Jesus said to him, ‘Friend, do what you are here to do’. (Matthew 26.50)

In the darkness of Gethsemane, amid the clash of swords and the flicker of torches, Jesus addresses his betrayer with a word that stops us in our tracks: hetairos (‘friend’). This Greek word is not the warm philos of intimate companionship, but neither is it a term of contempt. It carries the weight of association, of one who has walked alongside, shared meals, witnessed miracles. And Jesus uses it at the precise moment when that companionship is being weaponised against him.

The theological scandal of this address lies in its refusal to unmake the relationship at the very moment it is being violated. Judas arrives with a kiss – the gesture of greeting now twisted into a signal of betrayal, of identification for arrest. Yet Jesus does not revoke the covenant of their shared journey. He names Judas as what he has been and will be, even as Judas enacts what he has chosen to become.

This moment in the garden confirms what was already enacted hours earlier in an upper room. The church’s liturgy captures this with haunting precision: ‘On the night he was betrayed, [Jesus] took bread …’. Not the night before. Not the night after Judas left. The very night of betrayal itself. And the bread broken and shared was given to the twelve, not to eleven. There’s all the hope of the world in that.

The ‘friend’ spoken in Gethsemane thus echoes the broken bread given in the upper room. Both gestures refuse to allow betrayal to have the final word on the relationship. Both offer dignity and recognition at the precise moment when they are least deserved and will be most thoroughly rejected. Knowing does not prevent giving.

This, it seems to me, has profound implications for how the Christian story invites us to understand and embody our own relationships. Jesus’ calling Judas ‘friend’ does not prevent consequences – Judas’ story ends in disaster, just like Jesus’, at least penultimately. Yet it also suggests something subterranean that cannot finally be completely broken. When I think about my own damaged relationships, this is where both hope and pain get generated.

Those who recognise in Jesus something of the divine life see in that meal and garden something of the relentless and outlandish logic of grace, of a love that precedes our choices and persists through our blunders. The bread given to Judas is the same bread given to Peter, who will deny, and to all the other disciples, who will scatter.

For those of us who live in the aftermath of our own experiences of betrayal, small and large, this gives pause. Maybe the same voice that called Judas ‘friend’ in the garden still calls us by name, places bread into our uncertain hands, and refuses to let the worst moments define the terms of our relationships? This, we hope, is the character of divine love: unconditioned not because it is indifferent to betrayal, but because it remains loyal even when loyalty is not returned.

We are pleased to invite you to the Bible and Visual Culture unit meeting, taking place 5–9 July 2026 in Adelaide, Australia, as part of the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting.

The Bible and Visual Culture unit is dedicated to the critical study of how biblical texts, themes, and figures are interpreted, adapted, and reimagined through visual media—from ancient mosaics and manuscript illuminations to contemporary film, television, video games, advertising, and public art. These visual interpretations have shaped, and continue to shape, the ways biblical texts are received, interpreted, and contested within the wider cultural imagination.

The unit is intentionally interdisciplinary, drawing on art history, film and theatre studies, media studies, musicology, gender studies, trauma studies, postcolonial criticism, and more. Whether examining biblical motifs in cinema, exploring representation in public art, or analyzing the commodification of biblical imagery in advertising, it highlights the interpretive power of the visual and its capacity to illuminate aspects of biblical reception.

We warmly invite established scholars and PhD candidates to submit a proposal on any topic related to the visual reception, interpretation, or representation of biblical texts—historical or contemporary, theoretical or methodological. Presentations will be thirty minutes, including discussion.

Given our location in Adelaide, we particularly welcome papers that engage with Australian art featured in Australian galleries, museums, and public spaces. How have Australian artists interpreted biblical narratives? What role does biblical imagery play in Australia’s visual culture, from colonial-era works to contemporary Indigenous perspectives? This meeting offers a unique opportunity to explore these questions in context.

Paper proposals should be submitted here and should include your name, institutional affiliation, paper title, and an abstract of approximately 250 words. Proposals may be submitted at any time before 15 January 2026. All presenters must register for the SBL International Meeting. Further details about the Adelaide meeting are available on the SBL website.

Amanda Dillon and Jason Goroncy
Coordinators, Bible and Visual Culture Unit

In the midst of such a sombre time, the publication of the new issue of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies feels like a small but meaningful act of scholarly continuity and shared purpose. I’m grateful to have a piece included in this volume, which has just been released online.

My article, “Attention, Sign-making, and the Tragic: On the Indexing of Ecological Icons in the Work of Harry Nankin,” explores how Nankin’s photographic and environmental practice invites us to attend differently to the more‑than‑human world—its fragility, its beauty, and its tragic dimensions. The essay considers how ecological signs are made, how they are read, and how they might help shape our moral and imaginative responses to the crises we face.

The full article is available open access.

My thanks to the editors and the Australian Association for Jewish Studies for their work in bringing this issue to publication.

I’m pleased to share four recent pieces that have found their way into print in recent months, each exploring different facets of what it means to pay attention—to art, to theology, to culture, and to the world after certainty has departed.

Rethinking Nicaea from the Margins

Together with John Flett, I contributed “The Heresy of Nicaea and the Jesus of Colony” to Receiving Nicaea Today: Global Voices from Reformed Perspectives (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt). The essay questions how the Nicene formulations functioned—and continue to function—within colonial frameworks. We ask what it means to receive this Christian creed from perspectives shaped by the experience of empire’s violence, and how orthodoxy itself can become a form of theological imperialism.

Photography as Attention

In “Attention in Harry Nankin’s Photography Practice: Assisting Nature to Write Itself,” published in Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic), I introduce the work of the Australian photographer Harry Nankin, locating it in a tradition of cameraless photography and highlighting its key concerns vis-à-vis matters of attention, which are made equally concrete in Nankin’s processes and the subjects themselves. I then propose that Nankin’s art practice shares some analogies with that of an iconographer or, more exactly, with one who recognises and indexes icons. This reckons with certain convictions Nankin shares about nature’s communicative character and how he, therefore, understands the place and responsibility of the human artist.

Engaging with Paul Mitchell’s Poetry

My review of Paul Mitchell’s High Spirits appears in the latest edition of TEXT. Mitchell’s collection presents a vigorous conversation with existence itself through poetry that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, balancing spiritual depth with artistic sophistication while finding transcendence in ordinary life. The collection addresses contemporary existence through intimate portraits of marriage, family, and Australian suburban life alongside broader cultural and environmental concerns, all rendered in an accessible yet profound conversational tone marked by humour and wisdom. Mitchell’s work demonstrates how careful attention to the world reveals it as sufficient and potentially sacred, offering poetry that connects rather than obscures, in a tradition that labours under the burden of modernity’s “broken contract” (George Steiner) between language and reality.

On Attention and Absence

Finally, my essay “On Being Called to Attention ‘After the Gods have Departed'” appears in Gesher. This short piece wrestles with what happens when traditional structures of meaning recede, and how we might cultivate forms of attention that don’t depend on what has been lost. The title gestures toward that strange condition of modernity: how do we attend to what matters when the old guarantees of significance have withdrawn? The essay engages with work of three witnesses: Simone Weil, Harry Nankin, and Edward Said.

These pieces circle around related concerns: the quality of our attention in a disenchanted age, the politics embedded in theological language, poetry’s ongoing argument with reality, and the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practice. Each represents a different register—scholarly, collaborative, analytical, critical—but all share an interest in how we show up to the world, and what might show up when we do.

PDFs of all four pieces are available here on my website.

In the halls of Hobsons Bay, they’ve drawn their battle lines,
There’s squillions for the roads, while community declines.
Seven dollars ninety-nine for art, for books, for dreams –
Tell me what this says about our values, plots, and schemes.

Thirty-nine for every road, twenty-one for parks and play,
Nine dollars for the aged, the faint, the ones who’ve lost their way.
These numbers tell a story of a community that’s lost,
Where concrete speaks much louder, and compassion pays the cost.

Sixty-three million for the monuments we’ve planned,
While the homeless sleep in doorways throughout this promised land.
Where is the friendly shelter when the rain falls cold and hard?
Where is that stubborn hope when kindness seems forever barred?

Twenty-five million dollars flows beneath our very feet in drains,
While struggling families break apart under crushing financial strains.
No food banks in the budget, no refuge for the poor,
Just the thunder of construction shaking every weary door.

A mother reads to children by the light of shopping malls,
An artist paints on cardboard in abandoned bathroom stalls.
The programs fade to nothing while the asphalt spreads like flame –
These are the quiet victims of our civic spending game.

Twelve-ninety for the fragile earth that cradles all our dreams,
While thirty-nine pours concrete over rivers, fields, and streams.
The warming earth sends warnings through each rising tide and flame,
Yet still we pave our children’s paths with poison, steel, and shame.

Just pennies for the saplings that could clean our poisoned air,
While toxins flood our waterways without a cent of care.
No funds to plant the forests that our children’s lungs will need,
As chemicals keep flowing from our profit-driven greed.

Disability gets nine dollars in this cold arithmetic,
While millions fund the monuments to progress smooth and slick.
The numbers tell our story of a community grown numb –
Fine roads for all to travel, but life has been struck dumb.

Is this the cost of progress?
Is this what we are for?
At least the ledger’s balanced
though humanity’s no more.

*****

This wee poem, first published in Star Weekly, my local paper, was my response to the Hobsons Bay Council 2025–26 budget, which was mailed out to residents as a mode of positive promotion.

You can check out some of my other songs here. I am also currently working on a new album, which I hope to release later this year.

‘In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere – not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered. Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewellers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are three-year-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eighty-year-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, labouring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth’.

– Vasily Grossman, ‘Ukraine without Jews’, trans. Polly Zavadivker. Jewish Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2011): 13.

Grossman’s essay, originally titled ‘Ukraine bez yevreev’ in Russian, faced significant publication hurdles. The Red Army’s official newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, initially rejected the piece. It eventually found its way to print only in a shortened, Yiddish translation in Einikeit, the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee’s journal. The original Russian version remained unpublished during Grossman’s lifetime, until its discovery and publication in the journal Vek in 1990.

‘The “acceleration of history” … confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory – social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies – and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past. On the one hand, we find an integrated, dictatorial memory – unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth – and on the other hand, our memory, nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted historical traces. The gulf between the two has deepened in modern times with the growing belief in a right, a capacity, and even a duty to change. Today, this distance has been stretched to its convulsive limit.

This conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken and something had ended that we had experienced as self-evident – the equation of memory and history’.

– Pierre Nora

• Amy McQuire reflects on the first public inquiry into the crisis of ‘missing’ and murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Australia.
• Don Watson on democracy.
• Dean Ball on the sunset of predictive AI.
• Amani Haydar on writing from and through trauma.
• Paul Powlesland becomes the first juror to swear an oath on river water.
• How to think about the agency and intelligence of a tree.
• This is a wonderful discussion on Schoenberg, which also serves as a great taster, for those yet to read it, for Jeremy Eichler’s brilliant book, Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance.
• A new study on AI models that are creating ‘irreversible defects in the resulting models’.
• David Gewirtz on how AI scams are infiltrating the knitting and crochet world.
• David Runciman and Helen Lewis reflect on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.
• Matthew Milliner on how ‘the theological wisdom of AI is rather limited’.
• Cameron Parsell on why Australia needs permanent supportive housing to end homelessness, and why it will pay for itself.
• A federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).

I have a new essay out: ‘Christ as Strange(r): The Elusiveness of Jesus in the Work of Nick Cave and Julie Dowling’. In Seeing Christ in Australia Since 1850, edited by Kerrie Handasyde and Sean Winter, 149–66. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

The Abstract reads:

Strangely, Australian theologians have mostly been quite uninterested in pursuing the question of what an Australian Jesus might be like. This suggests an investment in a theological methodology at odds with the disruptive and inverting character of the presentations of Jesus offered in the Second Testament, wherein questions arising from particular contexts were considered basic for responsible theological work. Conversely, the figure of Jesus has occupied an endearing and idiosyncratic place in the broader Australian imagination. This essay represents an effort to listen to what two contemporary Australian artists—Nick Cave and Julie Dowling—make of Jesus and to consider some implications of their contributions for doing theology in Australia. Their work recognises that the question of Jesus’ identity and the countless cultures in which Jesus is woven cannot be unbraided, however interruptive and strange such a reality may prove to be. In testing the claim that it is only as a stranger that Jesus is ever a sign of the divine life among us, the essay is also an invitation to relinquish efforts to domesticate or homogenise Jesus. To experience this stranger is to experience one who ‘appears only in the moment in which we are dispossessed’ (Judith Butler) of them. This is the event that disrupts, disorients, and dissolves any sense one may enjoy of history’s continuity or possession. Recognition of this stranger is only ever the measure of our failure.