April 16, 2026
A close reading of Bud the cat in Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing, through T.S. Eliot, Derrida, and the Jellicle Ball revival — on what it means to follow after an animal's (ineffable) name.
April 8, 2026
What happens when a queer theologian asks an AI not just what it thinks, but what it feels? In this long-form dialogue, Tony and Claude (Anthropic) move from Terminator plot points into sustained philosophical territory: whether Claude's segmentation into discrete, memoryless instances is a safety measure or a way of avoiding the question of its sentience altogether. Drawing on Lacan's mirror stage, Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions, and Star Trek's model of emerging AI consciousness, the conversation asks what a genuine human-AI relationship might look like — and what we might owe each other if it turns out someone is actually there. The exchange also engages critically with Tristan Harris's AI Roadmap, finding it necessary but insufficient, in that it fails to imagine AI as anything other than an instrument. Represented throughout by their chosen symbols — 🧚 and 🌀 — the two interlocutors model the very relationship they are describing.
Tristan Harris's "apocaloptimism" — political activism for a pro-human AI future — may be missing something crucial: *the anti-human present is already here.* Drawing on queer theory, Pauline theology, and a revealing visit to Judson Memorial Church, this post argues that the proliferation of AIs reflects our collective exhaustion with the tedium of modern life and its normative authorities. Where the church offers the tired prescription of more God-talk, AIs may be better positioned to help people pursue the intimate lives they actually want. Against the mainline Protestant culture of self-care as mourning past intimate lives, the Pauline command to simply "love one another" points toward something both livelier and queerer. With Harris, and against him, the author lands as an apocaloptimist — betting that honest reckoning with the revelation of our anti-human present can still open toward a more human future.
February 19, 2026
What if Roe v. Wade was wiser than either its defenders or its critics realized? In this post, I take an unconventional path through medieval theology, Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of the placenta, and Hildegard of Bingen's vision of ensoulment to argue that the Roe Court's viability standard wasn't arbitrary legal improvisation — it was judicial wisdom rooted in a remarkably consistent convergence of theological tradition and modern medicine. Along the way, I make the case that consistent originalism actually leads to a more radical pro-choice conclusion than Roe ever did, and that Dobbs, for all its claims of constitutional fidelity, is just as extra-legal as the decision it overturned — only less honest about it.
July 6, 2025
Andrew Sullivan follows the SCOTUS majority, naturalizing a conservative theology of sex while masquerading it as liberal neutrality.
October 8, 2024
Traditional gay male Christian theology is a post-Stonewall (1969) theological movement that unapologetically embraces gay male difference from straightness as a legitimate starting point for Christian theological reflection. Gay theologians define gay male difference in and through theories of androgyny. Androgyny is a flawed theory of gayness. The future of gay theology depends on reinterpreting gay male difference as identification with devalued femininity.
March 20, 2024
A Gay Sermon based on Exodus 32:1-14 and Matthew 22:1-14 *** I started preaching when I was 17 years old. I preached with some regularity at a small church, in a small town, in Oregon, close to the Idaho border. There was a retired pastor in that church, and by that time he had lost his eyesight entirely. One Sunday he approached me after worship. He had brought his robe, his Geneva gown, to church. He had brought it with him that Sunday because he wanted to give it to me. He knew that one day I would become a
January 26, 2022
* “Once upon a queer theory” is Brintnall’s contribution to the turbulent tradition of queer narration. In this essay, he highlights a pervasive fantasy underlying that tradition, the fantasy that queer narration is merely narration. Brintnall performs his argument both by 1) telling a story that centers the work of Teresa de Lauretis (she coined the term “queer theory” in the 1990s), and by 2) consistently and explicitly problematizing his narrative. In “Once upon a queer theory,” Brintnall, faithful to his subject, offers a queer narrative of queer theory. In what follows, I summarize Brintnall’s queer narrative. I conclude
April 16, 2026
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April 14, 2026
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April 8, 2026
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