De Larrabeiti’s Borribles children’s/young adult fantasy trilogy was written and published between 1976 and 1986, a period of huge political, social and economic change in the UK. Set in London, it tells the story of Borribles, a group of children who have had a ‘bad start’ in life and become Borrible; ‘wild’ children with pointed ears who can nev…[Read more]

This paper seeks to examine whether daemons (which take the shape of animals) and familiar animals indicate the social class of characters in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Both series of books for young people were started at a time when neo-liberal politics were at the forefront of government, both in the late years of John Major’s C…[Read more]

This paper discusses approaches to pedagogy outlined in three series of books for children and young adults. By the end of the presentation, I hope to have outlined what the education systems in these novels says about the culture and society presented in these books. The books are: JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jonathan Stroud’s Bar…[Read more]

This draft handout accompanied in-class discussion and instruction. There are two key objectives: 1) to model the practices of critical note taking, including close reading, connection making, and question asking; and 2) to document the first assigned reading from Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit. This handout covers the first three c…[Read more]

Legion, one of the most recent iterations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) on television, takes an unconventional road to remediating the 1960s as a cultural period.

This CSTOnline blog post takes a look at the current resurgence of science fiction on television, and discusses these recent trends along the example of The Expanse, an adaptation of the successful space opera penned by scifi author James S. A. Corey.

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

“The thesis investigates the case of the modern Television drama series FlashForward and sets out to chart the employment of concepts of Collective Memory Studies in the narrative in order to reflect upon the ways of how social perceptions of the past and Collective Memory are remediated in the course of the narrative.
To achieve that goal, the…[Read more]

This critical commentary argues that the novels submitted (emphasis on Ammonite, The Blue Place, and Hild, with three others, Slow River, Stay, and Always briefly referenced), form a coherent body of work which centres and norms the experience of the Other, particularly queer women. Close reading of the novels demonstrates how specific word-choice…[Read more]

This essay begins by offering some observations about how holiness was comprehended and expressed in Victorian and Edwardian England. In addition to the ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ that characterised society, notions of holiness were shaped by, and developed in reaction to, dominant philosophical movements; notably, the Enlightenment and Romanti…[Read more]

Published in PCANZ Global Mission – Why, Where, and How (Wellington: Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2014).

Abstract: Why does the Church need the world? This paper seeks to explore what today’s Church might learn from secular ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’ as part of its ongoing mission to, for and with the world that God so loves. In particular, it will investigate the role that poets, dramatists and other artists might play in identifying humanism’…[Read more]

‘Mission and the Priesthood of Christ’. Candour 7 (May 2013), 7–11.

‘Fighting Troll-Demons in Vaults of the Mind and Heart – Art, Tragedy and Sacramentality: Some Observations from Ibsen, Forsyth and Dostoevsky’. Princeton Theological Review 13, no. 1 (2007), 61–85.

‘“That God May Have Mercy Upon All”: A Review-Essay of Matthias Gockel’s Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election’. Journal of Reformed Theology 2, no. 2 (2008), 113–30.