POSTS
TheArchive.
A chronological record of essays, thinking tools, and interventions.
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Let’s read Pascal’s Pensées – keep in the loop
Over the coming months I will be reading and blogging through Pascal’s Pensées. It is a truly remarkable book of Christian apologetics, a real classic written by a brilliant mathematician and literary author. I first studied Pascal as part of my undergraduate degree, and then returned to him later as a fount of wisdom on
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Thinking Through Sin: Genesis 3, Sartre, and the power of the gaze
When Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their relationship undergoes a striking change. They begin accusing each other of wrongdoing (3:12-13), becoming ashamed (3:7,10) and being defensive (3:12-13). Their relationship becomes a zero sum game of power and domination (3:16b) in which each is
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Explaining Derrida with Diagrams 1: Différance
I’ve written a book on Derrida which is intended to be accessible to non-philosophers, and one of the challenges is to explain Derrida’s thought both faithfully and clearly. I have decided to use diagrams as one way of helping readers to grasp what Derrida is saying and, equally importantly, what he isn’t saying. I am
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Thinking Through Sin: Original sin and critical theory
This is an excerpt from the as-yet unpublished book Thinking Through Sin and Judgment, in the ‘Thinking Through the Bible’ series For all the contemporary resistance to the idea of sin, it finds some striking echoes in modern critical and cultural theory, echoes of the way in which sin effects how that we think about
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Who am I? Jesus’s question to find your true identity may surprise you
One of the great questions of our age is “Who am I?” Its answer is the key to unlock every door. Films like the original Star Wars trilogy, the Jason Bourne franchise and Captain Marvel derive much of their narrative impetus and emotional pull from the quest for the self: what is my true identity?
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The Gospel Coalition Course | Derrida, Foucault, and the Bible
Derrida, Foucault, and the Bible Understand What Prominent Postmodern Philosophers Derrida and Foucault Were Saying, and Put Their Views in Conversation with the Bible About the Course This course will help you see what Derrida and Foucault are really saying, and show you how you can bring their thought into conversation with the Bible. You
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From Plato to Postmodernism book: Introduction
Here is the Introduction from my 2011 book From Plato to Postmodernism: The Story of Western Culture Through Philosophy, Literature and Art. The Introduction is entitled “To the man with a hammer …” human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them
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Esther Meek’s Foreword to Michel Foucault in the P&R Great Thinkers series
It is the task of a Foreword to commend a work to you the reader, and to say why this work matters. I shall endeavor to fulfill this task, one which is at once easy and somewhat difficult. It is easy because Christopher Watkin’s Foucault is a highly commendable venture; it is difficult because our
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Podcast on Derrida, theology and Reformed theology
In this third podcast I begin by discussing Derrida’s cautious affirmation that “I rightly pass for an atheist”, and try to dismantle the myth that, for Derrida, God can be whatever you want him/her/it to be. I trace Derrida’s rejection of the god of onto-theology and then explain why he returns to the trope of “x without
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Podcast on Derrida, ethics and Reformed theology
In this episode I talk very briefly about the growing willingness to accept, from the mid 1990s onwards, that deconstruction is indeed ethical, before tackling the myth that Derrida is a relativist. I unpack the phrase “tout autre est tout autre” (“every other is wholly other”) from Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard on Genesis 22 and