A volume of Augustine in Conversation: Tradition and Innovation (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield). Coming in 2027.

Abstract: Prose poem.

Appearances: Sarah Lawrence Literary Review 2024-25 Ed., Melange: A Journal of Prose Poetry and the Arts, Princeton University, Vol. I.

Abstract: The duende is that mysterious presence in art which makes our hair stand on end, causes our blood to quicken, and our breath to change; the force “everyone feels and no philosopher has explained,” so sayeth Goethe; “a struggle, not a thought” so sayeth poet and activist Federico García Lorca. 

This paper draws on studies of technology, Western secularity, and indigenous epistemologies to investigate the duende as a "more-than-human" agency, one that we can collaborate with to put pressure on what “art” means now. In the transition to modernity, our relationships with more-than-human beings sunk beneath explicit discourse about reality. As AI acts as a mirror for what modernity values most about human capabilities, the duende reminds us of the importance of seeing the language of the narrativizing mind versus being in the action of the sensing body. This paper argues against a mechanistic view of the earth, world, and ourselves. We are participants in a living cosmos, one that is alive with communication and collaboration. Our inheritance is not limited to scientific materialism: our other inheritances, including animism and the wisdom found in our bodies and art-making, may be up to the task of handling the shifts we’re experiencing with AI. 

By acknowledging our co-creative participation in a more-than-human cosmos, and the commitments that entails, we might find modes of art-making through animistic practices of relation; and, we may heal the rupture between tech (technology/technique) and art that lives in the space of rupture between thought and struggle.

Appearance: The Art of Hospitality: International Conference for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. (2025)

Abstract: I offer an illustration of the enclosure that various models of transhumanism,‬ posthumanism, and singularitarianism are already enacting upon human possibilities, through‬ the lens of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and its inhabitants, particularly the character of‬ Sméagol/Gollum. I argue that Jung’s active imagination, a similar practice to Tolkien’s‬ invention (Latin root:‬‭ invenire‬‭ , meaning “to find”) of Middle-earth, is an act of wayfinding, a‬ practice of knowledge-making in which the “tools” of time, including language, embodiment,‬ and storytelling, are implemented. The practice of wayfinding moves along temporalities that‬ are distinctly at odds with those of the Transhumanist Movement, even though both narratives‬ contain Christian mappings of time.‬

‭To illustrate what this means in practice, I compare the temporalities of the wayfinding practices‬ of Gollum and the Hobbits against the (at the time of writing, speculatory) homogeneous,‬ autonomous temporalities of transhumanists who opt to upload their consciousnesses into the‬ deathless Cloud. Ultimately, I argue that Gollum’s fate may be more desirable than the fate of‬‭ those who turn permanently away from the mysteries of reality – that is, anything which cannot‬ be signified or represented to completion – in favor of “living” forever.‬

Appearance: Sacred Arts in a Pluralistic Society: An Inter-Religious Conference at Vancouver School of Theology. Vancouver, BC. (2024)