JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL

(Kept in shorthand.)

5 May. The Castle. —The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they called "robber steak"—bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat's meat! The wine was Golden Mediasch, which produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.

When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door—which they call by a name meaning "word-bearer"—came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were "Ordog"—Satan, "pokol"—hell, "stregoica"—witch, "vrolok" and "vlkoslak"—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions)

When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye. This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of the box-seat—"gotza" they call them—cracked his big whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey.

I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the "Mittel Land" ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.

Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us:—

"Look! Isten szek!"—"God's seat!"—and he crossed himself reverently.

As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me: for instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and again we passed a leiter-wagon—the ordinary peasant's cart—with its long, snake-like vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of home-coming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lance-fashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our driver's haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. "No, no," he said; "you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce"; and then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantry—for he looked round to catch the approving smile of the rest—"and you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep." The only stop he would make was a moment's pause to light his lamps.

When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us; we were entering on the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with an earnestness which would take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritz—the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which the steam from our hard-driven horses rose in a white cloud. We could see now the sandy road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle. The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I thought it was "An hour less than the time." Then turning to me, he said in German worse than my own:—

"There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return to-morrow or the next day; better the next day." Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing of themselves, a calèche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver:—

"You are early to-night, my friend." The man stammered in reply:—

"The English Herr was in a hurry," to which the stranger replied:—

"That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift." As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's "Lenore":—

"Denn die Todten reiten schnell"— ("For the dead travel fast.")

The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. "Give me the Herr's luggage," said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were handed out and put in the calèche. Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept on their way to Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in excellent German:—

"The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz (the plum brandy of the country) underneath the seat, if you should require it." I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there all the same. I felt a little strangely, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay. By-and-by, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road—a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and a sharper howling—that of wolves—which affected both the horses and myself in the same way—for I was minded to jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right.

Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed; he kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver's motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose—it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all—and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.

At last there came a time when the driver went further afield than he had yet gone, and during his absence, the horses began to tremble worse than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see any cause for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether; but just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of fear. It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.

All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared, and looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to see; but the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side; and they had perforce to remain within it. I called to the coachman to come, for it seemed to me that our only chance was to try to break out through the ring and to aid his approach. I shouted and beat the side of the calèche, hoping by the noise to scare the wolves from that side, so as to give him a chance of reaching the trap. How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness.

When I could see again the driver was climbing into the calèche, and the wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.

5 May.—I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the approach of such a remarkable place. In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight.

When the calèche stopped, the driver jumped down and held out his hand to assist me to alight. Again I could not but notice his prodigious strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that could have crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took out my traps, and placed them on the ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and studded with large iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather. As I stood, the driver jumped again into his seat and shook the reins; the horses started forward, and trap and all disappeared down one of the dark openings.

I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor's clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor—for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of the morning.

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:—

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!" He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice—more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said:—

"Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!" The strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking; so to make sure, I said interrogatively:—

"Count Dracula?" He bowed in a courtly way as he replied:—

"I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest." As he was speaking, he put the lamp on a bracket on the wall, and stepping out, took my luggage; he had carried it in before I could forestall him. I protested but he insisted:—

"Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He insisted on carrying my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang heavily. At the end of this he threw open a heavy door, and I rejoiced to see within a well-lit room in which a table was spread for supper, and on whose mighty hearth a great fire of logs, freshly replenished, flamed and flared.

The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It was a welcome sight; for here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with another log fire,—also added to but lately, for the top logs were fresh—which sent a hollow roar up the wide chimney. The Count himself left my luggage inside and withdrew, saying, before he closed the door:—

"You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your toilet. I trust you will find all you wish. When you are ready, come into the other room, where you will find your supper prepared."

The light and warmth and the Count's courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was half famished with hunger; so making a hasty toilet, I went into the other room.

I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful wave of his hand to the table, and said:

"I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup."

I handed to him the sealed letter which Mr. Hawkins had entrusted to me. He opened it and read it gravely; then, with a charming smile, he handed it to me to read. One passage of it, at least, gave me a thrill of pleasure.

"I must regret that an attack of gout, from which malady I am a constant sufferer, forbids absolutely any travelling on my part for some time to come; but I am happy to say I can send a sufficient substitute, one in whom I have every possible confidence. He is a young man, full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition. He is discreet and silent, and has grown into manhood in my service. He shall be ready to attend on you when you will during his stay, and shall take your instructions in all matters."

The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had experienced.

By this time I had finished my supper, and by my host's desire had drawn up a chair by the fire and begun to smoke a cigar which he offered me, at the same time excusing himself that he did not smoke. I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked physiognomy.

His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We were both silent for a while; and as I looked towards the window I saw the first dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count's eyes gleamed, and he said:—

"Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!" Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he added:—

"Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter." Then he rose and said:—

"But you must be tired. Your bedroom is all ready, and to-morrow you shall sleep as late as you will. I have to be away till the afternoon; so sleep well and dream well!" With a courteous bow, he opened for me himself the door to the octagonal room, and I entered my bedroom....

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL

(Kept in shorthand.)

4 May.—I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting.

Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a very hysterical way:

"Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go?" She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again:

"Do you know what day it is?" I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again:

"Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is?" On my saying that I did not understand, she went on:

"It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?" She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, "For your mother's sake," and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my good-bye. Here comes the coach!

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL

(Kept in shorthand.)

3 May. Bistritz — Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called "paprika hendl," and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don't know how I should be able to get on without it.

Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a nobleman of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.

In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)

I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.

I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was "mamaliga," and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call "impletata." (Mem., get recipe for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7:30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress--white undergarment with long double apron, front, and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed and said, "The Herr Englishman?" "Yes," I said, "Jonathan Harker." She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirt-sleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter:

"My Friend.--Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.

Your friend,DRACULA.

This year I designed and taught a number of new modules in my new job and I’ll be posting my syllabi for them over the summer while I finally get time to catch my breath and think about how to rework the modules from this year that I’ll be teaching next year, alongside planning a new undergraduate ecclesiology module and a new MA level module on mystical theology in the Abrahamic traditions that I’m really excited about, and which will be the first of the modules I’ll teach at DCU I’ve actually designed myself. This module was designed for our part time, evening BA in Theology and Religious Studies, and was taught over five weeks in 3-4 hour session. It was surprisingly fun for a module about such unrelentingly grim things. Thanks are due to various people who helped me pull this together all at quite short notice, but especially to Jake Erickson and to Anthony Paul Smith.

Week 1: What is the Problem of Evil?
This week we’ll spend some time introducing the module, beginning to think about the God question and the problem of evil. Then we’ll take a look at some of the classical Christian texts about the nature of God and evil, focusing on the excerpts from Irenaeus, Augustine and Dionysius which are this week’s required reading.

Required Reading:
 ‘Irenaeus’, ‘Augustine’ and ‘Dionysius’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Recommended Reading:
 ‘Job’s Question’ in Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011.

Week 2: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
This week we’ll think about some of the ways that classical Christian ideas about God and evil related to questions of power and violence. How did Christians think about the relationship between good and evil? How was evil understood in relation to questions of law and order? How did beliefs about hell and the devil shape how Christians thought about the societies they lived in? How did ideas about the nature of God and goodness shape how Christians thought about social, political and economic hierarchies?

Required Reading:
Armstrong, Amaryah. ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’. The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.
Kotsko, Adam, ‘The Sociopathy of the Redeemed’ extract from The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press, 2016.

Recommended Reading:
Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012.

Week 3: Theodicy
This week we’ll look at some of the distinctive ways that the problem of suffering begins to emerge in modernity, along with new ways of thinking about the nature of God, the individual, and the foundations of social order.

Required Reading:
‘Voltaire’, ‘Hobbes’ and ‘Leibniz’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Recommended Reading:
‘Kant’, ‘Schopenhauer’ and ‘Hegel’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.

Week 4: Evil in God’s Name
One of the ways that evil is a problem for Christian theology is that throughout history, some Christians have done things in the name of God which other Christians have considered to be evil. This week we’ll spend some time thinking about some ways that Christians have justified inflicting suffering on other people, and reflecting on what this means for the God question and the problem of evil.

Required Reading:
Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’ in Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981.

Recommended Reading:
Nigel Biggar, ‘Individual Rights versus Common Security? Christian Moral Reasoning about Torture’ in Studies in Christian Ethics 27.1 (2014), 3-10 (this nasty little piece takes a very unpleasant delight in superfluously graphic descriptions of torture and I regretted not giving my students a heads up about this earlier in the semester)

Week 5: Reconsiderations

Required Reading:
Extracts from Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987.

Recommended Reading:
‘God Can’t Prevent Evil’ from Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019.

General Bibliography
Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Cornell University Press, 2000.
Armstrong, Amaryah. ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’. The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.
Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987.
Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Eerdmans, 2011.
Jantzen, Grace. Becoming Divine : Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. [Bloomington, Ind], 1999.
Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. 1973
Kermani, Navid. The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011.
Kilby, Karen. God, Evil and the Limits of Theology. 2020. ———. Suffering and the Christian Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Kitamori, Kazoh. Theology of the Pain of God: The First Original Theology from Japan. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005.
Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Larrimore, Mark J. The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.
Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s’ On the Concept of History’. Verso Books, 2016.
McCabe, Herbert. Faith within Reason. A&C Black, 2007.
———. God Matters. A&C Black, 2005.
McGill, Arthur Chute. Suffering: A Test of Theological Method. Westminster John Knox Press, 1982.
Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019.
Pinn, Anthony B. Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999.
Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2004.
Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012.
Surin, Kenneth. Theology and the Problem of Evil. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004. Tilley, Terrence W. The Evils of Theodicy. Georgetown University Press, 1991.
Vincent, Alana M. ‘Dissenting from Redemption: Judaism and Political Theology’. European Judaism [Amsterdam], vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32–40, https://doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.500106.
Zizek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, 2012.

Assignment
This final assignment will count for 100% of your overall mark for the module. You will be asked to write a 2500 word (+/-10%) essay in response to one of the following questions:

1. C S Lewis: “If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was”. Discuss.
2. William R Jones, “Black theology, precisely because of the prominence of ethnic suffering in the black experience, cannot operate as if the goodness of God for all mankind were a theological axiom”. Discuss.
3. Karen Kilby, “Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer.” Discuss.
4. Dorothee Soelle, ‘Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic’. Discuss.
5. Kenneth Surin, ‘Doing theodicy … as if it were an essentially ‘theoretical’ and ahistorical activity … not only frustrates historically situated reflection on the manifold forms and occurrences of evil, but also militates against a properly Christian response to the ‘problem of evil’. EITHER discuss this claim OR pick one of the thinkers we have read over the course of the module and consider their account of evil in relation to the historical context in which they were/are writing.
6. Discuss one of the following pieces of fiction which address the problem of evil in light of the materials we have covered over the module:
   1. Ursula le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas‘
   2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘The Grand Inquisitor‘
   3. Flannery O’Connor, ‘Good Country People‘
   4. W E B Du Bois, ‘Jesus Christ in Texas‘
   5. Ted Chiang, ‘Hell is the Absence of God‘
   6. A fictional text of your choosing 
7. Pick one event, recent or historical, which raises the problem of evil. What kinds of questions does this event raise about the god question and the problem of evil, and how might those questions be addressed?
8. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. If you would like to write your essay on a topic other than those set out in the questions above, you are free to do so on the condition that you a) pick a topic that will enable to you to meet the learning outcomes and b) get my approval for your chosen essay topic before you submit the essay. I’m really happy to talk over ideas with you and suggest readings etc. but you MUST get in touch with me before you submit your final essay.

If you are responding to one of the prompts which asks you to discuss a quotation, you can choose either to engage extensively with the thinker the quotation is taken from or simply to use the quotation as a way into talking about themes and ideas in the thinkers and texts we’ve studied in this module.

Your essay can draw on a mixture of texts from the module, texts from the module bibliography, and texts that you’ve found yourself. You should cite at least four scholarly sources. Your essay should use quotations as evidence, either to back up your overall argument, or to dissect in order to discuss the thinker or text you are discussing. You should not directly cite lecture materials. 

Your essay must have a thesis: a central idea or insight which is arguable (i.e. someone could disagree with it). 

Hello! Editor Matt here. A quick reminder: you’re getting this email because you signed up for Dracula Daily, the email newsletter that sends you the full text of Dracula in real time. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you can unsubscribe at the link at the bottom of this email.

If that DOES sound familiar - you’re in the right place. The story of Dracula starts on May 3, which means we’re starting in less than two weeks. Dracula is fun to read along with people, so if there’s anybody in your life you’d like to join this book club with, get ‘em on board now! :)

On May 3 you’ll get the first section of the book, as we meet Jonathan Harker. After that, you’ll only get emails on days when there’s action in the book.

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This year:

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This year paid subscribers will get:

• weekly subscriber-only posts, which cover a summary of the reading (in case you got behind) and a smattering of related jokes and memes and stuff

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Did you say band-aids?

Yeah! Well ‘adhesive bandage’ is the correct term, since BAND-AID® is a registered trademark. But this has got to be like a Kleenex® situation by now, right?

But YES. I was thinking about making stickers or badges or something to celebrate this year, and my brilliant wife Erika suggested instead: custom bandages.

So yes! I made custom Dracula Daily themed adhesive bandages, so you can patch up (or conceal) those tiny throat wounds. Don’t cause your loved ones undue concern! Those little punctures on your neck are probably no big deal.

I’m not selling these - I’ll just send them out in the postal mail as a way to say thank you to people that support the project. I’ll send out a link in our first weekly roundup email and you can claim your bandages, and then I’ll get them in the mail for you.

And really: it’s just a little thank you. You should only pay actual money to Dracula Daily if you want to throw your support behind the project!

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- If you’re already a supporter - you’re good! Nothing to do. Just claim your goodies when I send out the link.

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And get ready for the book to start - we meet our good friend Jonathan on May 3!

Last week I gave a keynote address at the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference, which was on the theme “Theology: A Discipline of Failure?” Below is the text of my paper.

“I couldn’t encounter my loss face to face”[1][2]

As I write this piece, US and Israeli bombs continue to fall on Iran. US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, author of American Crusade, tattooed with Christian insignia including both a Jerusalem Cross and a Chi Rho, recently quoted the Bible at a Pentagon briefing.[3] A few weeks ago, Christian pastors gathered in the Oval Office to pray for Trump as he led the US into war.[4] Theologian James Orr was recently appointed head of policy for Reform UK.[5] Billionaire Peter Thiel — friend of Jeffrey Epstein, fan of Tolkien, and founder of Palantir — continues to tour his Girardian theology of the end times, according to which we are invited to view Greta Thunberg as the avatar of the antichrist.[6] Perhaps the problem contemporary theology faces as a discipline is not so much its failure as its success.

But we are here to talk about failure. I have argued elsewhere that if there is one thing that Christians can agree on, it is that theology has failed. I am conscious that not all SST members are Christians, and I so hope it is not too much of a colonizing move to suggest that we might broaden this still further: if there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that theology has failed. Things become tricky only when we try to pin down precisely what has gone wrong, and why. In this paper I will take as my starting point a 2024 paper by Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana, which argues that SST specifically has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I will suggest that failure is best understood neither as a falling away from an original goodness or as a disordering of theology’s inherent orientation towards a particular telos but as inherent and constitutive. The question we should be asking is not how to stop failing but, rather, how to relate to failure. Whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it, theology has always renewed itself through its liaisons with its others, and I will argue that the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers us resources for considering this question – how to relate to failure? If Palestine is now, as Steven Salaita argues, an “avatar of campus suppression”, it is because it also condenses so many of the urgent crises we face today.[7]

If I am pessimistic about the possibility of our agreeing on the nature of theological failure, then all the more so about the possibility that we might agree on what theology is. For the purposes of this paper, let us assume that (to lightly paraphrase the SST constitution) ‘theology’ refers to everyone engaged in what they consider to be theology, across a wide range of contexts including the academy and the churches. Theology is done not only in preaching, teaching, and research, but also in the work of making and remaking the institutions in and by which theology is done – in administration, in informal networks of influence and prestige, in mentoring and pastoral care just as much as in gossip and in whisper networks. I think it is crucial, as theologians, that we reflect not only on what we think, but also on what we do, consciously and unconsciously. I am conscious here that my primary location in a university will shape what I say, and want to emphasise that this is not intended in any way to disparage or dismiss the theological work done in churches and elsewhere (some of my best friends are priests).

To begin, then. In their 2024 paper, ‘Silence is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana argue that SST has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.[8] “This failure”, they argue, “in the form of theological silence, is complicity” in the ongoing injustices suffered by Palestinians.[9] This silence, the authors argue, is in conflict with SST’s 2016 Theology and Race report, which argued that “British academic theologians need to engage critically with the role of race in the formation of the discipline in the context of race in the UK and the British Empire.”[10] Since McIntosh and Ranawana’s paper was published, SST has sought to address the issue of Palestine in both speech and action. The Society organised an online event on “Theology and the War in Gaza” in 2024, issued a public statement in 2025, and in 2025 also decided to relocate from the University of Warwick, where staff and student campaigns to end the university’s complicity in “genocide, the arms trade & occupied apartheid Palestine” have so far been unsuccessful.[11] Despite these developments, I think that McIntosh and Ranawana are right to see in SST’s response to the genocide a failure. But their critique gives us too much credit.

Theology has a long history when it comes to justifying slaughter. In 1274 Humbert of Romans, Master General of the Dominican Order, wrote a treatise which set out to theologically justify the crusades and to respond to various critics who saw crusading as incompatible with the demands of Christianity.[12] Some people, he said, were arguing that it was wrong for Christians to shed blood. After all, don’t the examples of Christ and the martyrs demonstrate that the truly Christian path is to turn the other cheek and to refuse violence, even if it costs us our lives? Ah, says Humbert, there is a time to build and a time to tear down buildings, a time to refuse the sword and a time to take it up. What if infidels wanted to kill every Christian and erase Christianity from the face of the earth; surely then Christians would not continue to preach peace? There is no end to the hostility and ill-will of the Muslims, he claims. How can Christians accept the occupation of the land of Israel by such an evil people, who do not allow for true Christian worship? Did not God command the Hebrews never to make treaties with the worshippers of false gods who occupied the promised land? The Crusaders, Humbert insists, are not invading other people’s territory, but taking back their own land, the land which God gave first to the Jews and then to the Christians.

Humbert goes on to remind his readers of Jesus’ parable about a field where the wheat was growing alongside weeds. The servants of the field’s owner asked if they should pull up the weeds, but the owner told them to hold back – pulling up the weeds would also damage the wheat. Instead, he said, the servants should wait until harvest time to separate out the good plants from the bad. But what of a field which has only weeds and no wheat? Should the plants not all be pulled up? Is the Holy Land not like a fig tree which bears no fruit, and should be cut down; or like the city of Sodom, in which not even ten good men could be found, and which should be razed to the ground with fire?

The editors’ note I have attached to my copy of Humbert’s text says that his arguments “would certainly not convince anyone today”.[13] But they are all too familiar.[14] Humbert draws on biblical passages in which God commands the Hebrew people to enter the promised land and to wipe out its existing inhabitants; to erase their religion, their culture, and their memory from the earth. Contemporary scholarship suggests that this violent erasure of the Canaanites never actually took place (at least not on anything like the scale imagined by the biblical text). But the texts come to us now dripping with blood, thanks to the work of Christian interpreters in whose hands it became a warrant not only for the ultimately failed Christian attempt to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity, but also for the brutal expulsion of Jews and Muslims from medieval Spain, and for the modern invention of settler colonialism.[15] As Robert Warrior and Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz have shown, the theological tools developed by Humbert and his contemporaries to justify the Crusades were wielded once again during the conquest of the Americas and European attempts to wipe indigenous Americans from the face of the earth.[16] They are wielded again today both by Christian Zionists and by the state of Israel, arguing that the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians is both necessary and morally justified.

As Warrior points out, the other side of the story of the liberation of the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt is the story of their conquest of the land of Canaan, and God’s injunctions to wipe the Canaanites from the face of the earth.[17] It is tempting, in the face of horrors committed in the name of God, to move to disavowal, to insist that these things are not Christian, that theology cannot be claimed as a warrant for such obscenity. But to make this claim is not only to fail to face up to the reality of the discipline which has formed us, it is also to fall into the very logic which so often legitimizes Christian violence.

As Daniel Boyarin argues, the emergence of Christian identity is centrally tied to the distinction of heresy. In inventing heresy, Christianity draws for itself a border, a partition line which cuts artificially across the divisions which formerly defined the world from which it was born — between Jew and Greek, enslaved and free, male and female — and brings into being a new and more absolute distinction between Christian and non-Christian.[18] As Denise Kimber Buell has it, this distinction produces not only a new divide between Christians and non-Christians but also Christian universalism, composed of three claims: that Christianity is one thing —  that it consists of a unified set of beliefs and practices — that anyone can become a Christian, and that everyone should become a Christian.[19] As Gil Anidjar puts it,

Christianity, the Jesuic distinction in humanity (if I may propose this awkward rephrasing of Jan Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction”), is the difference between innocence and guilt as the basis of human society, the difference across humanity, between the old and guilty (humans) and the new and innocent (Christians). It is indeed the advent of a new humanity. From now on, may God protect the humanity of old.[20]

Both the desire to see Christianity as one thing only and the attempt to identify a purely liberatory core to Christianity in relation to which all other elements of Christian tradition are corruptions or degenerations mirror the theological logics of sexual, racial, and ethnic purity which have profoundly shaped Christianity across its history. They obscure the ways that liberation theologies so often remain implicated in the very systems which they seek to oppose;[21] the difficult, skilful, and creative work which goes into the endless remaking of Christian theology for new times, places, and contexts;[22] and the ways in which liberatory forms of Christianity have been shaped not only by Christian tradition but by Christians’ relations with those outside of the church. Christianity has never been simply the passing down of traditions or the preservation of an original message. Fidelity to Christian tradition is always also betrayal, miscegenation, and mutation.[23]

If we want to think about theology and its failure in the face of the genocide in Palestine, we cannot simply seek to exonerate some pure essence of Christianity from responsibility. We must instead confront the ways in which theology has functioned — and continues to function —  as one element of the machinery of this abomination.  Theology is deeply implicated in the logics of supersession, anti-Judaism, and philosemitism on which not only Christian Zionism but also Christian nationalism, secular modernity, and the modern nation state rely; and in the ideology and practices of settler colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and racism on which our world is founded.[24] The systems of secular politics, international law and human rights which have — for all their supposedly universal values — so signally failed to stop the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians draw deep from theological wells. More directly, the theological academy is deeply tied to the Zionist project, most especially so in biblical studies whose entanglement in the ongoing settler colonial project includes both participation in archaeological research which has functioned to displace Palestinians both materially and theoretically, and the construction of narratives of “ancient Israel” which serve to legitimise contemporary Israeli identity.[25]

“We might expect”, McIntosh and Ranawana write, “to see widespread public statements and action by theologians and theological ethicists across the globe condemning genocide, especially a genocide that claims theological justification and threatens the lives of Christians”.[26] It will not surprise you by now to hear that I do not share this optimism. I am not trying to deny that people have struggled against genocide, violence, and other forms of injustice in the name of theology. I am not — to be very clear —  suggesting that those of us who call ourselves theologians cannot or should not justify our struggle against these things in theological terms. But I do think we need to confront the reality that Christianity is not simply one thing; that is is, as it always has been, a religion of both oppressors and oppressed. Both individual theologians and theological institutions have taken sides with both enslavers and enslaved, revolution and repression, lynch mobs and lynched, fascists and anti-fascists, the wealthy and the dispossessed, and with both colonialism and decolonisation. 

This is a problem for us to grapple with not merely as individual theologians, but also as members of SST. The SST constitution says that the Society will “support all those engaged in theology, across the full range of approaches and church traditions”.[27] This commitment to representing the diversity of theology underpins SST’s statement on theology and race, which states that SST “is seeking to address, within the scope of its life, the marginalisation in academia of black and minority ethnic people and their perspectives, and the narrowing of scholarship that goes with it around the concerns and interests of those racialised as white’” so that SST can be “a society for all scholars and students of theology”.[28] Here we encounter a problem.

As the SST statement on Gaza says, “Our Society and our Committee include people who have a range of views regarding the purpose and responsibilities of theologians, the work of theology and of the Society”. A series of quite careful statements follows. The society condemns “the use of Christian Zionist thought, which has led to uncritical support for the Israeli state’s assault on the Palestinian people.” SST “support … the view that theologians must consider the implications and outcomes of their theological production, in this case, their complicity in perpetuating new and old forms of violent settler colonialism” [italics mine].[29] I do not find this satisfying as a response to the open letter from Palestinian Christians, which calls on church leaders and theologians to condemn not only Israel’s response to October 7 but also “the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine”, and asks us to recognise the fact that October 7 and the events which followed it must be placed within the wider context of ‘Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid’.[30]

I find the statement’s careful hedging to be both unethical and strategically unhelpful: in addressing itself to members it offers neither meaningful solidarity to the open letter’s authors, nor any commitment to defend members who do take a more unambiguous public stand. But I also know that to be a member of SST, to be a theologian, to be an academic, is to find myself a member of institutions which are either actively or passively enabling an ongoing genocide. I know that I am thereby implicated, and I know that there are limits to the price I am willing to pay to challenge either this or the other forms of violence which I know myself to be reproducing, however unwillingly, however imperfectly. I know that theological systems and structures which it seems to me we should be working urgently to dismantle are for others of you foundational and indispensable.

There are irreconcilable contradictions here. What would happen if we paid attention to them, instead of trying to paper over the cracks? As I have said elsewhere, “A Christianity which sees itself as one thing into which everyone can and should be brought is a Christianity which cannot reckon with the possibility or the reality of internal disagreement and dissent, and which cannot see the failure to convert as an indication of anything other than in indication of corruption. It is this fantasy of wholeness, of one-ness, which has tended to make Christianity so dangerous to both internal dissenters and external others, and which has rendered it so unable to reckon with the conflicts, disagreements, and inconsistencies that run through its institutions, texts, and practices.”[31]

There is no escape from failure. But there are good theological reasons to understand failure not as a fall away from some primordial success, some original wholeness, but as in fact the constituting condition of our being. To insist that God creates from nothing, from freedom rather than necessity, is to say that at the heart of our being is something which cannot be explained. To speak about God is to founder on the limits of theological language, to try and to fail again to name the unnameable, to limit the illimitable, to know the unknowable. Failure is ontological.

Failure is also the reality of the disciplines and institutions which form us as theologians. The sexual, familial, and reproductive metaphors so central to Christian narratives of both ecclesial identity and the study of theology, however disciplined, cannot but draw our attention to the impossibility of fidelity, to the inevitability of failure. We neither understand nor control the ways that our parents have formed us, any more than parents can grasp or master who and what their children become. On sex, the Bible will tell the truth if we will not — that the order based on men’s possession of women has always been sustained and maintained by violent men, manipulative wives, courageous sex workers, and infidelities great and small.

The question that we should ask then, is not how we might now succeed but, instead, how to relate to this constitutive failure. Theological failure is a problem of being, of knowledge, and of power; and the question of how to relate to this failure is a problem of desire. I want to turn now to the Jacques Lacan, who offers a typology of four discourses, four ways of relating to the incompleteness, the constitutive failure of being, language, and order. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this typology is deeply indebted to Christian theology, and Lacan’s four discourses — the master’s discourse, the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse — correspond to the four stages of theological speech as set out in Dionysius’ foundational account of mystical theology: the naming of God according to the logic of doctrinal propriety, the proliferation of divine names, the denial of divine names, and finally the mystical language of contradiction, paradox, and silence.[32] As Thomas Lynch puts it, “Understanding these configurations enables an analysis of four key social phenomena: ‘governing, education, protesting, and revolutionizing’”; all of which, I will argue, can illuminate the discipline of theology as it is exercised in the context of churches, universities and (of course) learned societies.[33]

The first of Lacan’s four discourses is the Master’s discourse. This “is the discourse of unquestionable authority; the discourse of strong leaders and traditional values. It says that the solution to what ails us is a reaffirmation of authority (biblical, encyclical, or political), and a return to hierarchies of race, gender, class, or church governance.”[34] It is the discourse of sovereign power, of groundless decision, of the God who creates by dividing, out of nothing. The Master’s discourse believes that the solution to failure is to re-establish proper order, and is willing to wield violence in order to do so.

But there are two truths that the Master’s discourse cannot confront. First is the reality of incompleteness and division. Christianity is not one. However hard we try to impose authority on the world, it will always escape our grasp. I am sure I am not the only member of the Society who grew up very sure that there was a right way to be a Christian, a right way to read the Bible, and who has found that this belief fell apart the more tightly I clung to it. I suspect that this failure is one reason why so much energy is now being put into various attempts to discipline academic theology along with the rest of higher education.[35] There are cracks in the texts that some of us cannot help but fall through. The other thing concealed by the Master’s discourse is the pleasure of transgression and the ways that enjoyment is intensified by prohibition. The last few years have been a lesson on the ubiquity of those pleasures in the places of power. This pleasure is, for Lacan, crucial to understanding the way that this discourse is sustained: “What keeps people attached to a model so obviously built on repression and hypocrisy are the pleasure of hating those who are excluded by this discourse’s legalistic order and the transgressive pleasures of breaking the law”; though also, I think it is important to add, the pleasures of doing violence to others who transgress it. As Alberto Toscano has argued, “the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence”.[36]

When the master’s discourse begins to break apart, one route out of these contradictions is what Lacan refers to as the ‘university discourse’. Here the solution to incompleteness and contradiction is to multiply knowledge: “If we just write another report, create another policy or procedure, conduct more research, run more training sessions, track more data, or add another layer of paperwork, then we will arrive at a resolution. This is the discourse of bureaucracy, of ‘equality and diversity’ committees, and of ‘post-political’ pragmatic government” which claims not to be ideological but to be interested simply in better management, in more efficient systems and processes.[37] I am reminded here of a paper that Gerard Loughlin gave at SST several years ago in which he described the Anglican Living in Love and Faith process as an endless series of reports suggesting that what was needed was “more listening”; whether this was better or worse than the decisions lately arrived at I will leave to you to decide. This is also, of course, the discourse of the REF. One of the last things I did before leaving the UK for Ireland last summer was to draft a REF environment statement. I had to describe what my unit was doing to encourage career progression amongst its members. A laudable goal, except that we had not been able to apply for promotions for four years, due to an ongoing financial crisis; and when the university had paused its promotion process it had also withdrawn its promotion criteria, with the (also laudable!) goal of rewriting them to be both clearer and more equitable. A report, then, on how we were working to help our colleagues work towards unknown criteria for a non-existent end, for a system of assessment which barely anyone believes in, all in the middle of a deepening crisis in which it was (and is) not even clear that my job, my programme, or the institution as a whole would make it as far as the next REF. The university discourse functions, then, “both to evade the real questions and conflicts that characterise institutions and also to disempower and deflate any attempts to confront these real problems by ensuring that people are kept so bored and alienated by endless busy-work that they become cynical and disengaged.”[38] While — as the very persistence of the REF testifies — it is possible to get stuck here, it is also possible that the pointlessness, the absurdity, or the sheer tedium will lead to the discourse breaking down.

If at this point we resist the lure of the Master’s discourse, we may find ourselves instead moving into the discourse of protest, of complaint: the hysteric’s discourse. For Lacan, this is a moment with transformative potential. The hysteric insists on the failure of the system within which she is positioned. The master discourse’s insistence on order is incoherent, and the university discourse’s insistence that incoherence can be resolved by the production of knowledge is doomed. This is the work of critique; but critique can be a trap. In the student revolutions of 1968, Lacan notoriously said to his protesting students, “You are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”[39] The hysteric recognises that there is something wrong with the way that things are, but has not yet given up on the fantasy of wholeness. Sara Ahmed writes eloquently about the ways that complaint and protest can be absorbed by universities into self-serving and self-aggrandising narratives of improvement and transformation.[40] Critique can function to reproduce the very systems and structures at which it is directed, and this reproductive function cannot be laid solely at the feet of institutions.  The queer theorist Lauren Berlant talks about “cruel optimism” which exists, they say, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”; Daniel Colluciello Barber suggests that something like cruel optimism can come to structure the way we critique the institutions we are part of.[41] The very act of critique, he suggests, can itself be a form of investment in that institution. Why waste time understanding what is wrong, trying to convince others to agree with us and so on if not that we hope, on some level, that change is possible, that the institution can become better? Critique can be a way of sustaining our relation to the things we criticise; it can be a way of disavowing our on responsibility for a situation and of failing to reckon with the power that we have ourselves; it can be a way to sustain our own sense of goodness by distancing ourselves from the institutions in which we are implicated. Critique, that is to say, can be a form of care, a kind of reproductive labour.

It is difficult to inhabit institutions in the midst of multiple overlapping catastrophes. I know I am not the only person to find myself returning over and again to Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the angel of history pictures the angel, eyes wide open, mouth open and wings outstretched, his face turned towards the past, blowing him into the future and so ever further from paradise as he watches history unfold as “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his fee”’.[42] As Nadia Abu El-Haj demonstrates, one tendency which emerged out of the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima was the figure of the witness, whose “prophetic quality was inseparable from her trauma”.[43] El Haj connects this figure of the witness to the emergence, over the last few days, of a “new humanitarianism”, a new ethics of care which focuses not on the struggle for a most just world so much as on the attempt to relieve human suffering, which replaces “talk of politics” with “moral obligation”, an “ethical turn … understood as ideologically neutral and thus ‘post’-political”.[44]

Of course, before there were hysterics there were medieval women mystics. I want to close this discussion of the hysteric’s discourse by turning to Catherine of Siena, in whose life and work protest, care, and the witness of suffering are closely entangled; in whose self-aggrandising self-abnegation, martyr complex, violence, frustrated power and compassion I recognise not only myself but also — please forgive me — many of you. According to Catherine’s biographer Raymond of Capua, when a local sister called Andrea became sick with breast cancer, her wounds so putrid that people could only stand to be near her if they stuffed their noses so as not to be able to smell, Catherine tended to her faithfully, washing Andreas’ oozing breast. Catherine was not immune to the stench of Andrea’s wound, but demonstrated her perfect self-mastery when, experiencing nausea whilst tending to the wound, she bent her face to it until she almost passed out (I, too, have attended meetings about my institution’s financial crisis).[45]

You might think that such commitment to care and self-sacrifice would be met with gratitude but, like so many people around the saint, it seems that Andrea could not stand the holy Catherine, spreading nasty rumours about her, and accusing her of sexual immorality. Catherine, however, remained undeterred, continuing to attend to Andrea’s bedside until one day the bitter and resentful old sister saw Catherine’s face transformed into that of an angel, on which she repented, called together all those to whom she had slandered Catherine’s reputation, and admitted that Catherine was not only pure but, indeed, a saint.

Catherine’s greatest joys, it seems, were always prompted by great suffering; in her letters she writes to her confessor, Raymond of Capua of the unspeakable joys she experienced when attending the execution of a young nobleman, with whom she had stayed up praying throughout the night. As she waited for him to be brought out to the executioner’s block, eager for spiritual encounter, she laid her neck upon the block. But, she says, “my desire did not come there, for I had too full consciousness of myself.”[46] Instead she resumed her prayers for the young man, as he in turn laid his head upon the block, speaking the names of both Jesus and of Catherine herself just before the axe fell and his head in turn fell into Catherine’s lap, whereupon she experienced the ecstasy for which she had been longing.

With all this holiness, Raymond marvels, it is difficult to understand the many insults Catherine received throughout her life from those around her. Those around her seem to have been persistently incensed by her spiritual patience and self-discipline. So greatly did the Sisters of Penance of St Dominic envy Catherine’s superior wisdom and devotion that they began to complain about her, deciding that her miracles were not from God but the devil, working to keep her out of their meetings, keeping her away from holy communion, denying her access to a confessor; so incensed by her that, when she did manage to partake in communion, falling immediately after into a deep trance, they would pick her up and throw her bodily out of the church, some of them even kicking her as she lay insensible on the ground.[47]

What does it mean to insist on tending to the wounds of someone who finds your presence extremely irritating? What does it mean to ecstatically receive the host in a community which finds that ecstasy so unacceptable that your fellow congregants literally pick up your body to remove you from church? What complex ties of power, pleasure, suffering and self-aggrandisement are at work in Catherine’s relationships with the pious nuns who cannot bear her and her confessor Raymond for whom the obvious irritation which Catherine provokes in others becomes itself a sign of her sainthood?

Writing about the psychic burn-out often experienced by migrant care workers, Jared Sexton suggests that burnout and breakdown are endemic to the profession of caring, because of the inherent paradoxes at the heart of care work itself. Psychoanalysis tells us, he suggests, that our best intentions are laced with unbidden aggression and sexuality, that dangerous and sometimes violent desires emerge when those cared for do not go along with the caregiver’s best intentions, resulting in harms both to the carer and to those cared for.[48] Catherine’s life and work speaks to this complex intertwining of self-sacrifice and pleasure, to the ways that self-denial can be a way to seek out power; the violence that so often takes root in the midst of care, directed both at carers and at those cared for. Liberation theology has often talked about God’s preferential option for the poor, but there is a risk here – as liberation theologians well knew – that this sense of God’s solidarity with the oppressed can turn into a kind of fetishisation of suffering and poverty.[49]

Why do so many of us stay in jobs, churches and institutions which are draining the life out of us? Why is it that so many of us find ourselves frozen, being blown ever further from Paradise, as catastrophe piles upon catastrophe before our open eyes? Why are we so much more easily moved by pity than by anger; what does it mean that it was not Palestinian resistance and struggle against occupation and genocide which brought about mass support within the West for the Palestinian cause, but the endless, unbearable images of Palestinian suffering?

The route out of this bind, Lacan suggests, is the final of the four discourses: the analyst’s discourse. It is only here, for Lacan, that we truly confront the reality of failure: the impossibility of mastering ourselves or those around us. The task of the analyst is not to control, not to produce endless knowledge, not to protest, but to open a space in which the other may come face to face with failure. We might think of this in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that the role of philosophy is not to provide answers but to ask the “right questions”.[50] We might think of it in terms of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s argument for “a theology which aims (as only Queer Theology can) to scandalise, that is, to be a stone on the road to force theologians to stop, fall down, while pausing in their pain and thinking during the pause”.[51]

This work of interruption, of scandal, of asking questions, is no simple matter of brute force. It may take only a single blow of the hammer to stop the wheels from turning; the art is in knowing where to hit it. Things are trickier still when we begin to work at scale: how to trip the feet of a discipline, a sub-field, a scholarly guild, an institution, a congregation, or a classroom? Here too is failure; here too we must seek to know not only ourselves, not only the institutions and structures we inhabit, but also the relationship between those things. This is work — for Žižek, the work of love, of agape —  and it requires careful attention, along with a sustained attempt to let go of the fantasies of wholeness or redemption which so often structure our relationship to research, teaching, preaching, our ministry, pastoral and administrative work.[52]

Perhaps this has always been the case, but it seems to me that one of most significant difficulties with which this task presents us is that to truly pay attention, to face up to the task of theology —  be that intellectual, institutional, or pedagogical — is to  find ourselves, like Catherine, face to face with horror and obscenity. Academic theology has always been a site of struggle, has always been an engine of violence, and of the reproduction of the violent distinctions of race, class, and gender; but just as Christians come together in agreement that theology has failed if not on anything else, so too I would suggest to you, my readers, that if we can agree on anything it is that university life is not, on the whole, improving. Back in 2013, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote that, “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”[53] There is still truth in this, but places of refuge are shrinking everywhere, albeit still in ways stratified by geography and also by class.

It has become commonplace to speak about “the Palestine exception” — the tendency for both speech and action by and about Palestine to be suppressed, particularly within universities. Yet as Steven Salaita points out, “this Palestine exception informs and is constituted by broader, and older, forms of suppression”, the return of repressed truths of colonial violence past on which our world is built.[54] What is happening — what continues to happen — in Palestine is a horror beyond grasping. It is also a vision of the future which looks to be coming for us all: the razing to the ground of universities and libraries, the killing, torture and incarceration of both students and teachers in Palestine the corollary of the central role Israeli universities play in producing not only the historical and theoretical justification for apartheid, in making and testing technologies of surveillance and slaughter, and in suppressing both staff and student speech and activism.[55]

Christian narratives of salvation and redemption can render us, as Amaryah Armstrong argues, unable to confront the reality of loss.[56] It is difficult not to fall into the logic of theodicy, which says that any kind of suffering, loss, or failure can be justified if – and only if – we believe that ultimately all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Modern secular narratives of historical progress have deep roots in Christian tradition. One thing that these narratives imply is that failure can only ever be a staging post on the way towards victory; that hope is only possible if we believe that God hides behind the curtain of history, ensuring that, whatever happens to other people over there, we are going to be fine, that the suffering and defeat of others exists in the end as a backdrop to our own final triumph over history. Christ’s crucifixion has come to mean, for many of us, not the necessity of the destruction of a world which is willing to put Christ to death, but that redemption will emerge out of suffering, through suffering. There is a kind of obscenity in this. What kind of glorious victory would suffice to cancel out the suffering of all of those who been killed in Gaza, in California fires, in small boats in the British channel, in countless other singular apocalypses?

Perhaps instead we might come, as Amaryah Armstrong suggests, to “understand black riots as an instance of black revelation”; to see “looting, property destruction, and physical resistance to the state’s and citizenry’s enforcement of white nationalism” as “a means of contesting the law, order, and economy of an anti-black world and the reality it legitimates”.[57] Perhaps we might welcome, with whatever trepidation, the abolition of “what exists now” which is, as Anthony Paul Smith argues, “indefensible”, such that “its destruction is a kind of grace, a liberation from the deathly self”.[58] Perhaps we might hear the words of Edward Said, in the poem by Mahmūd Darwīsh from which this paper takes its title: “If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible!”[59] Perhaps we might ask one another how we can relate to our failure to love our enemies, who are also ourselves.

[1] Mahmūd Darwīsh, ‘Antithesis’, trans. George El-Hage, Journal of Arabic Literature (The Netherlands) 36, no. 1 (2005): 50–56, https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064053560620.

[2] I am grateful to Christians for Palestine UK (and especially to Grey Collier) and to Modern Church (especially Alison Webster) for giving me the opportunity to develop these thoughts on Palestine, some of which have been previously published as blog posts: ‘Remember Amalek’, Modern Church blog, 12 April 2024, https://modernchurch.org.uk/marika-rose-remember-amalek; and ‘Hope and Heartsickness’, Modern Church blog, 8 August 2025, https://modernchurch.org.uk/hope-and-heartsickness. Fellow members of the International Network for Experimental Theology and Philosophy  (INEPT) provided invaluable input on a very sketchy draft of the paper – thank you to Tommy Lynch, Hannah Strømmen, Ulrich Schmiedel. Aaron Goldman, Annette Langer-Pitschmann, Gorazd Andrejč, Zoran Grozdanov, Mattias Martinson, Ida Simonsson, Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson, and Mark Godin . I’m also very grateful to my Dublin colleagues, Brad Anderson, Miriam DeCock, Alyson Staunton, and Daniele Pevarello who read and commented on an early draft, and especially to Anthony Paul Smith who was an invaluable sounding board and insightful editor throughout the writing process. I should note that the generosity of the interlocutors I have listed above should not be taken either as implicating them in any errors which remain or as signalling their agreement with the arguments I make in what follows.

[3] ‘Hegseth’s Christian Rhetoric Sparks Concern amid Iran Conflict’, The Independent, 21 March 2026, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hegseth-christian-rhetoric-iran-war-pentagon-b2943142.html.

[4] ‘Pastors Pray over Trump in the Oval Office’, Reuters, 6 March 2026, https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW151406032026RP1/.

[5] ‘Dr James Orr Appointed Head of Policy for Reform UK’, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/20-february/news/uk/professor-james-orr-appointed-head-of-policy-for-reform-uk.

[6] Johana Bhuiyan et al., ‘Inside Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-Record Lectures about the Antichrist’, US News, The Guardian, 10 October 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist; Nick Vivarelli, ‘Peter Thiel Sparks Vatican Ire With Antichrist Lectures in Rome’, Variety, 18 March 2026, https://variety.com/2026/digital/global/peter-thiel-vatican-ire-antichrist-lectures-rome-1236692140/.

[7] Steven Salaita, ‘The Free Speech Exception to Palestine’, Middle East Critique (Abingdon) 33, no. 3 (2024): 4, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2024.2342667.

[8] While Mark Carney is correct that the ‘rules based international order’, now ending, was (at best) a half-truth (Denis Staunton, ‘Mark Carney Says Rules-Based Global Order Is over, Offers Blueprint for “Third Path”’, The Irish Times, accessed 23 March 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/01/21/mark-carney-says-rules-based-global-order-is-over-offers-blueprint-for-third-path/.), it seems very clear to me that the term ‘genocide’ is appropriate in this context; in this view I am joined by Amnesty International, the UN, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, amongst others (‘Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’, Amnesty International, 5 December 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/.; M.I, ‘Report: “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime” by the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 (A/80/492)’, Question of Palestine, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25/. ‘Israel Has Committed Genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission Finds’, OHCHR, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds. ‘Active Genocide Alert – Israel-Palestine: There Is No Justification for Genocide’, Lemkin Institute, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/active-genocide-alert—israel-palestine%3A-there-is-no-justification-for-genocide.

[9] Esther McIntosh and Anupama M. Ranawana, ‘Silence Is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, International Journal of Public Theology (Leiden, The Netherlands) 18, no. 4 (2024): 463–87, https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-20241605. 464

[10] ‘Report of the SST Executive Committee Subgroup on Theology and Race’, 2018, 7.

[11] Warwick Staff and Student Solidarity Network, An Investment in Injustice (2024).

[12] Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’, in The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274, ed. Louise Riley-Smith and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Edward Arnold, n.d.).

[13] ‘Opus Tripartitum’, 103.

[14] See, for example, the section on ‘Expressions of Genocidal Intent Against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others’ in South Africa, ‘Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures’, International Court of Justice, 29 December 2023, 140–64, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf.

[15] See, for example, John Edwards, ‘Reconquista and Crusade in the Fifteenth Century’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. Norman Housley (Springer, 2004), 166; Sarah Covington, The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2022), 2; Jace Weaver, ‘Unsettling the Settled: A Response’, Political Theology 24, no. 7 (2023): 788.

[16] Robert Allen Warrior, ‘Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians’, Christianity and Crisis (New York) 49, no. 12 (1989): 261; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2023); see also  Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (U of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[17] Warrior, ‘Canaanites’.

[18] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1–33.

[19] Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race : Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity / Denise Kimber Buell., Gender, Theory, and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.7312/buel13334., 140.

[20] Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014). 254.

[21] See for example, Warrior, ‘Canaanites’; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (Routledge, 2002), 4–6; Amy-Jill Levine and Ted A. Smith, ‘Habits of Anti-Judaism: Critiquing a PCUSA Report on Israel/Palestine’, The Christian Century, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2010-06/habits-anti-judaism; James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 2010), xx.

[22] See, for example, Delores Williams, ‘Hagar in African American Appropriation’, in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (n.d.), 172; Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’, The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.

[23] Marika Rose, A Theology of Failure : Žižek against Christian Innocence / Marika Rose., First edition., Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2019), 11–13, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823284092; Marika Rose, ‘Holy Mothers of God: Sex Work, Inheritance, and the Women of Jesus’ Genealogy’, Theology & Sexuality (Abingdon) 25, nos 1–2 (2019): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1652031; Marika Rose and Anthony Paul Smith, ‘Hexing the Discipline: Against the Reproduction of Continental Philosophy of Religion’, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (London) 5, no. 1 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0207-4; Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, ‘Editor’s Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, 2010, 1–25.

[24] See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani: ‘the history of the prevailing state system begins in 1492, with the Reconquista’ (Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 5.

[25] See, for example, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge, 1996); Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism : Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel / Nur Masalha. (Zed Books, 2007); Michael J. Sandford, ed., The Bible, Zionism, and Palestine: The Bible’s Role in Conflict and Liberation in Israel-Palestine (Relegere, 2016), https://www.academia.edu/29776721/The_Bible_Zionism_and_Palestine_The_Bibles_Role_in_Conflict_and_Liberation_in_Israel_Palestine; Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024).

[26] ‘Silence is Complicity’, 466.

[27] ‘Constitution’, Society for the Study of Theology, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.theologysociety.org.uk/about-us/constitution/.

[28] ‘Report of the SST Executive Committee Subgroup on Theology and Race’, SST, n.d.

[29] SST Committee, ‘Statement on SST and Gaza’, March 2025, https://www.theologysociety.org.uk/about-us/initiatives/statement-on-sst-and-gaza/.

[30] ‘A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians’, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.kairospalestine.ps/images/A_Call_for_Repentance__An_Open_Letter_from_Palestinian_Christians_1.pdf.

[31] Marika Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy: Theology, Identity and Antagonism’, in Dissenting Church: Exploring the Theological Power of Conflict and Disagreement (Springer, 2024), 205.

[32] Rose, Theology of Failure.

[33] Thomas Lynch, ‘Making the Quarter Turn: Liberation Theology after Lacan’, in Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real, ed. Creston Davis et al. (2015), 217, citing Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Norton, 2007), 166.

[34] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[35] Here I am thinking not only of direct government intervention such as the gutting of the US National Endowment for the Humanities, attacks on ‘DEI’ and the attempt to impose a ‘Compact’ on US institutions of higher education (Sara Custer, ‘How DOGE Gutted the NEH in 22 Days’, Inside Higher Ed, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2026/03/11/how-doge-gutted-neh-22-days; ‘Over 50 Universities Are under Investigation as Part of Trump’s Anti-DEI Crackdown’, NPR, 14 March 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/g-s1-53831/dei-universities-education-department-investigation; egalluscio, ‘What Is Trump’s Compact for Higher Education? — FAQ’, PEN America, 11 November 2025, https://pen.org/trumps-compact-for-higher-education-faq/ ) but also the disappearance of institutions and programmes as a result of austerity (here I would include the reduction of financial support for students) and/or decisions made by university boards and senior management (e.g. ‘Professor Warns of “Scary” Cuts to University Theology Departments’, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/20-march/news/uk/professor-warns-of-scary-cuts-to-university-theology-departments; ‘History in UK Higher Education: A Statement from the Royal Historical Society’, RHS, accessed 22 March 2026, https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/history-in-uk-higher-education-a-statement-from-the-royal-historical- society/.), the targeting of universities by groups such as Turning Point (now active in the UK as well as the US), as well as the broader moral panic about universities in general and the humanities in particular

[36] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso Books, n.d.), 149.

[37] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[38] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[39] Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Ambiguous Legacy of 68’, In These Times, 20 June 2008, https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-ambiguous-legacy-of-68.

[40] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2020).

[41] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke university press, 2020), 1; Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 179–206.

[42] Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Dennis Redmond, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

[43] Nadia Abu El-Haj, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso Books, 2022), 28.

[44] Combat Trauma, 17.

[45] Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (P.J. Kennedy & Sons, n.d.), 369–71.

[46] Catherine of Siena, ‘To Brother Raimondo of Capua of the Order of the Preachers’, in Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters, trans. Vita Dutton Scudder (J.M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1905), http://www.domcentral.org/trad/cathletters.htm.

[47] Raymond of Capua, Life, 364-265.

[48] Jared Sexton, ‘Antidoting’, The Black Scholar 51, no. 3 (2021): 12–13.

[49] See, for example, Gustavo Gutiérrez et al., A Theology of Liberation : History, Politics and Salvation / Gustavo Gutiérrez ; Translated and Edited by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. (SCM, 1985), 287–91.

[50] Anja Steinbauer, Interview: Slavoj Žižek, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Slavoj_Zizek.

[51] Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (Routledge, 2004), 35.

[52] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (Verso, 2000), 117–18.

[53] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013.), 26.

[54] Salaita, ‘The Free Speech Exception to Palestine’, 3.

[55] On scholasticide in Palestine, see e.g.  00/00/0000 00:00:00 On Israeli universities, see e.g. Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel; Anthony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso Books, 2024).

[56] Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, ‘Losing Salvation: Notes toward a Wayward Black Theology’, Critical Times 6, no. 2 (2023): 325, https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10437087.

[57] Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order’.

[58] Anthony Paul Smith, ‘On White Christian Violence’, in In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism, ed. George Yancy and Bill Bywater (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), 340.

[59] ‘Antithesis’, 56.

Thomas Hobbes’ biographer Arnold Rogow writes that, “Hobbes … may never have loved a woman, but no one has ever hinted that he was homosexual” (Radical in the Service of Reaction, 66). Even if that was true at the time Rogow was writing (1986), I’m sure it can’t possibly be true any more; but I spent some time digging around Hobbes scholarship over the summer (with the generous support of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies) and came up empty-handed. Let me then be, perhaps, the first person to suggest it: I think it’s possible that Hobbes was gay. Here are some of my reasons:

• Rogow’s claim comes in the middle of his discussion of Hobbes’ extremely close friendship with notorious homosexual Francis Bacon.
• As Rogow notes, Hobbes never married and was described by his biographer John Aubrey as not ‘a woman-hater … but … even in his youth, (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women’ (66).
• One of Hobbes’ early pieces of writing was a Latin poem about a cavern in Derbyshire called the Devil’s Arse (‘partially so-called because the rocks supposedly look like the buttocks of a person bending over. The rocks are enormous and between them is a very deep cavern, in which the sun never shines’), in which he also discussed another local cave called “Poole’s Hole”. (A P Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, 73)
• Rogow writes, ‘References to human anatomy in the Peak do not establish that Hobbes and the second earl shared an interest in the more intimate physical aspects of life, but we may doubt that Hobbes would have included these references had the earl, for whom the poem was written, be displeased by them’ (71) — the earl here is Hobbes’ student as well as his employer, and also a close companion. Of the earl, Hobbes writes in a. poem full of bawdy innuendos the following lines: “Magnificent, not lavish, still he spends/His riches freely, and amongst his Friends’ (73).
• Rogow suggests that these images of holes and caves haunted Hobbes for the rest of his life and that the Devil’s Arse may have inspired Hobbes’ last reported words before his death: ‘I shall be glad to find a Hole to creep out of the world at’ (71).
• Hobbes was convinced that the secret to a long life was ridding the body of excess moisture, and so as an old man he would play vigorous games of tennis or go for long walks to work up a sweat and then, according to Aubrey, “give the servant some money to rub him” (Brief Lives, 165).
• Also, apparently in quest of a less moist life, Hobbes would lie in bed at night singing ‘prick songs’ (Rogow, 226). Here ‘prick’ refers to a particular form of musical notation, but also, I mean, come on
• Aubrey also recounts a story told to him by Hobbes about a time that Hobbes was hired as a tutor to the young Duke of Buckingham, according to Hobbes a man of ‘great naturall parts’ and a quick wit, who was however slow to comprehend Hobbes’ instruction; this, it transpired, was because he was “at mastrupation (his hand in his Cod-piece)” (Rogow, 153).
• At the heart of Hobbes’ political theory is an (unusual!) insistence that authority has no gender, that the distinctions between men and women are overwhelmingly artificial rather than natural, and that the same therefore goes for any societal norms around sexual behaviour

Obviously none of this is conclusive. But I do think that it’s at least worth both asking the question, and also wondering why it is that the question has not been more seriously considered (in the process of writing this post I began to wonder whether Rogow — a psychoanalyst and close friend of Gertrude Stein — was, in fact, hinting at the possibility of Hobbes’ homosexuality). I do think it’s symptomatic of a general gap between political theological readings of Hobbes which tend to be better at thinking about the symbols, metaphors and underlying metaphysics of Hobbes’ thinking but tend to ignore questions of gender and sexuality, and the feminist scholarship of Hobbes which tends to a somewhat literalist reading of Hobbes which tends to assume that his ideas about gender can primarily be inferred from the times when he explicitly discusses gender and not say, his ideas about snakes and frogs and rivers of blood. Rogow says, when discussing Hobbes in relation to Bacon, that both expressed ‘more than a hint of misogyny’. I’ve not finished the Rogow book so it’s possible I am missing something, but what I’ve read so far suggests that it is not so much that Hobbes — who worked for women, left money to women, and could imagine a world in which women ruled over men — hated women as that he was just more personally interested in men.

Hello, Editor Matt here!

It’s been a long time since you heard from me. A quick station identification: This newsletter is Dracula Daily, which sends out the entire book Dracula in bite-sized pieces.

This list has been quiet for a while because Dracula Season doesn’t start until May. But I’m interrupting here to let you know some quick news about a new thing to read.

(In the meantime, sit tight for Dracula. If you’re getting this newsletter, then you’re already signed up for Dracula Daily, and you’ll start getting the story in your email in May)

The quick news

We’re kicking off a new newsletter - another underrated and overlooked book, delivered in ‘real time’ to your inbox. It’s called The Honeywood File, and the newsletter is Honeywood Daily. You can sign up for it here.

The short version is: here’s another great book, told through letters and telegrams, that we can read together like Dracula. It’s got much shorter sections, and it’s spread out over a longer time period. The book is about people trying to design and build a house - an architect, his client, and the people they work with along the way. I think it’s very, very funny. Honeywood is one of my favorite books I’ve discovered over the last few years.

Here’s my pitch on why you’ll love it.

We’ll start on April 1st (no fooling!) - so sign up if you want to read along. More details over at Honeywood.

Thanks

That’s it. If you’re just here for Dracula, then sit tight - our story begins in May!