I’m pleased to share four recent pieces that have found their way into print in recent months, each exploring different facets of what it means to pay attention—to art, to theology, to culture, and to the world after certainty has departed.

Rethinking Nicaea from the Margins

Together with John Flett, I contributed “The Heresy of Nicaea and the Jesus of Colony” to Receiving Nicaea Today: Global Voices from Reformed Perspectives (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt). The essay questions how the Nicene formulations functioned—and continue to function—within colonial frameworks. We ask what it means to receive this Christian creed from perspectives shaped by the experience of empire’s violence, and how orthodoxy itself can become a form of theological imperialism.

Photography as Attention

In “Attention in Harry Nankin’s Photography Practice: Assisting Nature to Write Itself,” published in Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic), I introduce the work of the Australian photographer Harry Nankin, locating it in a tradition of cameraless photography and highlighting its key concerns vis-à-vis matters of attention, which are made equally concrete in Nankin’s processes and the subjects themselves. I then propose that Nankin’s art practice shares some analogies with that of an iconographer or, more exactly, with one who recognises and indexes icons. This reckons with certain convictions Nankin shares about nature’s communicative character and how he, therefore, understands the place and responsibility of the human artist.

Engaging with Paul Mitchell’s Poetry

My review of Paul Mitchell’s High Spirits appears in the latest edition of TEXT. Mitchell’s collection presents a vigorous conversation with existence itself through poetry that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, balancing spiritual depth with artistic sophistication while finding transcendence in ordinary life. The collection addresses contemporary existence through intimate portraits of marriage, family, and Australian suburban life alongside broader cultural and environmental concerns, all rendered in an accessible yet profound conversational tone marked by humour and wisdom. Mitchell’s work demonstrates how careful attention to the world reveals it as sufficient and potentially sacred, offering poetry that connects rather than obscures, in a tradition that labours under the burden of modernity’s “broken contract” (George Steiner) between language and reality.

On Attention and Absence

Finally, my essay “On Being Called to Attention ‘After the Gods have Departed'” appears in Gesher. This short piece wrestles with what happens when traditional structures of meaning recede, and how we might cultivate forms of attention that don’t depend on what has been lost. The title gestures toward that strange condition of modernity: how do we attend to what matters when the old guarantees of significance have withdrawn? The essay engages with work of three witnesses: Simone Weil, Harry Nankin, and Edward Said.

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These pieces circle around related concerns: the quality of our attention in a disenchanted age, the politics embedded in theological language, poetry’s ongoing argument with reality, and the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practice. Each represents a different register—scholarly, collaborative, analytical, critical—but all share an interest in how we show up to the world, and what might show up when we do.

PDFs of all four pieces are available here on my website.