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Author: Chris Watkin
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The academic prayer life: how to be more colourful and adventurous than just “make me successful”
As with all of our prayers (or mine at least) there is a tendency, when we pray about our work, simply to spiritualise the values of the culture around us and pray for what everyone in our lab or department wants, be they Christian or not. This usually means praying for some combination of success,
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Bonkers is the new normal: escalating paradigm shifts in the progress of a pandemic
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. Camus, drawing his reader into the heightening tension of La Peste, calibrates attitudes to the plague with an escalating vocabulary. Each shift in terminology is accompanied by a dramatic event or realisation that causes a paradigm shift in the understanding of
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The inkling of something different: why modernity does not prepare us for a pandemic
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. Knowing what is to come in the novel, Camus’ description of Oran in the opening pages of La Peste is brilliantly prescient. Nobody is expecting their weekly routine of work and leisure to be interrupted. This, Camus notes, is what it means
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Pandemics are apocalyptic, but not in that way
This is my first post about Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague). I’m about a quarter of the way through the novel now, and there’s SO MUCH to write about. Reading Camus in the context of the current COVID-19 situation provides a counterpoint outside the media frenzy from which to gain perspective and insight into
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Deleuze, atheism, and belief in God. Extract from my forthcoming book on Deleuze and theology
This is the third in a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It comes at the end of a section on Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, and it discusses what “belief in God” could mean from
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Developing a Christian Approach to Your Academic Discipline: The Map and the Mirror
In this post I want to explore one way that Christian academics can get to grips with the secular disciplines in which we work. I will begin by discussing two different ways in which we can understand the Christian faith and the way it shapes our work, before moving on to discuss a tool to help
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COVID-19 reading list: Let’s read Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) together
In view of the COVID-19 information, misinformation and toilet roll hysteria currently gripping the world, over coming weeks I will be channelling my quarantine curiosity into re-reading Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague), a story of an epidemic sweeping through the Algerian city of Oran. The novel examines the way in which living in an epidemic
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Why Deleuze’s philosophy fits its historical and cultural moment. Extract from my forthcoming book on Deleuze and theology
This is the second of a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It argues why Deleuze’s thought was appropriate for its historical and cultural moment, and offers some reflections on how to engage with a body
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Tim Keller shows how overwork and underwork are symptoms of the same disease, and Francis Schaeffer helps us find the right balance between optimism and pessimism
In this brief interview between Tim Keller and Matt Smethurst about Keller’s book Every Good Endeavour: Connecting your Work to God’s Work, the point that I found particularly helpful was Keller’s diagnosis of how “the counternarrative of the gospel addresses our propensity to idolize or demonize, to overwork or underwork”. This repeats a characteristic move of Keller’s, showing
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Video talk on Foucault, sexuality and the Bible
Here is a recording of a lunchtime talk I gave at Biola University in February 2020. I discuss the later Foucault, specifically the first volume of his History of Sexuality, and bring it into conversation with biblical notions of identity and alterity. For further reflections on Foucault and the Bible you might want to check
