Books I Have Written

I am the author of four books. The first three are a trilogy examining the revolutionary nature of the Pauline faction in the very early days of the Jesus movement. The series is called “Paul and the Uprising of the Dead.”

Volume One, Pauline Politics: An Examination of Various Perspectives, examines the main cluster of themes people examine when trying to understand Paulinism or the early Jesus movement in a way that also considers socioeconomic and political dynamics.

Volume Two, Pauline Eschatology: The Apocalyptic Rupture of Eternal Imperialism, further develops this contextual understanding of the Pauline faction by related Paulinism to apocalyptic movements and by further examining what I take to be the four conerstones of Roman imperialism: the household unity, honour and shame, patronage, and traditional religiosity reworked around the imperial cult(s).

Volume Three, Pauline Solidarity: Assembling the Gospel of Treasonous Life, then presents a comprehensive picture of the ways in which the Pauline faction were striving to develop a transnational household of God with and amongst those who were colonized, vanquished, enslaved, and oppressed by Rome and her allies, notably by reworking notions of honour and shame around the Jesus-event, developing a transnational resource-sharing network rooted in sibling-based economic mutuality, and viewing the true good news of their age as being about the uprising of life that is occurring amongst the left-for-dead. In this volume, I offer my own interpretation of the key themes generally associated with the “theology of Paul” (although, as I show throughout the series, every word of that phrase is misleading).

My fourth book, A Magnificent Work, is an autobiographical exploration of the interconnectedness of toxic masculinity, White supremacy, and settler colonialism within the context of Canadian-occupied territories. It is a work of “documentary fiction” (to use the term of W. G. Sebald) or “autotheory” (as proposed by Maggie Nelson). I move from relating my personal experiences as both a son and a father to exploring the ways in which similar events have played out on a much larger scale within the Canadian occupation. Special attention is given to the history of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s oldest and longest-running “Indian Residential School.” Thus, although an Anglican bishop once described the Mohawk Institute as “a magnificent work,” I argue that the truly magnificent work that awaits people like me—notably, cishet male settlers of Christian and European descent—is the process of embodying a gentle masculinity, recovering a sense of one’s proper place of connectedness within a network of relationships with varying degrees of responsibility and accountability, and striving towards decolonization.

In 2023, I had two poems published in an anthology of poems written by “some of Ontario’s finest writers.” This anthology, edited by Andreas Gripp and published by Black Mallard, is called Stones Beneath the Surface and can be purchased online here.