About my Substack Posts
I've started using Substack to share reflections and musings. Please scroll down or use the menu to find out more, or to subscribe to one or both of my sites. There is an option to become a paid subscriber, but since I'm still experimenting with Substack as a platform and my posts are quite intermittent, I particularly welcome free subscribers.
Listening to the Essence of Things
This Substack site began as a research diary for a book I'm writing, contracted to Oxford University Press, engaging with Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, "Laudato Si': Our Common Home". It has however spread out to cover different subjects, as my reflections on nature and language, meaning and desire, take me down many different avenues.
The phrase "Listening to the Essence of Things" comes from Josef Pieper's book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which is an important source of inspiration for my research and reflections. The photograph is a moment of pure joy when I was swimming in the sea at sunset one evening in winter.
Through a Glass Darkly:
Reflections on Gender
Much of my academic teaching and research has focused on issues to do with theology and gender, in engagement with psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, feminism, and art. As debates about sex and gender become increasingly complex, contested, and agonistic, I am revisiting some of my ideas as I grapple with the challenges posed to scholars like myself by questions of gender and sexual identities.
I've started a separate Substack site to explore these questions and to share some of my writings. Those who are interested in these issues and the existential, ethical, and theological challenges they pose might like to subscribe to this site and engage in the dialogue.
The image is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's early 16th century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.