Photo by James Allen Walker
Hello and welcome to my personal webpage. This is a place where I will share a little of my story and deposit some of my attempts at poetry. My name is MG Michael. I am a theologian, New Testament scholar and Early Church historian. I have a particular focus on apocalypticism and the Apocalypse of John.
Formerly I was an honorary associate professor with the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. I taught and designed courses at the intersection of ethics, privacy, surveillance and the social implications of innovative technologies.
More importantly, I would like to share some humble thoughts on the ‘mysterium tremendum’, that is, on the presence of the "overwhelming mystery".
I will not say much more, save that I want for this to be a journey for you as well, to look for the clues and to put some of the pieces together, to make up your own mind.
My prayer will remain that you might have considered our encounter worthwhile.
But I do want to give you some context as to my inspiration and world-view. The books and authors I will regularly return to are Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Writings from the Philokalia: On Prayer of the Heart trans. Kadloubovsky & Palmer (1951), Ninian Smart's The Religious Experience of Mankind (1969), Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973), The Way of a Pilgrim Anon. (19th cent.), Sophrony Sakharov’s Saint Silouan the Athonite (1991), and The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kavanaugh & Rodriguez (1991).
My favourite scripture reading is the eighth chapter of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and probably my favoured verse 26: "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."