Tony’s Books

Love’s Entanglement (2026) - An interview with Author

• What does Love’s Entanglement bring to the traditional and current theological conversation?

This book gives us an entirely fresh starting-point for theology, one that may be summarized in terms of “poetics” or “semiotics.” Traditional readings of scripture and faith present them as a flat doctrinal-intellectual, once-for-all understanding of God and salvation. But what if the Bible was engaged in a long journey of translation, not from one language or another, but from one human meaning to another? From a meaning rooted in human violence, to one rooted in divine nonviolence? By twinning the thought of René Girard and Martin Heidegger, Love’s Entanglement shows us that biblical language is the revelation or uncovering of a primordial human truth and an even deeper divine one.

• Can you explain this some more, how this might actually work?

Philosophers refer to “first philosophy” as the root starting point or source code for any system of thought. Christianity has been used to having Plato and Aristotle supply its first philosophy, hand in hand with the Bible. All you have to do is think of concepts like “soul” or “eternity” to know this influence. But what if our basic thinking should not be about being, substance, and the eternal immortal soul, but about violence and humanity’s birth out of violence, and then the intervention of a nonviolent redemptive God to save us from ourselves? If we begin from this starting point it would mean that conversion to Christianity refers to a very different way of being human on the earth, rather than an insurance to get us out of here to an otherworldly afterlife.

• How does the book set about making its case?

Love’s Entanglement demonstrates a key contrast between classic concepts of being or substance and a thought of relation or relationship. It is this contrast—or dialectic—that carries the main force of the argument. Is our understanding of the universe through metaphysical ideas and substances, or is it through the living texture of relationship? The book deals with the question philosophically, but it also has a chapter on science, because it helps demonstrate what’s at stake. If we think of something like the “Big Bang” it is the thought of an extremely dense and tiny point of substance that then blows up. But what of the necessary relationships between the parts that hold the whole thing together? Where do they come from? And then if you think of a human person, are they not much more likely to think in terms of core relationships, rather than abstract philosophy? If you add René Girard to the mix, you can see humans have relationships of imitation and violence and, with that, a world of myth and the sacred, from their very beginning. Once you see this, the picture of relation or relationship stands out much more urgently as the first philosophy for humankind.

• So, how do you develop the question of relation? How do we as humans decide about this?

The book uses the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, which describes the human sign-system (or semiotics) as a relationship of meaning established by a sign. It is always an open-ended process—one sign interpreting another (what he calls “the interpretant), as human history unfolds. Love’s Entanglement argues that Christ has introduced into the world a radically new relationship of love and nonviolence, such that human meaning is fundamentally made anew. Christ is the supreme interpretant, continually translating and renewing human meaning. Another way of saying this is that Christ offers a new “transcendental relation,” one of nonviolence, in place of the old transcendental relation of violence. This, of course, is a cosmic shift, one that every believer, and all of human culture, continues to process in the very fiber of their nature. Here is the central thought of the book, the core insight it brings to the table

• Can you say more about the concept of relation, in particular the notion of “the third” which seems to play such a big part in your book?

Charles Peirce elevated the thought of “the third” to a prime category, meaning you can’t have reality without it. For two things to be together, there is always a need for a third to create the relation and meaning between them. This is self-evident when you think about it. What is different about Peirce is that he raised this to the first level of attention and thought. Then, if you follow this thinking, you see that signs and symbols are a vital instance of the third, as they serve to bring things together both in animal sentience and in human consciousness. Signs show and create relationship, and really act to demonstrate the way relationality runs through everything and forms the raw material or underpinning of signs.

• So if signs produce relations and relationship, what is involved in human signs and their unique connection to concepts? How have they actually come about?

This is hugely important. According to Girard, the first authentically human sign was the body of the collective victim. This is a dramatic claim, but it helps make sense of so many things about the beginning of abstract thought—it is literally the shock of meaning branded into the human brain. And then the repetitive role of ritual is the medium that preserves and amplifies the world of signs. So, the collective victim is the first sign and the transcendental relation that founds all human meaning. When Christ deliberately enters into this role, he radically transforms that relation. From one of embedded violence to one of transformative and liberating nonviolence.

• Presenting things in this provocative way must have consequences for Christian faith and practice: can you sketch some of them?

If Christ changes the roots of human meaning from a kind of “background radiation” of original violence to a communication of original nonviolence, this is nothing less than new creation, a recreation of all things, as scripture promises. But even though this is biblical language, Christian existence has not lived as though this is true. When theology understands this as its authentic content, it can let go of its transactional and metaphysical teaching. Default church practice is to one degree or another about maintaining co-existence with violent human structures, while the individual sets their sights on another “eternal” life after death. When theology understands and teaches Christ as a genuine phenomenon of recreation, then it can let go of its transactional and violent teaching. Would it not then represent an actual leaven of human transformation?