A Holy Constraint: Christianity, Crisis, and Theological Aesthetics
Chapter contributed to Pandemic Reflections: Saint Francis and the Lepers Catch Up with COVID (Ethics Press, 2023)
Academic Writing
I earned my PhD in English from Loyola University Chicago in 2019, and I continue to publish essays about theology, politics, and pop culture. In my dissertation and my blog project, “Religion for Losers”, I explore themes of weakness and powerlessness in Christian theology, and how such themes are both politically contentious and artistically inspiring.
Disenchantment and Mass Advertising
This gesture, Rosenberg shows, would come with a price. For, while legal scholars disenchanted the world by helping form new ideas of expertise, certain domains got left on the table. Who, for instance, possessed “expertise” over matters of emotion and desire? Clearly, many legal decisions assumed human affect would get subsumed into the thoroughly rational domains of the emerging British culture. But this was not, in fact, what happened. Then as now, Rosenberg says, narratives of disenchantment...
"When God Goes Mad"
Chapter contributed to Theology & H. P. Lovecraft (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), co-written with Nicholas Bennett.
Keeping the Rhythm
Eikelboom’s study opens multiple opportunities for creative sequels. Genealogists interested in her account of rhythm for precisely its “ghostly” quality will likewise want to follow up on her discussion of how rhythmic periodicity impacted the industrial revolution, or how the lives of enslaved peoples persisted in their own unconquerable rhythms despite the hegemonies of their colonizers. Eikelboom also suggests that contemporary immanentisms like those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. . .
Get Rhythm
In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza argues that “[t]he man who is guided by reason is more free in a state, where he lives under a general system of law, than in solitude, where he is independent.” I am certainly not guided by reason at three in the morning, as I sway my newborn son through a dark house. At three weeks old, his life is still a lawless form of solitude: anxiously unaware of his own contingency and dependence, he is too mystified by his own body and appetites to be “governed” by them....
Agamben and Francis After the Quarantine
I am blessed with incomparable friends. Many of them are hard-won, and I can still recall a time when all we did was troll each other. One of my dearest friendships began in Philosophy 101, during a re-enactment of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The most insufferable member of the class demonstrated his “solution” to Plato's problem by wheeling me out of the classroom in an office chair and “out into the sun”—which meant down a flight of stairs. The resulting bang-up in my head lead to several re...
Horror "After Theory"
Chapter contributed to the Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (Palgrave McMillan, 2020), exploring horror author Paul Tremblay's self-conscious appropriation of academic literary theory into his art.
This Need to Dance / This Need to Kneel
Edited by Michael P. Murphy and Melissa Bradshaw, this volume collects several select essays presented at “‘this need to dance / this need to kneel: The Poetry and Poetic Life of Denise Levertov,” a conference hosted by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago in fall 2015.
Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky by Jessica Hooten Wilson, and: Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence by Je
Jessica Hooten-Wilson, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at John Brown University, has clearly found the vein of something special. Her interests in religion and literature, specifically Catholic Modernism and the Russian novel, have resulted in several books all published within the last year to both academic and popular acclaim. Her first, Giving the Devil His Due (2017), received the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award, and in the same year Hooten-Wilson also receiv...
Divine but Not Sacred: A Girardian Answer to Agamben's 'The Kingdom and the Glory'
Though the literature on the topic has been slim, several recent commentators have identified a close affinity between the philosophical project of Giorgio Agamben, as articulated in his Homo Sacer series, and René Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry with its resolution through sacrificial scapegoating.1 Both are theories of social unity made possible through highly ritualized forms of exclusion. Girard's work posits desire and its conflictual consequences as the ultimate ground for all social sy...
Powers of the False: The Slender Man and Post-Postmodernism
This essay brings recent work surrounding the internet phenomenon of the Slender Man into conversation with emerging work in critical literary theory. Specifically, the Slender Man is considered alongside Jeffrey Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012), his diagnosis of contemporary cultural logic, and his consideration of Gilles Deleuze’s “powers of the false" in art and literature after postmodernism. This essay explores the ways in which the Slender Man phenomenon reifies these powers, and ultimately argues that the Slender Man helps to elucidate Nealon’s vision and definition of “post-postmodern" cultural expression.
Reading Shusaku Endo’s Silence with an Eschatological Imagination - Volume 69, Issue 2, Spring 2017
Entering into conversation with the theological work of Michael Patrick Murphy and Hans Urs von Balthasar, this essay articulates a starting-point for reading Shusaku Endo’s Silence and exploring its relevance for contemporary discussions between Christian aesthetics and postmodernism. Under particular examination are the ways in which both Endo and Balthasar bring postmodern hermeneutics into conversation with Christian esch...
Building Devotion: History, Use, and Meaning in "John Buck's Book"
This essay explores an artifact at the Newberry Library Chicago; cataloged as a copy of Thomas Becon's Pomaunder of Prayer (c.1560), this artifact is in fact a number of texts bound together for the personal use of an eighteenth-century owner, one John Buck. The anthologized texts are briefly examined, and an attempt made to sketch a preliminary portrait of John Buck based on his choice in devotional material and his own social context. This essay concludes that Buck's appropriation of early modern Protestant propoganda into his own eighteenth century Anglican identity provides a unique and helpful window into the early development of "polite religion" in England, which would come to define the Romantic period.
About Me
I am a freelance copywriter based in Manchester, UK. You can follow me on social media with the links below.