DAVID BRAZIL TO ROMANS

Sitting with David Brazil's To Romans (Compline 2012), a slight run of poems composed on a manual typewriter, photocopied and stitched into a stiff cover, the title and name of the author printed in black letter font, presumably monotype. Like seminar notes toward a more thoroughgoing biblical exegesis halted midway by — what — maybe the constraint of time or our collective inability to reconcile an ecclesiastical imagining of love with a desire for social justice.

If the book had a bibliography for further reading I suspect it would feature, among other things, the enormous constellation of texts attending to questions of universality, radical politics, justice and Pauline love (i.e. Alexander Kojève's response to Leo Strauss's On Tyranny, Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind &c, Badiou's St. Paul, Žižek's Monstrosity of Christ, Nancy's De-Enclosure and so forth).    
  

Oscar Romero comes to mind, the last sermon delivered 24 March 1980, the day of his assassination: "Every country lives its own 'exodus'; today El Salvador is living its own exodus. Today we are passing to our liberation through a desert strewn with bodies and where anguish and pain are devastating us. Many suffer the temptation of those who walked with Moses and wanted to turn back and did not work together. It is the same old story."