I have a new essay out: ‘Christ as Strange(r): The Elusiveness of Jesus in the Work of Nick Cave and Julie Dowling’. In Seeing Christ in Australia Since 1850, edited by Kerrie Handasyde and Sean Winter, 149–66. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

The Abstract reads:

Strangely, Australian theologians have mostly been quite uninterested in pursuing the question of what an Australian Jesus might be like. This suggests an investment in a theological methodology at odds with the disruptive and inverting character of the presentations of Jesus offered in the Second Testament, wherein questions arising from particular contexts were considered basic for responsible theological work. Conversely, the figure of Jesus has occupied an endearing and idiosyncratic place in the broader Australian imagination. This essay represents an effort to listen to what two contemporary Australian artists—Nick Cave and Julie Dowling—make of Jesus and to consider some implications of their contributions for doing theology in Australia. Their work recognises that the question of Jesus’ identity and the countless cultures in which Jesus is woven cannot be unbraided, however interruptive and strange such a reality may prove to be. In testing the claim that it is only as a stranger that Jesus is ever a sign of the divine life among us, the essay is also an invitation to relinquish efforts to domesticate or homogenise Jesus. To experience this stranger is to experience one who ‘appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed’ (Judith Butler) of them. This is the event that disrupts, disorients, and dissolves any sense one may enjoy of history’s continuity or possession. Recognition of this stranger is only ever the measure of our failure.