Matthew John Paul Tan

Why are zombies consuming the popular imagination? This book--part social analysis, part theological critique, and part devotional--considers how the zombie can be a way to critically situate our culture, awash with consumer products.

Matthew Tan considers how zombies are the endpoint of social theory's exploration of consumer culture and its postsecular turn towards an earthly immortality, enacted on the flesh of consumers.

The book also shows how zombies aid our appreciation of Christ's saving work. Through the lens of theology and the prayer of the Stations of the Cross, Tan incorporates social theory's insights on the zombie concerning postmodern culture's yearning for things beyond the flesh and also reveals some of social theory's blind spots. Turning to the Eucharist flesh of Christ, Tan challenges the zombie's secularized narrative of salvation of the flesh, one where flesh is saved by being consumed and made to die.

By contrast, Jesus saves by enacting an alternative logic of flesh, one that redeems the zombie's obsession with flesh by eucharistically giving it away. In doing so, Jesus saves by assuming the condition of the zombie, redirecting our logic of consumption and fulfilling our yearning for immortality.

Does social justice promote Christian unity? With reference to paragraph 12 of Unitatis Redintegratio—Vatican II's declaration on ecumenism—this book argues that an emphasis on justice and unity without proper consideration of social context actually risks obscuring a clear public declaration of Christ, by having Christians uncritically accept the presumptions that underpin the sociopolitical status quo. This constitutes a failure in Christian interpretation, the crux of which is a failure in ecclesiology. Matthew John Paul Tan suggests the beginnings of a corrective with reference to works by Pope Benedict XVI, theologians such as Graham Ward, and postmodern theorists like Michel Foucault. Ultimately, Tan invites the reader to begin considering how answering this seemingly simple question will implicate not only theology, but also philosophy and political theory, as well as considering the need for the church to engage in a bolder confessional politics in place of the politics of the public square often favored by Christian and non-Christian commentators.

This thesis examines how Christian interpretation is shaped by, and also shapes, the political contexts within which the Church is situated. The ecclesial identification of, and response to, sites of political violence serves as this thesis’ primary point of reference. It argues that ecclesiology, the imaging of the Church as the Body of Christ, constitutes the central node that shapes the Church's reading of the political signs of the times generated by other social bodies. Because the central investigation necessarily implicates both theology and social theory, this thesis begins by identifying frameworks of sociopolitical analysis that properly correlate the two fields. It will critique approaches shaped by the assumptions of Modern social science, whose obsession with autonomous and strategic self-maximization, together with what is only scientifically verifiable, lead to a deliberate a priori exclusion of “irrational” religion. It will also critique seemingly “postmodern” analyses that betray lingering Modern influences, and argue for a more thoroughgoing postmodernism in which individuals, communities, materiality and transcendence operate harmoniously with one another. It will then employ Graham Ward's cultural hermeneutics as the framework that not only exhibits this thoroughgoing postmodernism, but also engages all aspects of this thesis’ inquiry.

Through the lens of Ward’s cultural hermeneutics, this thesis will show how ecclesiology emerges from practical engagements between the Church as a social configuration with other social configurations. It will explain the implication of corporeal practices and the imagination in the formation of such configurations, or social imaginaries. It will then demonstrate how the recruitment of bodies into communal practices in turn either weaken or strengthen one imaginary vis a vis another. However, in the course of these shifts in corporeal configurations around the Church, the thesis will also show how ecclesiologies themselves will slowly lose their persuasive power. This creates with the Church a need for communal reconfiguration to facilitate a reading of the contemporary signs of the times.

The next four chapters outline how political change grounded in overlapping corporeal and communal practices conditioned three twentieth century Roman Catholic ecclesiological archetypes: the "Perfect Society", "Mystical Body" and "Nuptial Communion". This analysis will take place by reference to four key historical episodes: the European liberal and industrial revolutions, the age of the dictators in Germany and Italy, post-war Latin America and late-Soviet Poland. In each episode, this thesis will show how the image of the Body of Christ became conditioned by a specific combination of practices operating within political, intellectual and ecclesial sites of power. It will also outline how that image in turn conditioned the practices that engaged the sites of political violence, and show how and why each image, and the practices that sprung from it, eventually desiccated.

The thesis concludes with a critical reflection, via a set of thematic constants, on the implications of the historical data for ecclesiology and the Church’s evangelical mission in light of its contemporary context. Focal points include the need for ecclesial vigilance in light of the imaging of the Body of Christ by reference to non-Christian contexts, attention to the recruitment of bodies as evangelical practices, the ubiquity of deference to authority and the stubborn allure of defining the political realm by reference to statecraft. It will then look to contemporary processes of "descularisation" and the increasing recognition of the salience of ritual and show how desire and liturgy can act as avenues for the emergence of new forms of ecclesial politics, where credible claims of the Gospel can be advanced without being beholden to the distortions that proceed from the assumptions inherent in Modern cultural forms.      

With reference to Andrew Linklater’s The Transformation of Political Community, this article explores how liturgical practices contribute to the critique of the exclusionary bias baked into the dominant international system. It begins by regarding the system as not a given but a series of standpoints, each of which bears the capacity for interpreting and transforming political reality. This article then looks at the directions that a liturgical transformation of political reality can take. It will explore the implications of a liturgical ontology of participation, before looking at how the liturgy redefines terms of citizenship and provides an avenue to engage with difference.

This paper will investigate the future salience of systematic theology by applying Sarah Coakley’s work on contemplative prayer as a lens to evaluate a cultural context increasingly circumscribed by the internet. More specifically, it will evaluate the Church’s enthusiastic embrace of cybernetic forms, from online services to the establishment of churches in Second Life, as part of its evangelising mission and of cybernetically extending the Body of Christ. This paper argues that a sharp critique of this enthusiasm can be launched with the realisation that deep parallels exist between the processes of immersing oneself within cyberspace and those of contemplative prayer as outlined by Sarah Coakley. Ultimately, this paper will argue that far from a neutral instrument or even a cultural form, cyberspace constitutes an interesting, but ultimately deficient version of Christian contemplative prayer. This paper argues that cyberspace is a manifestation of a posthuman anthropology that has several important overlaps with Christian subjectivity, decentring the autonomous Enlightenment subject, affirming the deep need for others in defining self, and rehabilitating the necessity for submission to authority. However, an uncritical celebration of cybernetics’ promises often ignores theological undercurrents that lie beneath their manifestations. Attention is given first to a neo-Gnosticism which denigrates humanity as embodied subjects. Also, the centrality of coding evinces an anti-incarnationalism that encourages the breaking up of concrete bodies, biological and social, for the sake of more universally superior, digitised alternatives. The paper concludes by proposing a way for the Body of Christ to navigate these poles by reference to the linking and juxtaposition of the Church’s cybernetic context to its sacramental worship.

This article seeks to contribute to the study of the logic driving religious actors by exploring the incorporation of theology into social scientific research. It will expose the limitations of orthodox methods with prematurely exclude the legitimacy of theological variables before they are even explored. It will also show how current postmodern approaches and even some models that purport to posit social action as participation in a transcendent order, end up shying away from full engagement with the transcendent and prove themselves to be pale replicas of methodological orthodoxy. However, this article argues that one particular substrand of the "transcendent order" argument, Radical Orthodoxy, surpasses these models through its serious engagement with transcendence as expressed in temporal particularity. …those who thought that religion and politics could be kept separate, understood neither religion nor politics

Abstract The question concerning the boundary between the religious and political is a continuously vexing question for Christians who want to contribute to public life and those who want to engage public life in a manner that is consistent with their spiritual lives. This article argues that the spiritual life, enacted in the practice of prayer, is not incidental to public life but actually constitutes a unique politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many political presumptions of the status quo. The article will first look more generally at the relationship between practice and theory, before analysing how the embodied nature of prayer implicates the contours of a new public body. This new body in turn suggests new contours of what it means to be a political subject, new terms of citizenship, and flowing from that, a new kind of political modus vivendi, exemplified by new attitudes to the necessity of survival in politics.

Due to its status as a nearly unavoidable source of communication, it is important to reflect on the way Facebook presents time to its users – especially to users who are members of the Church. While Facebook’s presentation of time can be detrimental to the faith of the Church’s members and Her mission, a liturgical (specifically Eucharistic) approach to time – because it is a point from which barriers of time and space are transcended – can serve as a counter for the faithful to unite under.

This paper will focus on one element of the pushback against the massive influx of immigrants taken in for humanitarian purposes, namely, an identity-based chauvinism which uses identity as the point of resistance to the perceived dilution of that identity, brought about by the transformation of culture induced by the incorporation of a foreign other. The solution to this perceived dilution is a simultaneous defence of that culture and a demand for a conformity to it. While those in the critical tradition have encouraged a counter-position of revolutionary transformation by the other through ethics, dialogue, or the multitude, such a transformation is arguably impeded by what is ultimately a repetition of the metaphysics of conformity. Drawing on the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and the Eucharistic theology of Creston Davis and Aaron Riches, this paper submits an alternative identity politics position that completes the revolutionary impulse. Identity here is not the flashpoint o...

This article addresses post-Cold War theological discourses in relation to socio-political action. It seeks to demonstrate the limitations of modern Behaviouralism which either excludes theology or pigeonholes it within a purely materialist schema. It also proposes a theological framework for investigating socio-political activity in context of a transcendent order. This involves the advocacy of the position known as Radical Orthodoxy in which postmodern thought is freed from the constraints of modernity. (Editor)

This paper will focus Jacques Ellul’s insights onto the manner in which our modern technological society is deeply ingrained in the subordination of both humanity and nature to efficient use. Ellul maintains that our way of life is characterised by structural instrumentalism, which is in turn underpinned by a distorted theological outlook. The paper asserts that these aforementioned factors together form the key drivers that propel us towards environmental desolation. This paper asserts that no adequate fine tuning of our present way of life will be possible to address issues such as climate change. What is needed instead is the comprehensive sociological and theological conversion of our society. This paper will conclude by tentatively exploring ways in which the church might proclaim and embody a prophetic message of repentance and conversion in this and other socio-cultural matters.

This article argues that the contemporary acceptability of abortion is not solely due to the Liberal imperative to exercise individual choice. Rather, abortion's acceptability needs to be explained with reference to the techniques of consumer culture. This article will begin by explaining how practices in general predispose one to gravitate towards one form of practices rather than another. It will then look at how consumer practices generate a biopolitics of economic efficiency and corporeal commodification which culminates in a politics of visibility. Under such conditions, even basic categories like mere existence is dependent on its ability to be displayed for public view. This article will conclude by reflecting on the necessity of forging the Church not as a subsection of a public framed by consumerism, but as an alternative public in its own right. This article is available in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: http://researchonline.nd....

This work explores the ways in which the anime of Makoto Shinkai cinematically portrays the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. The article will explore each virtue individually, with specific reference to the work of Josef Pieper and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In addition, it will juxtapose their explorations of these virtues with samples of Shinkai’s corpus of films. It will assert that the consistency of Shinkai’s work reveals several important parallels with the theological virtues. Faith is the encounter between one and another that reveals one’s nature. Hope is revealed by the distance between one and another, and is realised in traversing that distance to achieve an ecstatic reunion. Love, as the erotic attraction between one and another, is the driver that also sustains the journey and closes the distance. In spite of the similarities, important differences between the cinematic and theological will be highlighted.

This work explores the ways in which the anime of Makoto Shinkai cinematically portrays the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. The article will explore each virtue individually, with specific reference to the work of Josef Pieper and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In addition, it will juxtapose their explorations of these virtues with samples of Shinkai’s corpus of films. It will assert that the consistency of Shinkai’s work reveals several important parallels with the theological virtues. Faith is the encounter between one and another that reveals one’s nature. Hope is revealed by the distance between one and another, and is realised in traversing that distance to achieve an ecstatic reunion. Love, as the erotic attraction between one and another, is the driver that also sustains the journey and closes the distance. In spite of the similarities, important differences between the cinematic and theological will be highlighted.

This paper will focus on one element of the pushback against the massive influx of immigrants taken in for humanitarian purposes, namely, an identity-based chauvinism which uses identity as the point of resistance to the perceived dilution of that identity, brought about by the transformation of culture induced by the incorporation of a foreign other. The solution to this perceived dilution is a simultaneous defence of that culture and a demand for a conformity to it. While those in the critical tradition have encouraged a counter-position of revolutionary transformation by the other through ethics, dialogue, or the multitude, such a transformation is arguably impeded by what is ultimately a repetition of the metaphysics of conformity. Drawing on the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and the Eucharistic theology of Creston Davis and Aaron Riches, this paper submits an alternative identity politics position that completes the revolutionary impulse. Identity here is not the flashpoint of a self-serving conflict, but the launch-point of politics of self-emptying, whose hallmarks include, on the one hand, a never-ending reception of transformation by the other, and on the other hand, an anchoring in the Body of Christ that is at once ever-changing and never-changing.

This work would apply Girardian analyses on the novel to the television series Dexter. It begins by arguing that the series constitutes a dramatised novel by Dexter Morgan, in view of the constant reflections not only of his life, but also the lives of others, all of which form a narrative backdrop to each episode in the series.

Framing Dexter as a novel helps explain two interconnecting things: the prevalence of Dexter's engagement with religious motifs and his transformation from self-serving enthusiast to other-centred family man and rescuer. However, the transformation seen in Dexter as the Dexterian novel progresses falls short of a Girardian conversion in which “the last distinctions between novelistic and religious experiences are abolished”, a failure evinced by the continuation of Dexter's pattern of killing forming the primary backdrop of the whole series, even whilst the transformation is taking place. With reference to Gil Bailie's analysis of the trial of Susanna in the Book of Daniel in Violence Unveiled, this paper attributes the continuation of Dexter's pattern of violence to the continuing temporal immanence of his religious encounters and responses.

Invitation to the launch of "Justice, Unity & the Hidden Christ" in Gleebooks in Sydney, 24th October 2014 at 6pm.

Does Social Justice Generate Christian Unity? Features speeches from Ben Myers and Robert Tilley.
Could you please RSVP by 17th October by clicking on the link to Gleebooks and following the prompts?

http://www.gleebooks.com.au/BookingRetrieve.aspx?ID=185180

The question concerning the boundary between the religious and political is a continuously vexing question for Christians who want to contribute to public life and those who want to engage public life in a manner that is consistent with their spiritual lives.

This article argues that the spiritual life, enacted in the practice of prayer, is not incidental to public life but actually constitutes a  unique politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many political presumptions of the status quo.

The article will first look more generally at the relationship between practice and theory, before analysing how the embodied nature of prayer implicates the contours of a new public body. This
new body in turn suggests new contours of what it means to be a political subject, new terms of citizenship, and flowing from that, a new kind of political modus vivendi, exemplified by new attitudes to the necessity of survival in politics.

This article argues that the contemporary acceptability of abortion is not solely due to the Liberal imperative to exercise individual choice. Rather, abortion's acceptability needs to be explained with reference to the techniques of consumer culture. This article will begin by explaining how practices in general predispose one to gravitate towards one form of practices rather than another. It will then look at how consumer practices generate a biopolitics of economic efficiency and corporeal commodification which culminates in a politics of visibility. Under such conditions, even basic categories like mere existence is dependent on its ability to be displayed for public view. This article will conclude by reflecting on the necessity of forging the Church not as a subsection of a public framed by consumerism, but as an alternative public in its own right.

This piece will reconcile what many Christians regard as two irreconcilable elements, a more integral Christian public life, and a situation of cultural, social and indeed moral pluralism. The work suggests ways in which the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome can contribute to resolving this seeming dichotomy, showing the plural nature of our confession and the Christocentrism that is necessary to fully live life in a pluralistic context.

Benedict XVI's call to expand reason's horizons requires attention to the political frameworks that allows any enlarged reason to operate. A re-hellenised reason cannot fully operate in the current secular "public sphere" framework. Not only are the framework’s horizons so narrow as to bar faith from entry in discourse. The presumption of the framework’s neutrality, allowing equal freedom to all perspectives, ignores the fact that the framework itself is an evangelical force that preempts Christianity and turns citizens into captive "disciples" of an inherently violent agnosticism before communication even begins.

Expanding reason's horizons must be coupled with interrupting the existing framework’s hegemony, an inescapably political project since it involves the transformation of political communities. This transformation is evangelical to the extent that it consists in the recruitment of people into practices that sustain political communities. What distinguishes Christian frameworks from the current is that the former is built on the force of truth whilst the latter is built on the truth of force.

Recognition of the link between reason, politics and evangelism gives the Church legitimacy as a political actor, allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission, and provide a political context for authentically ecumenical and inter-cultural relations.

Article explores the  contribution that particular sets of religious practices can make to the building of conditions for peaceful coexistence.

It argues that the Eucharist reimagines the political status quo. Starting from an exploration of the way the Eucharist reimagines our conception of time, the article then explores how our conceptions of citizenship become transformed from a static state-centric conception of currently living compatriots, to one where living, dead and generations not yet born are brought into a Eucharistic polis.

Such reimagining is coupled with practices that together enact a “social imaginary” that resists the violence of the state. The Eucharist provides a counter-ontology of original peace contra the ontology of violence inherent in state disciplines. Also, liturgical narrative practice can resist discursive reappropriation of disembodied “values” to justify bellicose actions by the state.

The longing to connect between two people in very distant worlds (temporal or otherwise) is a key theme of anime director Makoto Shinkai – a theme which lends itself to the thought of theologians Josef Pieper and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

In this presentation, Dr Matthew Tan explores the theme of bridging people and worlds in the work of anime director Makoto Shinkai and how this relates to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

Have you ever seen an ad that made you feel like being anywhere but here? Have you ever thought what that might have to do with the Christian life? In this presentation, Dr. Matthew Tan will look at advertising, TV series, movies and music videos to explore how we need to take seriously the deep linkages that pop culture’s trope of escape has with the Christian tradition. He will also identify the serious divergences that pop culture’s version of escape has with the Christian, and explore how true escape is necessary, and possible, in Jesus Christ.

"This paper asserts that the postmodern city, far from being "materialistic" in the sense of denying the supernatural aspects of the person, is engaged in an orgiastic celebration of it. The
postmodern city has harnessed the soul, commodifying it and disciplining it to suit the generation of private profit.

The paper will establish its case with reference to the theme of running away, a theme cemented in pop culture through songs like Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run", movies like "the Island", TV
series such as “Prison Break” and games such as “Assassin's Creed” . Rather than deny the existence of the soul, the postmodern city and the pop culture it nurtures are but formations in which the inner and transcendent space of the soul is turned outward and made purely immanent.

The postmodern city does not so much sell products as present a secularised “story of a soul” to the consumer. The story begins with notions of confinement of the body from which a soul is trained to yearn to escape. More specifically, the soul is trained to find opportunities to act on this yearning for escape via an array of commodities and services made available for consumption by the
postmodern city. However, the facile nature of the secular “story of a soul”, combined with the sheer immanence of the means of the soul's escape, means that the scope of the soul's running away goes no further than the surface of the commodities that are consumed by the body, or the body of someone else (which
has been rendered a commodity anyway).

This paper argues that Christian theology should be sympathetic to the yearning of the runaway soul within secular culture, since the theme of escape within secular culture finds parallels that runs right through the Christian tradition. Scripture, the Patristic writings (such as Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa) and Liturgy attest to a God-given impulse to escape improper confinement, upon which secular culture preys. This paper asserts that this sympathy must at the same time be coupled with a recognition that it presents a Christian account of the runaway soul that correlates transcendence with particularity which at once correct the sheer immanence, shallowness and abstractness of the
secular counterpart."

Is the Matrix already a reality? We look at our culture's fascination with cyberspace and electronics, and see the diverse ways in which to realise our desire to go beyond our bodily limations through cybernetic means.

At first glance, Christians may look at these as instruments to make life easier, and even see them as new avenues of building community and spreading the Gospel. But do these conveniences blind us to an anti-theology of the Body, that produces an atomistic and even anti-sacramental way of life?

How are we to make sense of cyberculture? Is it all bad? If not, can it be redeemed?

Is the Matrix already a reality? We look at our culture's fascination with cyberspace and electronics, and see the diverse ways in which to realise our desire to go beyond our bodily limations through cybernetic means.

At first glance, Christians may look at these as instruments to make life easier, and even see them as new avenues of building community and spreading the Gospel. But do these conveniences blind us to an anti-theology of the Body, that produces an atomistic and even anti-sacramental way of life?

How are we to make sense of cyberculture? Is it all bad? If not, can it be redeemed?

Are we aware of what our culture is doing to us, how it is doing it, or what we can do in the face of it?

We look at how we inhabit our culture and how our culture acts on us as a type of evangelisation that counteracts the Christian Gospel, often without our knowing it.

What then can the bearers of the Christian Gospel do? Do we need an expansion of what it means to evangelise?

Religion’s challenge to the sovereign state is a question that has recently received wide ranging attention and has been the subject of a number of different arguments. Such arguments range from Hastings’s viewpoint that the Christian religion unwittingly inspired the ideology of nationalism, to Anderson’s argument that nationalism replaces traditional faiths as a new secular religion. The debate over this interaction becomes even more complex when attempting to understand how different religious expressions interact with the diverse nations and nationalisms found across the globe. However, this very diversity amongst individual nationalisms generally, and the wider general divide between Western and Eastern nationalisms, makes it imperative to pinpoint and analyse key similarities. In this presentation, we argue that a key trend amongst diverse nations both in the East and the West is the conscription of traditional religious ideologies to sacralise the ‘official’ nation as defined by the state.

In demonstrating our case, we will utilise war memorials as a common form of nationalist expression that bridges the gap between nations of all cultural persuasions across the East and the West. We will examine two war memorials, the National War Memorial in Canberra (Australia) and a regional war memorial in Denpasar, Bali (Indonesia). We argue that despite obvious external differences, they are united in their utilisation of the dominant local religious faith, namely Christianity and Hinduism respectively. This utilisation occurs through their juxtaposition of religiously themed artwork and architecture, with the symbols of the official state-sanctioned version of nationalism in order to create a narrative where religion implicitly supports and deifies the nation-state. In examining these two cases, we will discuss key similarities and differences. Examples of these include that Australia is a largely secular society, whereas Indonesia is constitutionally a religious society. Similarly, while Christianity is the most familiar religion to Australians, Hinduism is a minority religion in majority Muslim Indonesia. The differences between these two examples highlight the common processes occurring in both eastern and western states to link official nationalism to local religious practise and symbols.

In examining these two different war memorials and their utilisation of religious forms, we will argue that nationalism does not occur as a replacement of religion due to a decline in religious affiliation. Instead, using the framework developed by William T. Cavanaugh, we will demonstrate how the state actually conscripts forms of religious devotion, distorting that devotion through the injection into the original religious narrative of quasi-religious counterparts. Furthermore, we will develop his theory, to show how the state uses this to sacralize its official version of the nation, to the exclusion of other interpretations. We argue that the presentation of nationalist symbols, imagery and narratives in ways that mimic the original religious aesthetics and discursive threads have the effect of justifying the aggrandisement of the official nation as consonant with religious devotion. At the same time, we argue that through such mimicry there is a simultaneous steering of that religious devotion away from their original divine purpose, via a process of placing the state, through quasi-religious devotion to the official nation, as the pinnacle of the religious expression above the original divine object of worship.

Benedict XVI's call to expand reason's horizons requires attention to the political frameworks that allows any enlarged reason to operate. A re-hellenised reason cannot fully operate in the current secular "public sphere" framework. Not only are the framework’s horizons so narrow as to bar faith from entry in discourse. The presumption of the framework’s neutrality, allowing equal freedom to all perspectives, ignores the fact that the framework itself is an evangelical force that preempts Christianity and turns citizens into captive "disciples" of an inherently violent agnosticism before communication even begins.

Expanding reason's horizons must be coupled with interrupting the existing framework’s hegemony, an inescapably political project since it involves the transformation of political communities. This transformation is evangelical to the extent that it consists in the recruitment of people into practices that sustain political communities. What distinguishes Christian frameworks from the current is that the former is built on the force of truth whilst the latter is built on the truth of force.

Recognition of the link between reason, politics and evangelism gives the Church legitimacy as a political actor, allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission, and provide a political context for authentically ecumenical and inter-cultural relations.

Paper explores how the content of religious practices, particular the Christian Eucharistic Liturgy can be mobilised bring about changes to political communities, and with that build the conditions for the more peaceful coexistence.

Drawing mainly from the Radical Orthodoxy tradition, this paper also explores how the rituals of the Eucharist can engender a communal reimagination of the way we perceive the political communities we inhabit, and going further create new webs of relations to challenge those of the nation state.

The paper argues that the liturgy reinforces an ontology of participation contra the state’s ontology of violence. It argues that the rituals also redefine terms of citizenship, providing an avenue to engage with difference and provide an economic alternative to current political communities disciplined by capitalism.

Christians place great currency on freedom. With this in mind, the Church’s evangelical mission is often paralleled by attempts in establishing intercultural harmony or universal credibility as a member of civil society in the current state-centric political framework. This task of maintaining the freedom of citizens through these measures is seen as something isolated from the task of winning converts, yet compatible with its evangelical mission.

The Church cannot simultaneously carry out both these tasks. This is not because of the inconsistency of these goals, but because the current political framework’s banner of freedom masks the fact that the framework is an evangelical force, converting citizens bodies into “disciples” well before the Christian Gospel reaches their minds. Remaining in civil society therefore, is to assist in the spread of a secular Gospel.

Politics is therefore fundamentally evangelical to the extent that creating and maintaining any political framework overlaps with the recruitment of people’s bodies into practices that sustain political communities. Therefore, the Church’s contemporary evangelical mission must be intimately tied to the task of transforming the existing political framework by creating space for a reconfiguring the bodies therein. Recognition of the link between politics and conversion via corporeal recruitment gives the Church legitimacy as a political player and allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission.

This paper will investigate the future salience of systematic theology by applying Sarah Coakley’s work on contemplative prayer as a lens to evaluate a cultural context increasingly circumscribed by the internet. More specifically, it will evaluate the Church’s enthusiastic embrace of cybernetic forms, from online services to the establishment of churches in Second Life, as part of its evangelising mission and of cybernetically extending the Body of Christ. This paper argues that a sharp critique of this enthusiasm can be launched with the realisation that deep parallels exist between the processes of immersing oneself within cyberspace and those of contemplative prayer as outlined by Sarah Coakley. Ultimately, this paper will argue that far from a neutral instrument or even a cultural form, cyberspace constitutes an interesting, but ultimately deficient version of Christian contemplative prayer. This paper argues that cyberspace is a manifestation of a posthuman anthropology that has several important overlaps with Christian subjectivity, decentring the autonomous Enlightenment subject, affirming the deep need for others in defining self, and rehabilitating the necessity for submission to authority. However, an uncritical celebration of cybernetics’ promises often ignores theological undercurrents that lie beneath their manifestations. Attention is given first to a neo-Gnosticism which denigrates humanity as embodied subjects. Also, the centrality of coding evinces an anti-incarnationalism that encourages the breaking up of concrete bodies, biological and social, for the sake of more universally superior, digitised alternatives. The paper concludes by proposing a way for the Body of Christ to navigate these poles by reference to the linking and juxtaposition of the Church’s cybernetic context to its sacramental worship.

This presentation explores the potential contribution that particular sets of religious practices can make to the building of conditions for peaceful coexistence. It integrates and extends the literature on the political implications of the Christian Eucharistic Liturgy (more specifically the Roman Rite in its traditional and current forms), to provide a comprehensive focus on the specific issue of peacemaking.

It argues that the rituals of the Eucharist reimagine of the political status quo. Such reimagining is coupled with practices that together enact a “social imaginary” that resists the violence of the state. The Eucharist provides a counter-ontology of original peace contra the ontology of violence inherent in state disciplines. Also, liturgical narrative practice can resist discursive reappropriation of disembodied “values” to justify bellicose actions by the state. Finally, the liturgy generates an alternative web of relations that counters the violence of capitalism.

The author proposes a method of analysis that incorporates theology into the analysis of religious actors and peacemaking activities. Such a proposal forms part of a doctoral thesis concerning the relationship between theology and politics in Roman Catholic peacemaking. This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of subjective motivations behind religiously animated political activity, and simultaneously make new contributions in uncovering alternative methodologies that thoroughly engage with increasingly salient areas in international politics. This raises two questions for consideration, the first being the reasons behind the incorporation of theology into social scientific analysis in the first place, the second concerning frameworks in which theological considerations can be conceptually housed. The answer to the first question lies in the exposure of inadequacies in orthodox social scientific analysis into the activity of religious political players, which center around the maximisation of power and utility, and artificially close off consideration of salient (in the eyes of the religious subject) though conceptually ill-fitting (in the eyes of the scientist) variables in political activity, the key variable here being the transcendent sphere; in answering this question consideration is also given to the inadequacies of popular constructivist methods grounded in the formation and maintenance of identity, which lack conceptual depth and replicate, rather than overcome, the limitations of methodological orthodoxy. Answering the second question warrants a brief revisitation of metaxic understandings of social action proposed by Eric Voegelin, where all social action is seen as participation in an “in-between” stage between the temporal and transcendent spheres.

Does the Body of Christ belong in cyberspace? This question branches into diverse and pertinent topic areas, from the practical (Should we have online Confession/Eucharistic adoration?) to the ecclesiological (Can there be a Cybernetic Body of Christ?).

This presentation attempts to provide a preliminary answer to this question by using Christian personhood as a unifiying theme.

On the one hand, reference to Christian personhood helps identify important inroads for Christian mission opened up by cyberculture, such as the destablisation of Modern myths of radical individuality. On the other hand, the bodiliness of Christian personhood also helps identify either areas where cyberculture's "postmodernity" eventually replicates many Modern themes or even advocates a bodilessness which, if left alone, threatens to digitally dissolve the Body of Christ.

The presentation concludes with a brief sketch with how the Body of Christ in the Eucharist provides a site that anchors the Church's extension into cyberspace, while redeeming cyberspace's logic of virtuality. In so identifying areas of promise and concern with cyberspace, this paper also hopes to contribute towards providing a preliminary roadmap for the Church's negotiation with its 21st century wired-urban environment.

Where are the boundaries between our spiritual and political lives? Does it stop at the “public sphere”? Does the line remain hidden within the soul? Is there even a line at all?

This paper asserts that prayer is not incidental to politics but in itself constitutes a politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many presumptions of secular political theory.

This paper will demonstrate the political valency of prayer by reference to six topic areas, a sample of which include the theory/practice divide, the implication of biological and social bodies, time and citizenship.