Ecological Disaster & Jacques Ellul's Theological Vision

A theological response to climate change, co authored with Dr. Paul Tyson of ACU

This paper will focus Jacques Ellul’s insights onto the manner in which our modern technological society is deeply ingrained in the subordination of both humanity and nature to efficient use. Ellul maintains that our way of life is characterised by structural instrumentalism, which is in turn underpinned by a distorted
theological outlook. The paper asserts that these aforementioned factors together form the key drivers that propel us towards environmental desolation. This paper asserts that no adequate fine tuning of our present way of life will be possible to address issues such as climate change. What is needed instead is the comprehensive sociological and theological  conversion of our society. This paper will conclude by tentatively
exploring ways in which the church might proclaim and embody a prophetic message of repentance and conversion in this and other socio-cultural matters.

Reason, Politics and Evangelisation

Article Published in Heythrop Journal, for the published version refer to Heythrop Journal XLVIII (2010), 1-12

Benedict XVI's call to expand reason's horizons requires attention to the political frameworks that allows any enlarged reason to operate. A re-hellenised reason cannot fully operate in the current secular "public sphere" framework. Not only are the framework’s horizons so narrow as to bar faith from entry in discourse. The presumption of the framework’s neutrality, allowing equal freedom to all perspectives, ignores the fact that the framework itself is an evangelical force that preempts Christianity and turns citizens into captive "disciples" of an inherently violent agnosticism before communication even begins.

Expanding reason's horizons must be coupled with interrupting the existing framework’s hegemony, an inescapably political project since it involves the transformation of political communities. This transformation is evangelical to the extent that it consists in the recruitment of people into practices that sustain political communities. What distinguishes Christian frameworks from the current is that the former is built on the force of truth whilst the latter is built on the truth of force.

Recognition of the link between reason, politics and evangelism gives the Church legitimacy as a political actor, allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission, and provide a political context for authentically ecumenical and inter-cultural relations.

Liturgical Worship and the Transformation of International Political Community

Published Conference Paper, Presented at the 2008 Oceanic Conference for International Studies

Persistent Postmodern Numino-Political Analysis

Published in Volume 13 of the Australian e-Journal of Theology, 2009

Bodies of Christ in Seas of Change: The Relationship between Ecclesiology, Politics and Practice in the Conditioning of Twentieth Century Roman Catholic Responses to Violence

Doctoral Thesis, completed in September 2009 at the School of Theology, Australian Catholic University

The Eucharist and Peacemaking

Draft Version of Magazine Article, For final version please go to Volume #22 of "CASE", the Magazine for the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education (pages 25-8)

Article explores the  contribution that particular sets of religious practices can make to the building of conditions for peaceful coexistence.

It argues that the Eucharist reimagines the political status quo. Starting from an exploration of the way the Eucharist reimagines our conception of time, the article then explores how our conceptions of citizenship become transformed from a static state-centric conception of currently living compatriots, to one where living, dead and generations not yet born are brought into a Eucharistic polis.

Such reimagining is coupled with practices that together enact a “social imaginary” that resists the violence of the state. The Eucharist provides a counter-ontology of original peace contra the ontology of violence inherent in state disciplines. Also, liturgical narrative practice can resist discursive reappropriation of disembodied “values” to justify bellicose actions by the state.

War of the Worlds? Trajectori es of the Intersecti on of Religion with Peace and Conflict Studies

Published Conference Paper for the 2007 Conference for the Australian Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (Conference Theme: Faith and the Disciplines)

Book Review. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Eds). Religion and Political Thought. London: Continuum. 2006. pp 292. $24.99, ISBN: 0-8264-8006-3.

Published in "Dialogue" (2008). v6(2)

Book Review. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Translated by Chaya Galai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, AUD $59.95, 248 pp, ISBN: 0521850967.

Published in "Dialogue" (2006) v4(1)

Numino-Political Analysis

Bodies of Christ in Seas of Change