Category
Category: Let’s read together
Join me as I read and blog through key texts in theology, philosophy and culture.
Comment and add your own reflections.
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Albert Camus, Literature, and The Plague
This is the script of a video I prepared for the “Camus, Christ and COVID-19” event hosted by Christian Heritage Cambridge on 20 May 2020. I aim to address three questions: the place and importance of literature during a time of crisis such as COVID-19 the meaning of Albert Camus’ story The Plague (he withdrew
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More unacceptable reasons to enjoy the pandemic
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. In the previous post in this series I reflected on how literature can reveal the hidden side of a pandemic. Attitudes that would be incendiary if voiced in the first person can be exposed and explored in literary texts, absent
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The unspoken pandemic: on the illicit enjoyment of plague
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. Everyone is writing about the pandemic right now, but we are not writing everything. There are some some impulses, some reactions, some fleeting thoughts that we prudently keep under our hats at a time like this. Once the COVID-19 pandemic
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COVID, Camus and the Cross: An Easter Meditation
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. I have come across an impressive amount of self-styled insight in the past few days: what the world will look like after the virus, how we should reshape it, what an opportunity this is, how things will never be the
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Statistics in a time of pandemic: sublimity, mysticism, and the illusion of exactitude
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. There has been much talk over the past weeks of COVID-19 being an “invisible enemy”. Setting the war metaphor aside for a moment, it is illuminating to reflect on the ways in which we make pandemics visible. In La Peste figures and
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Do you know what is most shaping your desires and beliefs? This quick exercise can help you find out… and change it
In a recent post we briefly discussed the way in which the media we consume shapes to a significant extent what we desire, what we think, and how we feel about ourselves and our society. The issue merits further reflection for Christians studying or working in an academic setting. Christian academics are, so to speak, professional consumers and interpreters
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Pandemic temporality: the creation, fall and redemption of COVID-19
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. A pandemic does strange things to time. We are used to living in different times at once. There is the clock time of regular 60-second minutes and 24-hour days. There is the joy of youthful infatuation when a day with one’s
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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