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Richard Irvine

Richard Irvine is lecturer and director of teaching at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research spans the study of religion and the environment, and he has carried out fieldwork in the UK and Mongolia. He is the author of An Anthropology of Deep Time: Geological Temporality and Social Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Currently, he is writing about the relevance of monastic accounts of the struggle with acedia for a contemporary understanding of isolation, despondency, and boredom.

Essays

Contemplative Prayer, Desire, and the Problem of Other People

In its embrace of solitude, contemplative prayer opens up a space of tension around the social and embodied qualities of desire.

The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.

Pussy Riot and the Church

This piece is from the Political Theology Network archives originally posted on August 23, 2012.

In Memoriam: Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas and the Journey of Theology Toward the Future

The prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon (Ecumenical Patriarchate) passed in Athens, on February 2, 2023.

Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?