POSTS
TheArchive.
A chronological record of essays, thinking tools, and interventions.
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How can I justify spending so much of my life on academic research with all the problems in the world?
I work in an obscure corner of some unfashionable discipline. My ideas will never change the world. How can I justify spending so much of my life on academic research? How does it serve the kingdom of God? These questions read like a typical diary entry from my time as a doctoral candidate. I still struggle
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What is a theological concept? Part 4: Jean-Luc Nancy’s “something in Christianity deeper than Christianity”
In the previous post I explored Nancy’s reading of Badiou’s interruption of the mytheme by the matheme as a theological moment in Badiou’s thought. But what about Nancy himself? Does his own atheism—for atheist he indeed professes to be, providing that atheism is understood in a way that avoids the Christmas projection—avoid theological concepts? In
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Bradley Green: Henri Bergson and the Creation of the Self
One of the things I have been doing on my research leave is read (surprise), and specifically to read in the area of philosophy. Currently I am reading Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Besides just interesting, I hope to write one day a biblical theology of knowledge. That interest has led to reading this
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What is a theological concept? Part 3: Alain Badiou’s interruption of the mytheme by the matheme and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Christmas Projection”
In this third post in the “what is a theological concept?” series I focus for the first time on a specific philosophical moment: Alain Badiou’s account of the interruption of the mytheme by the matheme. I am particularly interested in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of this Badiouian move, for Nancy sees in the interruption of the
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What is a theological concept? Part 2: A schema for distinguishing between different atheisms
In Difficult Atheism I offered a schema for understanding varieties of contemporary atheism. In this post I want briefly to summarise that schema (adding some diagrams not included in Difficult Atheism), before going on to develop it further in the future. If you want to explore these ideas in greater length, please refer to the
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Let’s read Pascal’s Pensées
Today I’m going to start re-reading one of the books in my personal intensive treasure trove, Pensées by Blaise Pascal. I remember the time I first read it, fourteen years ago now, after picking it up almost by accident in a second hand bookshop. That first reading was on holiday (misty forests and long walks
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Art, sense and concept
“we comprehend the world aesthetically, in ways that cannot be derived from other forms of knowledge and artifice.” (Paul Crowther, “Art’s making: why aesthetics matters to art history,” unpublished manuscript) it is the integral fusion of the sensuous and the conceptual which enables art to express something of the depth and richness of body-hold in
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The good, the true, and the beautiful in arguments
In a post from 2009 over at Between the Times, Bruce Ashford quotes Augustine on Psalm 26, encouraging the Christian to see the God of creation behind the wonders of creation. The pleasure we experience in seeing a beautiful cathedral reminds us to admire the church’s architect. How much more should viewing the universe’s infinite
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What’s the stumbling block for our colleagues: untruth or ugliness?
Why do highly educated people–I’m thinking especially of our university colleagues–reject the claims of Jesus Christ? Many people better qualified than I am have written at great length on the subject, but let me offer one thought here. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll sum up my point in this shorthand way: The main problem
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Shalom (2 of 2). Building human culture: our task for today, our joy for eternity
In a previous post I explored how shalom shapes what we think the task of academy should be, and how we understand our place in it. I now want to widen the focus a little and think about shalom as a paradigm of culture-building that bridges this world and the next. This second way in
