Frequently Asked Questions
These are the questions we expect you to have.
We have tried to answer them honestly, in the voice of the project itself.
Lux Perpetua
These are the questions we expect you to have. We have tried to answer them honestly, in the voice of the project itself.
THE STORY
What is Lux Perpetua?
Lux Perpetua is a serial novel - published in two tracks, week by week, for as long as the story requires.
The story is called Ordo: A Chronicle of Lux Perpetua. It follows two parallel threads: a present-day historian in Alton, Illinois who inherits his grandfather's house and finds something in the basement that he cannot explain, and a series of recovered historical documents that reveal what he has inherited and why it matters.
The two tracks are published separately - The Living Thread on Mondays, The Lost Crown on Thursdays - and read together, they tell one story.
What does Lux Perpetua mean?
Lux perpetua is Latin. It appears in the traditional Catholic prayer for the dead: Lux aeterna luceat eis - let eternal light shine upon them - and in a slightly different form in the ancient antiphon: lux perpetua, the light that never ends.
The title carries both meanings. The story is about something that has been kept alive through centuries of suppression, dissolution, and forgetting. The light was never put out. It is also about the dead - the long chain of people who kept that light before us, whose names we mostly do not know, who handed something forward in the faith that someone would eventually receive it.
What is Ordo?
Ordo is Latin for order - the ordering of things, the structure through which meaning is maintained and passed on. The word carries weight in Catholic tradition: Holy Orders, religious orders, the ordering of the liturgy, the ordering of society under God.
The story is about what happens when that ordering is lost - when it is suppressed, corrupted, or simply forgotten - and what it costs to recover it.
Who is writing this?
Michael Halbrook. Husband to Suzanne. Father of four sons. Permanent deacon in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, serving at St. Elizabeth Parish in Granite City.
By day he runs Domus Formation (WeAreDomus.com), a Catholic formation company, and writes at DeaconMichael.net. For eighteen years before that he worked in technology leadership at Adobe; and he held various marketing, media, and advertising roles before that.
Where did this story come from?
About two years of pondering - the decline of the West, the shadow cast by the Enlightenment, the question of what it means that order has largely disappeared from how we understand society and the Church's place in it.
The concept of order in the Catholic sense has occupied me for a long time - beginning with Holy Orders themselves, the diaconal, presbyteral, and episcopal ordering of the Church's life, and then the religious orders that have carried the tradition through every century of siege and renewal. The Church preserves a structure that the world once reflected and no longer does, mostly unnoticed, in her own bones.
I've seen Les Misérables probably a dozen times. Something in it keeps pulling me back - the revolutionary fervor that believes it is building something new while standing on the rubble of something it doesn't understand, the bishop who absorbs violence and returns mercy, the weight of a man trying to become something better than what the world made him. It touches the same wound this story is probing - what happens to human beings when the ordering structure collapses, and what extraordinary cost ordinary people pay in the wreckage. That wound is where Ordo began.
The project was already underway when I watched my sons' high school production of Anastasia. Watching teenagers sing about the last of the Romanovs, I felt something sharpen - a grief for what was actually lost when the crowns fell. Not nostalgia for monarchy exactly. Something more specific. The sense that when the anointed kings were killed, something about the visible ordering of human life under God was killed with them. And that almost nobody noticed what it actually was. I drove home thinking, "Yes! That's exactly what this story is about. Keep going."
Is this only for Catholics?
No. The story assumes fluency in Catholic vocabulary - it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise - but it is not a catechism and it is not a tract.
It is a story about order, loss, and the stubborn persistence of things that should have died. Anyone who has felt that the world has lost its sense of structure - that something real and important has been dismantled without anyone quite naming what it was - will find something here.
The Catholic framework is the lens, not the conclusion. Joshua Maren, the protagonist, begins the story as a nominal Catholic who has not paid attention for years. His journey is not from unbelief to belief in any simple sense. It is from description to participation - from a man who studies the history of ideas to a man who discovers he is inside one.
Is this finished? How long will it be?
It is not finished. It is being written.
That is the nature of a serial novel - the story is alive, ongoing, published week by week as it is written. The first book of Ordo covers approximately 52 weeks. The full arc extends to five books.
You are reading it as it is made. That is different from reading a finished thing, and it asks something different of you. We think it is worth it.
Why a serial novel and not a book?
Because a book is finished before you read it, and this story is not finished.
The serial form has a long and serious history - Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky all published in serial. The form creates a relationship between the writer and the reader that a finished book cannot. You read it as it comes. You live with it between chapters. You bring the last chapter into your week the way you bring anything alive into your week - imperfectly, partially, with anticipation.
There is also something true about the serial form for this particular story. The custody chain that Ordo describes is itself serial - passed forward week by week, generation by generation, by people who did not know how the story would end. The form mirrors the content.
THE RECORD
What is The Living Thread?
The Living Thread is the present-day track of Ordo. It follows Joshua David Maren - 32, historian of ideas, nominally Catholic, recently arrived at his grandfather's house in Alton, Illinois - as he discovers what his grandfather kept and what it is going to ask of him.
The Living Thread publishes every Monday. Chapters 1 through 3 are free for everyone, always. Chapter 4 and beyond open when we know your name and email.
What is The Lost Crown?
The Lost Crown is the historical track of Ordo. It publishes recovered documents, witness accounts, and historical narratives that reveal the deep history of what Joshua has inherited - the chain of custody stretching back to 1307 and beyond.
Reading The Lost Crown, you will know things Joshua does not know yet. That gap is intentional. It is the dramatic engine of the story.
The Lost Crown publishes every Thursday. It requires a subscription.
Do I have to read both tracks?
No. The Living Thread stands alone as a complete reading experience. You can follow Joshua's story without ever reading The Lost Crown.
But The Lost Crown deepens everything. It answers questions The Living Thread raises and raises questions The Living Thread will eventually answer. The two tracks are counterpoint - each illuminates the other in ways that neither can achieve alone.
If you find yourself wanting to know more than Joshua knows, The Lost Crown is where you go.
What is The Seal? Why no password?
The Seal is how you access Lux Perpetua.
When you want to read, you enter your email address. We send you a seven-digit code - The Seal - which you enter to open the record. The Seal expires at midnight Central time. There is no password to remember. There is no account wall to create.
We chose this because passwords are barriers, and this platform is about access, not gatekeeping. The Seal is a key that is made fresh each time you need it. It costs nothing to request. It arrives quickly. It works.
Can I read on my phone?
Yes. The platform is designed to read well on any device. Your reading preferences - font, size, display mode - are saved to your account and follow you across devices.
What is the archive?
Every chapter ever published lives in the archive, in the order it was kept. You can filter by track or browse the full record. The archive is permanent - chapters are never removed.
THE COMMUNITY
What are the First Twelve?
Before Lux Perpetua opened to the world, twelve people were personally invited to read what existed in its unfinished state. They were not reviewers. They were witnesses.
The First Twelve have permanent free access to the full platform - both tracks, all forums - and their presence in the community predates everyone else's. When you read the chapter forums, you may find posts from people whose responses were written before the chapter was public. Those are the First Twelve.
They were chosen personally. The group is closed.
What are the chapter forums?
When each chapter publishes, a forum thread opens for that chapter. It stays open for 33 days. Then it closes and is sealed into the permanent record - visible, read-only, forever.
The forums are for Custodians, the Seventy-Two, the First Twelve, and priests with complimentary access. They are not public comment sections. They are the ongoing conversation of a community that is reading the same thing at the same time.
The 33-day window is deliberate. It creates a specific kind of attention - the knowledge that this conversation has a closing time sharpens the quality of what people bring to it. After 33 days, what was said is sealed. The record moves on.
Why 33 days?
Thirty-three is the number of years Jesus Christ lived on earth, and the number of buttons traditionally on a priest's cassock.
Thirty-three days is long enough for a real conversation. Short enough that it ends before it exhausts itself. And the number is not accidental.
What is The Margins?
The Margins is the permanent community space - four ongoing forums that never close:
Introductions - where readers place themselves in the record for the first time.
Connections - where readers bring what the story reminds them of. Books, history, events, things they know from elsewhere that the story touches.
Questions for the Author - where anything can be asked. Answers come when they come.
The Long View - for observations that span more than one chapter. Patterns, theories, things that seem to be building toward something.
The name comes from the story itself. The marginalia in Gaufred's psalter carried a message that survived seven centuries. What the community writes in the margins of this record may outlast us too.
What are the subscription tiers?
The Keeper - $44/year The Lost Crown, every Thursday. Full archive of both tracks. New chapter notifications. Keeper badge. Household reading for up to four family members.
The Custodian - $88/year Everything in The Keeper. Chapter discussion forums - open 33 days per chapter. Monthly author conversation, recorded. Custodian badge. Household reading for up to four family members.
The Seventy-Two - $288/year - limited to 72 members Everything in The Custodian. Monthly perfect bound issue, mailed to you. Annual physical artifact - numbered, signed, from the world of the story. Your name in the permanent record. Annual working notes. The Seventy-Two badge. Additional print copies at $108/year each. Household reading for up to four family members.
Who are the Seventy-Two?
In the tenth chapter of Luke's Gospel, Jesus appoints seventy-two disciples and sends them ahead of him into every town he is about to visit. They go two by two. They carry nothing extra. They are sent before the arrival of something larger.
The Seventy-Two here are the readers who carry the record in its most physical form - who receive it monthly in their hands, whose names are written into it, who are limited in number because some things derive their meaning from being bounded.
There are 72 places. When they are filled, they are filled. A waitlist exists for when a place opens.
What is the monthly perfect bound issue?
Each month, all chapters published that month - both tracks together - are typeset and printed as a perfect bound booklet, approximately 65-70 pages, and mailed to Seventy-Two subscribers.
It is the physical form of the record. A Seventy-Two subscriber who remains through the full arc of the story will have, at the end, a shelf of monthly issues that constitutes the complete manuscript in the order it arrived.
That is a different object from a finished book. It is the record of a story being made.
What is the annual physical artifact?
Each year, Seventy-Two subscribers receive a physical object from the world of the story - numbered, signed, and specific to that year.
Year 1: a fine art print of the platform's founding image, numbered out of 72, signed by the author.
Future years will bring different objects. What they will be depends on where the story goes.
Can I give a subscription as a gift?
Not yet - gift subscriptions are coming. In the meantime, contact us at record@luxperpetua.net and we will make it work.
What happens if I miss chapters?
Nothing is lost. Every published chapter lives in the archive, always accessible, in the order it was kept.
The chapter forums close after 33 days - if you arrive late to a chapter, you can read the conversation that happened but cannot add to it. The conversation is sealed. The chapter is not.
Is there a privacy policy? Terms of service?
Yes. Both are linked in the footer. They are written to be read, not to be avoided.
How do I contact you?
record@luxperpetua.net
We read everything. We reply when we can.
Lux Perpetua The light that was never put out. luxperpetua.net