Tim Howles

"Our Lady of the Sign: A Novel"
Abigail Favale
ignatius.com/our-lady-of-...

"Jesuit Rhetoric across Space and Time: Local and Global Perspectives"
brill.com/edcollbook/t...

"This Present World: Aphorisms for Knowing God"
by Steven DeLay
wipfandstock.com/979838524707...

13. Humanity can achieve a marvellous collectivity amongst itself, but it also has the potential to bring about death and destruction: thus for Serres, “a same operator can at the same time turn bad or good: we can improve collective life or abruptly do away with it by the same energies” (p.31).

12. Serres' work continually draws attention to this grey area, between violence and peace, which for him is a "slight deviation" that can easily tip one way or the other ...

11. For Serres this unity is given by the religious word “immortality”. Religion is that which creates human collectives, but in that liminal zone that fringes on the "sacred" (in the Girardian sense of repetition of the violent).

10. In fact, for Serres: the “humanities, cultures or religions” have from the beginning of time encoded this same mechanism of expulsion followed by unity. They are this movement: “they have served to save us, not individually, but collectively, in the fact of history” (p.15).

9. Moreover, there is not just exclusion, but also a unity that follows. Each scenario seems to generate a sort of crowd or society, by dint of witnessing violence: “multiplicity, in a chaotic mob, attains by means of that dead man unity, for example: family, state, government”.

8. Is this isomorphism perhaps found in the gesture of exclusion? “We have learned that exclusion brings us back to the sacred because the gesture of expulsion precisely characterises sacrifice” (p.21), writes Serres.

7. And yet, asks Serres, why are so many of the tropes associated with these incidents isomorphic: the loss of human life, the metallic shell, the gaping crowd, and so on? “We don’t recognise Carthage in Cape Canaveral nor the god Baal in Challenger, in front of the same deaths”.

6. In addition, the latter - the Challenger disaster of 1986 - can be written off as an accident, and therefore we are absolved of direct responsibility for this apparent sacrifice of human life.

5. Naturally and intuitively we disown any comparison between the former two and the latter. Serres writes: “Enlightenment philosophy teaches that the irrational must be driven out: what do the hideous statue and its inhuman form of worship have to do with us?” ("Statues", English translation, p.5).

4. The third and final is the Challenger space-shuttle disaster of January 28, 1986, in which the rocket broke apart 73 seconds after take-off, tragically killing all seven crew members aboard.

3. The second is the compartment of the god Moloch in Carthage. Sacrifices of children involving this statue are terrifyingly depicted in Flaubert’s "Salammbô", based on descriptions found in Diodorus Siculus.

2. The first is the bronze bull of Phalaris in Agrigentum. According to legend, the condemned were locked inside the device, a fire was set under it, heating the metal until those inside were roasted to death, their screams representing in acoustics the bellowing of the animal.

1. At the beginning of his stunning book “Statues” (1987), Michel Serres invokes three historical situations in which humans have found themselves inside an iron case that has cost them their lives.

"Truth Is a Synthesis: Catholic Dogmatic Theology"
Mauro Gagliardi
blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro...

Very important book publishing next month:

"The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology"
by David Bentley Hart

undpress.nd.edu/978026821041...

Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983 de Michel Foucault - Editions Flammarion Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983 : présentation du livre de Michel Foucault publié aux Editions Flammarion. De 1961, date de son retour en France après plusieurs années passées en Suède, en Pologn...

Great to see that this book also contains a radio conversation between Foucault and Serres on structures and Serres’s thesis on Leibniz @masssimons.bsky.social @drchriswatkin.bsky.social @timhowles.bsky.social editions.flammarion.com/entretiens-r...

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
- Samuel Beckett, Murphy

The Way We Understand the Cold War Is Wrong When people talk about a new Cold War, they tend to assume they know exactly what the original Cold War was and when it ended. Renowned historian Anders Stephanson argues that the standard Cold War ch...

The case for a short Cold War jacobin.com/2025/07/cold...

Armitage Lecture 2025 - Chris Watkin This is "Armitage Lecture 2025 - Chris Watkin" by Shore on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Armitage Lecture 2025:
“Custodians of the Common Good: Christian Education in a Post-Christian World”
Christopher Watkin
vimeo.com/1095446394/6...

Some articles by Bruno Latour on technology:

1. ‘Opening Doors’: bruno-latour.fr/node/381
2. ‘Can we have our Materialism Back?’: bruno-latour.fr/node/241.html
3. ‘Simondon’: bruno-latour.fr/fr/node/138

See also books: ‘Aramis: Love of Technology’, ‘La Clef de Berlin’, chap 8 of ‘The Inquiry’.

Eight Books That Explain the University Crisis Now is the perfect time to look with clear eyes at the goals, accomplishments, and failures of higher education.

Eight Books That Explain the University Crisis
"The past 10 years have been among the most tumultuous for higher education since the student movements of the 1960s"
www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

On the feast of St Ignatius, a moment to visit this chapel in #Oxford The first Roman Catholic place of worship in the city after the Reformation. Built by Fr Charles Leslie SJ in 1793, set back from the road on St Clement's St next to the Port Mahon pub.
www.oxonblueplaques.org.uk/plaques/sain...

A Tribute to David Tracy Jean-Luc Marion on final integration.

A Tribute to David Tracy
by Jean-Luc Marion

churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-t...

A Tribute to David Tracy Jean-Luc Marion on final integration.

A Tribute to David Tracy
by Jean-Luc Marion

churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-t...

Important book:
"A Philosophy of Climate Apocalypticism: In and Against the World"
By Jakub Kowalewski
www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

"Barriers to Entailment: Hume's Law and other Limits on Logical Consequence"
Gillian K. Russell
global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Brazil under fire for loosening environmental rules ahead of COP30 The approval of a bill that weakens environmental rules for mining, infrastructure and agricultural projects has raised concerns

“Brazil under fire for weakening environmental rules ahead of COP30 climate summit”
Green lawmakers and campaigners fear a new bill making it easier to secure environmental licences could fuel pollution, forest loss and oil exploration

www.climatechangenews.com/2025/07/23/b...