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.

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[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.