POSTS
TheArchive.
A chronological record of essays, thinking tools, and interventions.
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Deleuze and the biblical asymmetry of good and evil. Extract from my forthcoming book on Deleuze and theology
This is the sixth 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 compares the way in which Deleuze draws an ethics and politics out of his ontology with the biblical creation-fall-redemption schema. To see all
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Be careful what you pray for, Christian scholar
In our prayers as Christian scholars we will often find ourselves asking for wisdom, knowledge, depth of insight, and understanding. But do we realise that with the granting of these gifts comes an increased responsibility? Now let me say right at the beginning of this post that this truth is not unique to gifts of the mind.
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How does Deleuze know his view is true? Six points. Extract from my forthcoming book on Deleuze and theology
This is the fourth 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). In this extract I discuss six important points to take into account if we want to understand how Deleuze thinks about truth. To see
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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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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
