It’s been a long time since I kept a regular blog, but after watching social media turn increasingly anti social, and at the same time becoming increasingly aware of its limitations in terms of communicating anything more than a very basic message, I’ve turned back to the blog.

Astute observers will notice of course that this is a new blog, my old site is retired, or at least too tired. Too old and too out of date, and no longer the direction I want to take things. So this is the start of something new.

I’m moderately embarrassed at what I feel is the vanity of having the site named after me – but my long term plan is to post some of my more academic writing here, and for that reason if no other it suits me better to have a site name which refers directly to me. So there it is, that which I have previously disliked elsewhere has come close to home.

Currently my reading and writing is following a number of inter-related themes, they include: ‘the absurd’ arising from writers such as Camus and Kierkegaard; a pursuit of contemporary process theology and theopoetics through the writings of a number of interesting people, particularly Catherine Keller but a number of others too (Cobb, Whitehead, Pittenger etc.; and a continuation of my old obsession with panentheism.

Those who know me will recall that I’ve long been interested in ‘new monasticism’ of one sort or another, and something of that remains, although following in Bonhoeffer’s footsteps I’m now more invested in ‘new theology’, specifically religionless Christianity, than I am in what went before. I’ve certainly developed a more thoroughly pluralist approach, and if anything an even greater concern with the problematic idea of the ‘other’.

Meditation and apophaticism continue to loom large for me too, and I may yet continue to write about what I call Zen Christianity. For now though my main reading/writing focus has to related more directly to my PhD research, which is on post-secular spiritual capital. It’s highly likely that pieces of work specifically to do with that will appear here from time to time (in fact, all the subject above find a home in there somewhere).

I hope that this will become a place where meaningful interaction can take place, I hope too, as time goes on, to produce material which is readily ‘shareable’, but in the meantime, this is just to let you know that the site exists.

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