MA Theology

Barry Taylor's work focuses on the intersections between religion, theology and culture, with a particular emphasis on the impact and interplay of contemporary digital life on religion and belief, particularly Western Christianity.

He is especially interested in religion where it is least obvious, and in cultural clinamens — the behaviour and phenomena that escape our categorising and thus provide an opportunity for re-framing how we think about and approach life.

John D. Caputo is one of the most influential figures in contemporary continental philosophy of religion, known for developing a "weak theology" and a radical hermeneutics drawn from his readings of Heidegger, Derrida, and Kierkegaard. His work has reshaped how a generation of scholars thinks about faith, deconstruction, and the event that stirs within the name of God.

He is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. His many books include The Weakness of God, winner of the American Academy of Religion's award for excellence, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and The Insistence of God. At GCAS he mentors doctoral researchers working at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and critical theory.

Simon Critchley is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation. He has written more than twenty books across continental philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, ethics, and political theory, including studies of Greek tragedy, Heidegger, Shakespeare, David Bowie, football, suicide, and how philosophers die, as well as a novella.

His most recent book, Mysticism (New York Review Books, 2024), approaches mysticism not as religious practice but as a mode of experience and a way of life, drawing on music, poetry, and literature as much as on the mystical tradition itself. Other recent works include Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (Yale University Press, 2021), Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019), and Question Everything: A Stone Reader (W. W. Norton, 2023), which he co-edited. Through The Stone at the New York Times, he has done a great deal to carry philosophy into public life.

Clayton Crockett is Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at GCAS. His work spans continental philosophy of religion, political theology, psychoanalytic theory, and new materialism, with a sustained focus on questions of energy.

He is the author of Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology (Columbia University Press, 2022), Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism (Fordham University Press, 2018), Deleuze Beyond Badiou (Columbia University Press, 2013), and Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2011), as well as Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism, co-written with Jeffrey W. Robbins. He co-edits the Insurrections series at Columbia University Press and is a Fellow of the Westar Institute and its Seminar on God and the Human Future.

J. Igor Fardin is a researcher in architecture and philosophy. He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Development and works at the intersection of architectural theory and history, continental philosophy, and philosophy of religion.

His work, published in both philosophy and architecture journals, focuses on the notions of use and play, as well as on the relationships between architecture, religion, and ecology.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, serving as Middle East and Balkans bureau chief and reporting from more than fifty countries. He was part of the team awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, and received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism the same year. He reported earlier for The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, and National Public Radio, covering the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.

He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, along with American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, Wages of Rebellion, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, and America: The Farewell Tour. He holds a BA in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he also studied ancient Greek and Latin. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto, and has taught college-credit courses in the New Jersey prison system since 2013. He writes and broadcasts The Chris Hedges Report.

Catherine Keller is the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University, where she teaches process, political, and ecological theology. Her work develops a theology of becoming, reconfiguring ancient symbols of divinity for the sake of a planetary life together across vast webs of difference, and draws on feminist, philosophical, and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her books include Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (2021), Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (Columbia University Press, 2018), Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology (Fordham University Press, 2017), Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (Columbia University Press, 2014), and Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003). Since the start of the millennium she has directed Drew's annual Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, which has produced more than a dozen anthologies, most published by Fordham University Press.

Todd McGowan is Professor of English and Director of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, where he teaches theory and film. His work brings Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to bear on politics, cinema, and contemporary culture.

He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (Repeater, 2024), The Racist Fantasy, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia University Press, 2020), Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016), and The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007). He co-hosts the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley, co-edits the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston, and co-organises the annual Lack conference.

Jennifer Moe is Executive Director of the Young Adult Initiative at Garrett Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and Executive Secretary of the Religious Education Association, the international guild for scholars and practitioners of religious education.

Her research interests include the ways in which religious subcultures and their practices define, create, and reflect religious belief; young adults and their faith practices, and how these are formed or deformed by and within their faith communities; and the long-term resonances of evangelical Christianity, alongside the growing movement of ex-evangelical Christians in the United States and elsewhere. She has served as adjunct faculty in the Religious Education field at Garrett and is affiliate faculty at North Park University and North Park Seminary in Chicago.

Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies programme. She also holds the Jacques Derrida Chair in Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. She completed her doctorate at Princeton in 1979, and studied with Jacob Taubes in Berlin and with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris.

Her books include Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992), Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012), and Complaint: Grievance among Friends (2018), many of them widely translated. Alongside her writing she has worked extensively in performance, chiefly in Germany and France, and has been named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic for her contribution to French thought and letters.

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and metaphysics at the University of Exeter, where he is a research fellow and lecturer. His work centres on panpsychism and altered states of consciousness, drawing particularly on Whitehead, Nietzsche, and Spinoza.

He is the author of Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism (Psychedelic Press, 2021) and Noumenautics: Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, Psychedelics (2015), and co-editor, with Christine Hauskeller, of Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). With Hauskeller he also founded the Philosophy of Psychedelics Exeter Research Group. His recent writing includes work on pantheism in Philosophical Psychology, and his TEDx talk on psychedelics and consciousness has carried these questions to a much wider audience than academic philosophy usually reaches.