​About my Substack Posts
I've started using Substack to share reflections and musings. Please scroll down or use the menu to find out more, or to subscribe to one or both of my sites.
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Most posts are currently free and open to non-subscribers, but there is also a paid option on the gender site—Through a Glass Darkly. This gives access to the archive and to some full posts. I'm trying to find a balance between maintaining a free and open forum as a way of initiating dialogue and encouraging the sharing of ideas, and needing to generate an income now that I've left my paid academic post. Becoming a creative free spirit is costly! Ten percent of all the income I generate through paid posts goes towards the Catholic Women Speak Byseee Project that supports a school and community in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
If you're interested in following my work please consider becoming a subscriber. (Free subscribers are always welcome so no pressure). I welcome all who would like to engage in an informed and respectful dialogue with my writing, which occupies a fluid space between the creativity of reading and writing fiction and poetry, and the rigour of maintaining academic integrity with regard to more research-related posts.
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Thank you for your interest in my work. Engagement, dialogue and feedback sustain and motivate me more than you can imagine!
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This Substack site began as a research diary for a book I'm writing, contracted to Oxford University Press, engaging with Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, "Laudato Si': Our Common Home". It has however spread out to cover different subjects, as my reflections on nature and language, meaning and desire, take me down many different avenues.
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The phrase "Listening to the Essence of Things" comes from Josef Pieper's book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which is an important source of inspiration for my research and reflections. The photograph is a moment of pure joy when I was swimming in the sea at sunset one evening in winter.
"Listening to the Essence of Things": links to posts
Much of my academic teaching and research has focused on issues to do with theology and gender, in engagement with psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, feminism, and art. As debates about sex and gender become increasingly complex, contested, and agonistic, I am revisiting some of my ideas as I grapple with the challenges posed to scholars like myself by questions of gender and sexual identities.​
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I've started a separate Substack site to explore these questions and to share some of my writings. Those who are interested in these issues and the existential, ethical, and theological challenges they pose might like to subscribe to this site and engage in the dialogue.
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The image is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's early 16th century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
"Through a Glass Darkly": Reflections on Gender: links to posts
