AND THE WHY NOW
There is a tension that every serious person feels at some point in their life, between the world as it ought to be and the world as it actually is. Between justice and reality.
Most people learn to navigate that tension by accepting a certain amount of fragmentation. A professional self and a private self. A stated commitment and a practiced compromise. A public face and a private accommodation. That fragmentation is not weakness. It is the ordinary rational response to a world that does not reliably reward coherence.
For the last fifteen years I have tried to do something different. I have tried to live one coherent moral life: the same person in every room, the same commitments in private that I claimed in public, the same moral seriousness at home that I brought to my work and my civic obligations. That has been my project. Not as an argument or a philosophy I hold from a distance, but as a way of living that I have committed to at real cost, across every domain of my existence.
The cost of that life has now come due
Professionally, I have watched work to which I devoted years of my life continue without me, forcing me to confront the uncomfortable reality that those with the power to advance a vision of justice do not always choose to exercise that power in its service.
Personally, I have learned that the same commitments that give coherence to a life can also create vulnerabilities. The qualities that allow us to trust deeply, invest fully, and remain faithful to our convictions can leave us exposed in ways that are difficult to recognize until they have altered the course of our lives. As a father, I carry the weight of what these choices have cost my children and what I owe them going forward. As a civic leader, I sit with the question of whether the obligations I believed in were worth what they extracted.
I believe they were. I also believe this moment, sitting inside that consequence, having paid those costs, still standing, is exactly when this book needed to be written.
I have spent fifteen years accumulating the experience, the sacrifice, the fracture, and the hard-won understanding that this project requires. The greatest good of that life, the highest expression of what it meant to try to live coherently in a fragmented world, is not the work I built or the institutions I served. It is this book. I believe that is the obligation this moment asks of me. To take everything that accumulated and make mean something beyond my own life. To use my life as the vehicle for a story that is larger than any single life.
THE BOOK
Between Justice and Reality
A work of literary nonfiction organized around a single governing question: what happens to a person who tries to live one coherent moral life across every domain of existence when reality stops cooperating with that coherence.
The book uses one life (its formation, its civic ambitions, its sacrifice, its fracture, and its continued practice) as the vehicle for a larger inquiry into what it costs to be one person, all the way through, in a world that keeps offering fragmentation as relief.
Currently in development.
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
Because of Them
A companion picture book for young readers about a child who slowly discovers that goodness is how people carried him into existence, and that he can become part of that chain himself.
Where Between Justice and Reality asks what it costs to live one coherent moral life, Because of Them asks what it feels like to begin. The two books are siblings: the same moral imagination expressed at two different stages of a life.
Currently seeking representation.
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN JUSTICE AND REALITY
Some of the most important conversations happen away from stages, microphones, and social media feeds. They happen around kitchen tables, in living rooms, over coffee, and among people willing to speak honestly about the choices they have made.
Conversations Between Justice and Reality are gatherings where people come together to explore a question many of us carry every day:
How do we live faithfully between the world as it is and the world as it could be?
These are opportunities for reflection, listening, and genuine exchange across different experiences and perspectives.
If you’ve ever felt pulled between conviction and circumstance, ideals and responsibilities, hope and limitation, these conversations are for you.
ABOUT
Alula Asfaw is an author and civic leader based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He is the founder of Bonds of Union, a nonprofit organization building research and innovation infrastructure to address the country’s most persistent civic challenges. His work has engaged some of the most significant philanthropic and civic institutions in the country, and his thinking about purpose, obligation, sacrifice, and democratic life has shaped more than a decade of civic work across sectors.
A graduate of the University of Washington, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School, he delivered the Distinguished Alumnus Address at the University of Washington’s commencement in 2023.
He is currently completing Between Justice and Reality, his first book. Because of Them, a children’s picture book, is his second.
He is the father of four daughters.