New Book Announcement: Beyond Super-Nature

Very excited to announce / reveal / admit that I’m most of the way through a new (short) book, which I’m hoping to have available by early April.

The book begins with Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and uses Prospero’s renunciation of magic as a way of opening up an archetype of the move ‘beyond super-nature’ that we see in many other works.

Like Mutiny it’s very much ‘implicit theology.’ Each short chapter builds the argument by reflecting on a different piece of fiction – and currently moves through The Tempest to Harry Potter, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Watchmen, The Prestige and out again through Macbeth.

The conclusion will be more explicitly theological, and make what I hope is a key and very new contribution to the area of radical theology that Mutiny opened up.

It’s not going to be a long book, lyrical in style, and I’ll likely self-publish it as I did with Mutiny (unless someone out there in publishing is very keen?)

I was going to hold off saying this until it was totally ready to go as I’ve sort of being focusing on fiction and writing this in the background, but I spoke with Pete Rollins yesterday, and we realised that we’d both been reflecting on similar themes, so thought it’d be right to put something out there.

Pete mentioned something on Facebook about a work he’s just finishing, and you’ll note that we are both using ideas of magic as a lens through which to examine theological ideas. There’s no coincidence here: back in October when we were doing some speaking together we talked about this at length, partly springing from a series of blog posts I’d written. Pete and I spoke at length on the phone about it yesterday, and what’s great is that we’re both writing very different pieces, Pete’s more explicitly theological and drawing on works of philosophy to create a strong theoretical backbone, and mine much more focused on how these themes have emerged very regularly in works of literature and film. I love the work that he’s been doing, and am really looking forward to reading how he’s developed things since our discussions in autumn.

In other words, it’s going to be an exciting year for anyone interested in the work we’re doing! I’ll be speaking about the the themes in the book for the first time at the Subverting the Norm conference in April in the US, where I’ll also be doing a session in conversation with Pete. More news when I have it.