Geoff Ward
Biographic Data
| ID | 109748 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoff Ward |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoff |
| FAMILY NAME | Ward |
| SIGNATURE | WARD G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1620-5214 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 213 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Becoming human: Christology and deep time
The Chalcedon formula rests on “fully God and fully human”. We creatures have no capacity to understand what “fully God” encompasses, and the question of who and what we are as created human beings remains. Returning to the Nicene Creed today, and here in Africa, possibly more than anywhere else in the world, because of its place as the “cradle of humanity”, that question arises above and beyond all the Patristic debates and ecclesial wrangles. T…
The Diremption of Meaning
Examining work by Rowan Williams, this essay explores what he often refers to as the ‘difficulty’ of writing theology. The difficulty of theology lies in engaging the ruse of having ultimate answers to ultimate questions. The stakes are high: ‘God‐talk’ must concern itself with truth, with reality. But theology knows that truth is always a work of grace and understanding always involves a cost. While it is intellectual understanding that is pursu…
Mapping the web of solidarity: A social network analysis of shifting Tribal engagement among the Big 10 environmental organizations in the United States
Desire: A Theological Reappraisal
Desire and its cognates—longing, yearning—do a lot of hard work in modern theology, the work grounded in philosophical precedents going back at least as far as the early German Romantics. These precedents helped to inaugurate the twentieth century explorations of psychoanalysis. And so, desire re‐entered theological conversation and some lessons were learnt; most evidently about bringing the body back to the soul and the spirit. Despite the impac…
Michel de Certeau: A Jesuit Apologist
While recognizing that Michel de Certeau is not a Christian theologian, this essay argues for a way in which we might read his oeuvre as a mode of Jesuit apologetics. The basis for reading him as such is twofold. First, Certeau pays attention to the various movements of desire beneath the signs composing the discourses in the various fields of his enquiry. In tracing that transgressive desire, he is always to listening for the voice of the Other;…
The role of episodic memory sampling in evaluation
Many models of choice assume that people retrieve memories of past experiences and use them to guide evaluation and choice. In this paper, we examine whether samples of recalled past experiences do indeed underpin our evaluations of options. We showed participants sequences of numerical values and asked them to recall as many of those values as possible and also to state how much they would be willing to pay for another draw from the sequence. Us…
Ageing disgracefully with Jude Byrne: A special section recognising her life and work
While most special sections in Drug and Alcohol Review are focused on a particular research topic, this collection is devoted posthumously to a person and her interests; Jude Byrne. Unique in her ability to lead work across advocacy, policy and research, Jude used her intelligence and living experience as a person who used drugs to influence policy and practice across the alcohol and other drug, blood-borne virus and community sectors. As we note…
Hearing God
This essay attempts to address a simple question: what does it mean to hear God? So much hangs upon learning something about hearing God: revelation, salvation, formation, vocation and mission, for example. What is the relationship then between hearing and knowing God? Before examining two particular passages from the Scriptures in which hearing and knowing coincide (the calling of Samuel and God the Father speaking to Jesus the Son), I offer a s…
Crime against Law: Legacies of Racial Violence for Crime and Punishment
Histories of racialized violence relate to an array of contemporary crime and criminal justice system outcomes. This was anticipated by observers by the 1830s who warned that indulgence of racist violence corrupted the rule of law. Recent studies focus on county-level variation in two forms of racial violence (i.e., violence motivated or organized by racial politics)—area histories of slavery and racial-terror lynching—theorizing that these histo…
Vale Jude Byrne
March marks the second anniversary of the passing of globally esteemed drug reform advocate Jude Byrne. Internationally, as well as in her home country of Australia, Jude was a courageous advocate for the marginalised. Identifying unapologetically as a person who injects drugs for over 40 years, Jude's living experience drove her human rights perspectives on drug use, law and health. While spearheading political change, Jude inspired generations …
The role of rehearsal and reminding in the recall of categorized word lists
Most theories of free recall emphasize the importance of retrieval in explaining temporal and semantic regularities in recall; rehearsal mechanisms are often absent or limit rehearsal to a subset of what was last rehearsed. However, in three experiments using the overt rehearsal method, we show clear evidence that just-presented items act as retrieval cues during encoding (study-phase retrieval) with prior related items rehearsed despite well ove…
Recognition, Repair & the Reconstruction of “Square One”
The concept of a “square one” in societal organization is a curious thing, and challenging analytic, given the stubborn presence of the past. Even if not meant literally, the Square One Project, like much of the polity, envisions a new starting point, where social policy and practice might turn in a more equitable and inclusive direction. Yet we must grapple with what this restarting point is, in a sociological rather than political sense, and ho…
White Health Benefits of Histories of Enslavement: The Case of Opioid Deaths
Popular media and researchers have given increasing attention to the perceived growing alienation and despair of white Americans. The narrative of white decline has been particularly robust in light of the recent uptick in premature deaths of whites from opioid use, but this national conversation has lacked consideration of potential associations between opioid mortality among whites and durable legacies of white advantage that were established t…
(Dis)Continuities in Racialized Legal Violence
Amid growing research on the history and legacies of racist violence in the United States, there has been limited development of theory and measurement pertaining to racist violence as a sociological process. Social science research has centered on lynching and, to a lesser extent, slavery and broader Jim Crow laws and customs, and rarely have these and other forms been engaged together and in relation to contemporary outcomes. We focus on racial…
Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past
Scholars increasingly agree that histories of racial violence relate to contemporary patterns of conflict and inequality, and growing interest exists among civic leaders in reckoning with these legacies today. This volume examines the contributions and limitations of scientific research on legacies of racial violence and suggests implications for policy, practice, and other forms of intervention aimed at redress
Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South
Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners' facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors documen…
Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools
This study examines how corporal punishment in contemporary public schools, a disciplinary practice concentrated in southeastern U.S. states, relates to histories of lynching in the region. Using school-level data from the U.S. Department of Education, we examine these relationships in a series of multi-level regression models. After controlling for numerous school- and county-level factors, we find an increased likelihood of corporal punishment …
Tradition and Traditions: Scripture, Christian Praxes, and Politics
Distinguishing the Impact of Age on Semantic and Nonsemantic Associations in Episodic Memory
The study suggests that the nature of the association is most important to episodic memory performance in older age, irrespective of refreshing, such that source memory is unimpaired for semantically meaningful information
Contention and the Pendulum Pivot: Weighting Equal Justice
In Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (2017), Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps advocate replacing the pendular notion of penal change with an agonistic approach, where contention is central. This Essay reflects on a pendulum component that has escaped theoretical or empirical scrutiny in pendular accounts of penal change: the pivot determining how freely a pendulum weight swings, and its resting equilib…
Configuring Political Repression: Anti-Civil Rights Enforcement in Mississippi
Dominant approaches to political repression, which rely on linear analytic models and focus on discrete state agencies or repressive forms, obscure the complex organization and impacts of enforcement networks. Building on recent investigations of collective action fields and arenas of political contention, we develop a relational approach to political repression emphasizing joint actions to suppress challenges to the political status quo. We use …
From Insult to Estrangement and Injury: The Violence of Racist Police Jokes
This article examines racially derogatory police jokes, what we call "racist blue humor," as discourse that negatively targets and ridicules racial and ethnic minorities as inferior, dangerous, or as objects of symbolic and cultural violence. We argue that racist blue humor fosters the social acceptability of prejudice and discrimination among officers, normalizing a culture of dehumanization that legitimizes structural and direct violence. We an…
Aesthetics, Music, and Meaning-Making
The paper discusses the connection between rhythm and meaning based on Augustine's De musica. This central topic is illuminated by the analysis of other particular aesthetic concepts that one can find in Augustine (such as sentience and desire, in its many Latin variations), as well as in reference to modern aesthetics. The result is the emergence of a relationship between aesthetics and the making of meaning in a co-creative operation between th…
Extremities
Benchmarks provide common ground for model development: Reply to Logie (2018) and Vandierendonck (2018)
We respond to the comments of Logie and Vandierendonck to our article proposing benchmark findings for evaluating theories and models of short-term and working memory. The response focuses on the two main points of criticism: (a) Logie and Vandierendonck argue that the scope of the set of benchmarks is too narrow. We explain why findings on how working memory is used in complex cognition, findings on executive functions, and findings from neurops…
The slow violence of state organized race crime
The politicization of crime challenges theoretical and empirical criminology, while drawing the discipline into politics of criminal social control. This complication and complicity is considered in the case of state organized race crime, and especially its “slow violence”, where victimization is attritional, dispersed, and hidden. Criminology is not merely compromised here—or limited in theoretical and empirical reach—but complicit, contributing…
The Transmission of Historical Racial Violence: Lynching, Civil Rights-Era Terror, and Contemporary Interracial Homicide
Research finds that historic racial violence helps predict spatial distributions of contemporary outcomes, including homicide. These findings underscore the continued need to historicize modern race relations, yet intervening processes linking past violence with present events remain unclear. This study examines these intermediary mechanisms by reducing the century-long time-lapse common to legacy of racial violence research. We use mid-century m…
Does Racial Balance in Workforce Representation Yield Equal Justice? Race Relations of Sentencing in Federal Court Organizations
Increasing racial and ethnic group representation in justice-related occupations is considered a potential remedy to racial inequality in justice administration, including sentencing disparity. Studies to date yield little evidence of such an effect; however, research limitations may account for the mixed and limited evidence of the significance of justice workforce racial diversity. Specifically, few studies consider group-level dynamics of race…
Living Histories of White Supremacist Policing: Towards Transformative Justice
Prominent U.S. While an encouraging development, these calls for transformative justice understate the scope of this historical and contemporary problem, neglecting the often extralegal nature of police involved violence and injustice, its array of spectacular and more subtle forms, and the layered roles of state and non-state actors in perpetrating and sanctioning White supremacist violence. Drawing on historical records of racist violence impli…
White Health Benefits of Histories of Enslavement: The Case of Opioid Deaths
Popular media and researchers have given increasing attention to the perceived growing alienation and despair of white Americans. The narrative of white decline has been particularly robust in light of the recent uptick in premature deaths of whites from opioid use, but this national conversation has lacked consideration of potential associations between opioid mortality among whites and durable legacies of white advantage that were established t…
Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools
This study examines how corporal punishment in contemporary public schools, a disciplinary practice concentrated in southeastern U.S. states, relates to histories of lynching in the region. Using school-level data from the U.S. Department of Education, we examine these relationships in a series of multi-level regression models. After controlling for numerous school- and county-level factors, we find an increased likelihood of corporal punishment …
Race Effects of Representation among Federal Court Workers: Does Black Workforce Representation Reduce Sentencing Disparities
Increasing racial group representation among justice professionals is considered a potential remedy to inequality in the administration of justice, including racial disparities in sentencing. Research shows mixed effects of decision maker race on sentencing. Most studies focus exclusively on the significance of individual judges' status characteristics, however, failing to consider racial group representation among other court actors. The authors…
Configuring Political Repression: Anti-Civil Rights Enforcement in Mississippi
Dominant approaches to political repression, which rely on linear analytic models and focus on discrete state agencies or repressive forms, obscure the complex organization and impacts of enforcement networks. Building on recent investigations of collective action fields and arenas of political contention, we develop a relational approach to political repression emphasizing joint actions to suppress challenges to the political status quo. We use …
Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation
Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with con…
Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past
Scholars increasingly agree that histories of racial violence relate to contemporary patterns of conflict and inequality, and growing interest exists among civic leaders in reckoning with these legacies today. This volume examines the contributions and limitations of scientific research on legacies of racial violence and suggests implications for policy, practice, and other forms of intervention aimed at redress
From Insult to Estrangement and Injury: The Violence of Racist Police Jokes
This article examines racially derogatory police jokes, what we call "racist blue humor," as discourse that negatively targets and ridicules racial and ethnic minorities as inferior, dangerous, or as objects of symbolic and cultural violence. We argue that racist blue humor fosters the social acceptability of prejudice and discrimination among officers, normalizing a culture of dehumanization that legitimizes structural and direct violence. We an…
Racial Politics of Juvenile Justice Policy Support: Juvenile Court Worker Orientations Toward Disproportionate Minority Confinement
Since 1992 there has been a federal mandate to reduce "disproportionate minority contact" (DMC), that is, juvenile and criminal justice system contact of non-White youth at rates exceeding their representation in the population. There is little research on how juvenile court authorities interpret this problem and their responsibility to address it, yet existing studies suggest that racial attitudes of court workers, and the lack of diversity amon…
Accountable to what: Professional orientations towards accountability-based juvenile justice
Formal philosophical and procedural aspects of American juvenile justice have been transformed over the past half-century by `accountability' movements. Yet the meaning of accountability in juvenile justice — specifically who is to be held accountable and to whom — has varied over time making its present application unclear. In this article, we first describe two models of accountability ideals and how each developed. We discuss how traditional r…
Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South
Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners' facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors documen…
Benchmarks for models of short-term and working memory
Any mature field of research in psychology-such as short-term/working memory-is characterized by a wealth of empirical findings. It is currently unrealistic to expect a theory to explain them all; theorists must satisfice with explaining a subset of findings. The aim of the present article is to make the choice of that subset less arbitrary and idiosyncratic than is current practice. We propose criteria for identifying benchmark findings that eve…
The Future of Religion
Because what is understood by religio changes with time and place, even in those places dominated by western European languages the use of the trem is bound to specific cultural politics. When examining the possible future of religion, then, place matters. In the West, I argue, modes of believing and the structure of sensibilities are morphing following the new visibility of religion in the public sphere. The transformation will have long-reachin…
Reforming the Public Sector: Privatisation and the Role of the Advisers
(Dis)Continuities in Racialized Legal Violence
Amid growing research on the history and legacies of racist violence in the United States, there has been limited development of theory and measurement pertaining to racist violence as a sociological process. Social science research has centered on lynching and, to a lesser extent, slavery and broader Jim Crow laws and customs, and rarely have these and other forms been engaged together and in relation to contemporary outcomes. We focus on racial…
Contention and the Pendulum Pivot: Weighting Equal Justice
In Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (2017), Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps advocate replacing the pendular notion of penal change with an agonistic approach, where contention is central. This Essay reflects on a pendulum component that has escaped theoretical or empirical scrutiny in pendular accounts of penal change: the pivot determining how freely a pendulum weight swings, and its resting equilib…
Re: Joyce Text ● Culture ● Politics
Mapping the web of solidarity: A social network analysis of shifting Tribal engagement among the Big 10 environmental organizations in the United States
Recognition, Repair & the Reconstruction of “Square One”
The concept of a “square one” in societal organization is a curious thing, and challenging analytic, given the stubborn presence of the past. Even if not meant literally, the Square One Project, like much of the polity, envisions a new starting point, where social policy and practice might turn in a more equitable and inclusive direction. Yet we must grapple with what this restarting point is, in a sociological rather than political sense, and ho…
Threat, Competition, and Mobilizing Structures: Motivational and Organizational Contingenies of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan
While previous studies of ethnic contention and conflict identify important structural and meso-level indicators of threat and competition, analysis of variation in the mechanisms linking these sources of potential grievance formation with mobilization remains unclear. To address this issue, this study explores the social organization of Ku Klux Klan mobilization in 1960s North Carolina. While regarded as a progressive state in the civil rights e…
Theology and Postmodernism: Is It All Over
Journal Article Theology and Postmodernism: Is It All Over? Get access Graham Ward Graham Ward * *Graham Ward, The University of Manchester, Samuel Alexander Building, A2, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 80, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 466–484, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr099 P…
Racialized Crime Control and Societal Exclusion: A Tremendous Problem for Generations
In 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois warned of an approaching backlash of racialized crime control and the two-pronged threat this posed to Black civil society. These were not altogether new threats-American criminal law and crime control practices had always been mechanisms of racialized societal exclusion-but Du Bois anticipated unprecedented levels of Black criminalization and incarceration in the second half of the twentieth century, and some of the col…
Biblical Narrative and the Theology of Metonymy
Sacramental Presence or Neopaganism
John Milbank's Divina Commedia
Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear! ( Inferno Canto 1, 3–6) The journey towards Milbank’s representation of Augustine’s Civitas Dei calls for an epic heroism, as it passes through woods dense with philosophical thought and over chasms of vertiginous intellectual argument. Dante, then, provides a description of one’s experience of reading Theology and Social Theory. But …
Why is Derrida Important for Theology
The Revelation of the Holy Other as the Wholly Other: Between Barth's Theology of the Word and Levinas's Philosophy of Saying
Reforming the Public Sector: Privatisation and the Role of the Advisers
Literary San Francisco and the poetry of the excitements
The Erotics of Redemption—After Karl Barth
(1998). The Erotics of Redemption—After Karl Barth. Theology & Sexuality: Vol. 1998, No. 8, pp. 52-72.
Re: Joyce Text ● Culture ● Politics
Allegoria: Reading as a Spiritual Exercise
What I wish to argue for in this essay is the theological advantage of turning from the stasis of analogy and symbol (important categories for modernity according to Paul de Man) to the dynamism and semiosis of allegory. The move from static, atemporal discussions of analogy and symbol to allegory will lend itself to a rather different model for the hermeneutical task. It is one that is founded upon narrative, mimesis and participation, and one t…
Theology and Masculinity
The essay sketches an outline for a future theology of sexual difference and gender on the basis of the recent work done in men's studies, queer theory, and contemporary philosophical feminism. Its theological approach is Christian and post-liberal. Rather than beginning from experiences of masculinity, the essay argues for starting with a theological account of being made in the image of God. This would necessarily mean developing a Christology …
Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory
Graham Ward examines the core skills, approaches and concepts employed in the study of theology and relates them to the work of relevant critical theorists. Distinguishing theology's concern with repr
The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth
This authoritative book introducing Karl Barth is written by leading scholars of his work, drawn from Europe and North America. They offer challenging yet accessible accounts of the major features of Barth's theological work, especially as it has become available through the publication of his collected works, and interact with the very best of contemporary Barth scholarship. The contributors also assess Barth's significance for contemporary cons…
The Confession of Augustine (review)
Jean-François Lyotard. The Confession of Augustine. Trans. Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 111 pp. ISBN 0-8047-3792-4, $39.50 cloth; ISBN 0-8047-3793-2, $12.95 paper
"Michel de Certeau's "Spiritual Spaces
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 100, Number 2, Spring 2001
Between Virtue and Virtuality
This essay performs a cultural negotiation between Christian theological discourse and the discourses of the Internet. It argues that Christian theology can neither ignore what is taking place globally and affecting all our lives in one way or another, nor pretend that this advanced technology is simply another tool that can be used or not used as occasion demands. Theology must engage Internet culture as this new culture transfigures social life…
In the Economy of the Divine: A Response to James K. A. Smith
Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice
The book sets out to address and answer three questions from the point of view of Christian theology. The first is, from where does theology speak? The second is, what are the mechanisms whereby cultures change? The third is, how might we conceive the relationship between the contemporary production of theological discourse and the transformation of cultures more generally? Drawing upon the work of standpoint epistemologists, cultural anthropolog…
Applying Black Studies
Christ and culture
Acknowlegements. Introduction. Part I The Economy of Response. 1. Christology and Mimesis. 2. The Schzoid Christ. 3. The Body of the Church and its Erotic Politics. Part II Engendering Christ. 4. Redemption: Between Reception and Response. 5. Divinity and Sexual Difference. 6. The Politics of Christ's Circumcision. Part III The Living Christ: Economies of Redemption. 7. Allegoria Amoris: A Christian Ethics. 8. Spiritual Exercises: A Christian Ped…
Reply to Elizabeth A. Castelli
IT IS ALWAYS REFRESHING to receive back from another person one’s own ideas; refreshing because it is like returning to a familiar book read many years ago. The text is never quite the same; even one’s own text. I think Castelli is right to emphasize the topographies of religion and the my own standpoint within a European cultural situation—a situation which through figures like Lull, Cusa, and Ficino shaped our modern understanding of religion; …
The Future of Religion
Because what is understood by religio changes with time and place, even in those places dominated by western European languages the use of the trem is bound to specific cultural politics. When examining the possible future of religion, then, place matters. In the West, I argue, modes of believing and the structure of sensibilities are morphing following the new visibility of religion in the public sphere. The transformation will have long-reachin…
Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology
Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation
Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with con…
Accountable to what: Professional orientations towards accountability-based juvenile justice
Formal philosophical and procedural aspects of American juvenile justice have been transformed over the past half-century by `accountability' movements. Yet the meaning of accountability in juvenile justice — specifically who is to be held accountable and to whom — has varied over time making its present application unclear. In this article, we first describe two models of accountability ideals and how each developed. We discuss how traditional r…
Sociology (32 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (29 works) · Theology (22 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Criminology (15 works)