My friend Casey recently sent me the story of a wealthy Judge who went on holiday in Ireland and ended up duck hunting. Half way through the day he shot a bird out of the air and it dropped into a farmers field a few hundred yards away. As the Judge began to climb over [...]

Posted in Philosophy/Theology | Tags: Idol, Law

I recently talked to a friend who told me that she was visiting her conservative religious family for a birthday and brought her partner for the weekend. Over the few days they slept separate rooms. The question that immediately came to mind was ‘why?’ Who was it that didn’t think they shared a bed back [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology |

Psychoanalysis helps us to isolate two types of desirable things. The first are objects. Simply put we find ourselves wanting certain things everyday, from when we get up to when we go to bed. Yet, if that thing is not available (or if we achieve it), we move onto something else. We might be angry [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: Desire, jouissance, love

The famous philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that we are “condemned to freedom”. For Sartre this meant that we are responsible beings. However we are not merely responsible for the decisions we make. In addition to this he drew out how we are also responsible for the decisions we postpone or fail to act on. This [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: freedom, responsibility, Sartre

The title of this post relates to a (probably apocryphal) story from Northern Ireland in which a group of young lads stop a man who is walking down the street and asked him in a threatening way, “are you a Protestant or a Catholic?” The man responds by pointing out that he is actually from [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: Injustice, Listening, Northern Ireland, Other

Within religious circles the word “demonic” is generally used to describe something either actual or fictional. In the conservative/fundamentalist world demons are real beings who travel around the world creating mischief. On the other side people from the progressive/liberal tradition tend to think of demons and the demonic as terms that were used by pre-scientific [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: demon possession, Demonic, Lacan, virtual

At an event I curated recently the musician Duke Special performed a magical gig that moved us all deeply. One of the songs that particularly struck a cord with me was called, “Condition” (which I would recommend listening to while reading the rest of this post) The song itself captures something profoundly insightful about the human experience, an insight that I would like [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: Duke Special, Ego-Ideal, Ideal-Ego, Lacan, Pyrotheology, theology

I remember being in a nightclub with a good friend of mine in Belfast. It was late and the place was filled with music, laughter and dance. But in the midst of the entertainment I could see something else going on behind the manifest aesthetic pleasure. Despite all the seeming affirmation of life one could [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: brokenness, Kierkegaard, Pyrotheology

In classificatory systems the proletariat is not, strictly speaking, a class at all. Amidst the multitude of different classes (both actual and possible) the proletariat marks those who are excluded from the class system as such. Hence Marx was not particularly interested in class conflict. For Marx the primary conflict was not between various classes, but rather between the various [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: Dirt, Kester Brewin, Marx, Marxism, Paul, Proletariat

The great Illusionist Derren Brown recently asked an group of people to bring the picture of a loved one to a gathering (a cheap copy rather than some original). When people arrived at the venue with their pictures he held up a Satanic Bible and described an eleventh century rite contained within it. The rite itself was [...]

Posted in Blog, Philosophy/Theology | Tags: ambiguity, complexity, Derren Brown, doubt, early church, Paul, Radical Theology