About

I am Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the University of Winchester, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education.

My research focuses on the intersection of contemporary continental philosophy of religion and Christian systematic theology. My book, A Theology of Failure: Žižek against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019) brought the recent ‘materialist turn’ in continental philosophy to bear on existing debates about the relationship between Christian mystical theology and contemporary philosophies of difference, otherness and negativity. I argue that Žižek’s materialist thought offers resources for re-conceptualising Christian identity without the idealism which so often characterises Christian theology and tends to cover over both the dependence of Christianity theology on resources drawn from non-Christian traditions and the ways in which Christianity’s failures are not simply incidental but deeply entangled with the basic structures of Christian thinking.

Alongside my book I have continued to develop my work on Žižek, exploring in particular the entanglement of Christianity and Eurocentrism within his work, and have begun to explore the role of Christianity in contemporary constructions of whiteness and European identity, drawing on resources from black and liberation theologies.

My current project focuses on the cultural and theological shift from angels to cyborgs as key figures for imagining the futures of human life in order to ground a broader exploration of the process of disenchantment – the disappearance of a Christian-Neoplatonic vision of the world in which everything exists within a hierarchical system of signs which point to God – and subsequent re-enchantment – the emergence of a digitised, machinic capitalism in which everything exists within an algorithmic system of signs in which everything enables the circulation of surplus value.