1. Current research

I am a postsecular literary critic (that is, a literary critic interested in the continuing role that religion plays in modern life). I am currently working on two book projects in this field — the first a study of the religious thought and feeling of American novelists since 1960, and the second a study of the prevalence of Catholic thought in American fiction since 1960.

2. Books

Here are some of my previous books:

3. Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Here are some of my previous journal and book chapters:

• “Literature in the Self-Disclosure of God: An Interview with Paul Fiddes”, Perspectives in Religious Studies 51:1 (2024), 81-91 (Special issue on “Baptists and the Literary Imagination”, ed. Elizabeth H. Flowers and Darren J. Middleton).

• “D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God”, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, ed. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 67-80.

• “Seriously Modified Beliefs: The Reverend Robert Reid’s Influence on D. H. Lawrence”, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 6:1 (2021), 17-40.

• “Shir Ha-Elohim: A Prolegomenon to Biblical Aesthetics”, Christianity and Literature 69:3 (2020), 339-357.

• “Religion”, D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 183-191,

• “Religious Pluralism and the Beats”, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 410-421.

• “‘A Prison for the Infinite’: D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell on the War”, Études lawrenciennes 46 (2015), 1-14.

• “Procrustean Identity: Sylvia Plath’s Women’s Magazine Fiction”,Representing Sylvia Plath: New Essays on the Writer and Representation, ed. Tracy Brain and Sally Bayley (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147-164.

• “A Fine White Flying Myth of One’s Own: Sylvia Plath in Fiction”, Plath Profiles 2 (2009), 278-298.

• “‘The Influence of Somebody Upon Something’: To the Lighthouse in Sylvia Plath’s Work”, Woolf Editing, Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2009), 111-116.

• “‘What Girl Ever Flourished in Such Company?’: Sylvia Plath’s Religion”, Yearbook of English Studies: Religion and Literature, ed. Andrew Tate (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2009), 101-113.

• “Matthew Arnold”, The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. David Jasper, Elizabeth Jay and Andrew Hass (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 639-654.

• “The Power and the Glory: The Aesthetics of the Hebrew Bible”, Literature and Theology 18:2 (2004), 123-138.

• “Reception Theory: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roman Ingarden and the Geneva School”, The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 151-58. Reprinted in Modern European Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 149-156.

• “How to Avoid Speaking of the Other: Derrida, Dionysius and the Problematic of Negative Theology”, Paragraph 24:1 (2001), 50-65.

• “Histoires de l’Église: The Body of Christ in the Thought of Julia Kristeva”, Writing the Bodies of Christ: The Church from Carlyle to Derrida, ed. John Schad (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 145-57. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 367, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale/Cengage, 2014).

• “The Trace of the Trinity: Christ and Difference in St. Augustine’s Theory of Language”, Literature and Theology 12:3 (1998), 256-67.