In this article, I argue for the centrality of prayer within Christian interpretation of scripture. This argument is made in two stages. First, Christ on the road to Emmaus is the interpreter of scripture par excellence, such that scriptural interpretation is fruitfully understood as participation in Christ's interpretation of scripture to and for the church. Second, scriptural interpretation must take prayer as central to an appropriate scriptural hermeneutics, since prayer is one way in which the reader of scripture becomes conformed to person of Christ.

In this article I propose an erotic theosis as a fruitful possibility for conceptualising our final participation in union with God in the beatific vision and for imaging said participation on earth. Particularly, I propose a synthesis of recent work from Oliver Crisp on theosis with that of Sarah Coakley on sexual desire as an especially helpful way in which to conceive of our ever-deepening participation in God's love. Further, this synthesis uses contributions from Erin Dufault-Hunter on the intersections of sexual desire and ethics as a catalyst for its recommendations.

This article contrasts recent works by Sarah Coakley and N. T. Wright as they pertain to Paul's treatment of the Holy Spirit. In particular, Coakley reveals the inadequacy of Wright's claim that the early fathers were impeded in developing a high view of the Spirit because of an allegiance to ‘Greek philosophy’. Likewise, Wright's more comprehensive treatment of Paul helps to reveal potential problems with Coakley's apophatic tendency to describe the human encounter with God as ‘a love affair with a blank’. In the end, however, both thinkers are united in acknowledging the leading activity of the Spirit, both in prayer and in enabling the Christian to declare that ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Cor 12:3). In these ways, both authors converge in an attempt to restore the Holy Spirit to a rightful place in Christian theology and devotion.

Gillian Rose's re-thinking of Hegel in the wake of twentieth century ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing Hegelianisms has offered occasion for a recovery of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as more than simply the narration of the way consciousness absorbs its objects, as textbook accounts often suggest. Rose's suggestion is that Hegel offers a program of radical criticism that destabilises the modern ego in speculative thought itself. Sarah Coakley's recent first volume, of a proposed four, of her systematic theology triangulating Trinity, prayer and dispossessive spiritual practices provides a fruitful dialogue partner for Rose's project in that Coakley offers a mode of thinking about prayer deeply attentive to the shape of spiritual discipline and it's relation to theological grammar. This paper contests that it is precisely in the non-objectivity of divine being, as thought by Rose and Coakley, that we find resources for conceptualising thinking itself as a dispossessive spiritual act. The theological and the spiritual (theory and praxis) cannot, therefore, be partitioned out without violence being done to the act of thinking itself.