I’m using these Substack posts to share reflections and musings, some of which are part of the research process for a book I’m writing on creation, gender, desire, and language, contracted by Oxford University Press. The book is a dialogue with Pope Francis’s theology, written in a fluid and wide-ranging style that draws on many different sources in its quest for a language of desire and embodiment that might reposition us in relation to the natural world of which we are a part.
As I develop this site, I realize that it follows the meandering pathways of my thoughts, questions, and insights. Some of these are more relevant to the research than others, but they are all part of the process of asking what it means to be alive in these troubled times, and what meanings are yet to be discovered in silence and the poetics of life.
This image by Sarah Harvey, ‘Cubist Waters’, was on the cover of my 2013 book, Theology After Postmodernity: Divining the Void. I’ve chosen it for this website, because its fluid image of the cruciform female body floating in an indeterminate state of becoming or ceasing to be gives visual expression to how I experience myself as a body that writes on the brink of unknowing—and also because one of my sustaining joys in life is plunging into the sea near my home, spring and summer, autumn and winter, as a reminder of the infinite otherness of time and space.
Why subscribe?
All of my posts are currently free. When I establish a more regular habit of writing for Substack, I’ll introduce a paid option with access to more material, but I’ll always welcome free subscribers. I hope that anyone with an interest in joining the conversation will sign up and share this intellectual/existential quest with me. Your engagement is what I value most.
To find out about my other theological publications, please visit my website at this link. You can also read reviews of my novels and order them through my website or through other booksellers at this link to my publishing imprint, Christabel Press.
