Today is Holocaust Memorial Day

Remember.

Hegelian Christology in/and Andrew Shanks

Is the title of the paper I’ll be giving on 17th of Feb at postgrad seminar of Nazarene Theological College in Manchester at 11am if anyone’s interested in popping along it could probably be arranged.

In other news, I’ve recently finished reading Antonio Tabucchi’s wonderful little novel Pereira Maintains. Highly recommended.

Patriotism conference

At Manchester.

A late poem by Gillian Rose

During the last weeks of her life, when Gillian Rose was finally succumbing to the cancer that she had lived with for two and a half years, hospitalised, Rose continued to write daily. Howard Caygill published extracts from these final notebooks. Amongst the various pericopae is this text.

God is not nice

God is not Uncle

God is an earthquake

Louth conference registration form

Go here to download the registration form. Then print it and send it to book your place!

Two American novels

I’ve read this month Updike’s Terrorist and Roth’s American Pastoral. I was slightly disappointed with both, though that may be presumptuous. For some reason I just don’t connect well with Updike. He’s very observant and very good at description but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the ending. I thought he handled the main character very well though and offered a good picture of the pluralism of the contemporary US. Roth’s AP was much bigger in size and scope. It’s a history of Newark and a family therein but really it’s also the history of the US for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. It focuses on immigrant families and industry, on religious relations, and the moral landscape. It is a lament and there’s a lot of anger there; some humour but mostly tragedy. The writing doesn’t quite have the fireworks of Sabbath’s Theatre but it has excellent dialogue. There’s also some good stuff early on about subjectivity (quite Hegelian, I thought). The only reason I was disappointed was because it is so hyped and I’m just not sure it deserves it.

Another link on research and universities

Here.

Two links

A very amusing picture partially drawn by my friend Jonny.

And my friend Josh alerted me to this fascinating looking conference.