Andrew Moody
Andrew Moody lives and writes in Melbourne, Australia. He sometimes works as a lay theologian, sometimes as a graphic designer, and was the inaugural editor of The Gospel Coalition Australia from 2016 to 2023.* Andrew is married to Jenny and they have two grown-up children.
* You can see some more of his old TGCA posts here.
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The Storied World: Impassibility, Incarnation & Virtual Reality
In recent months, I have been thinking and writing about the significance of stories, divine impassibility and the incarnation. Here is a post to draw some of those threads together in the light of our Christmas hope. Some of this is an adaptation of a paper I gave up at EV church earlier this month. Here’s an odd truth to consider. The world we live in is virtual. I don’t mean that it is a mere illusion or a light-show, or that there is another physical reality behind it. I mean that it doesn’t have self-existence. The world is not a series of objects existing alongside God. Rather, God is…
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The Blood Miles is Released!
The wait is over, The Blood Miles is now available as ebook, paperback and hardback. Head over to the landing page for purchase links, or to preview the audio version.
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Spooky Stories and the Lord of Halloween
I like a spooky story. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s unhealthy. Maybe I should be more reformed and less medieval—more Zwingli and less Luther, as Carl Trueman would put it. I know there are definite dangers in thinking too much about spooky things—of drifting into a superstitious mindset where intermediate powers control the ups and downs of life. I know that I am not immune to that temptation, and I know the antidote (see more here). I like the idea that there is a hidden world that still reveals itself. I’m also unsure of how many of the stories one hears are genuine. I have had a few strange things…
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Narnia Must Die – Tough Questions for Christian Writers
A few weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts about the possibilities of Christian fiction: whether it should exist; what it might achieve. I ended on a fairly upbeat note. Stories might refresh our jaded palettes to see what’s true; stories might take us by surprise and sneak past our prejudices and certainties. But there is one important problem that I passed over. The more stories succeed, the greater the danger that we might mistake them for the realities to which they point. We might want to live in made-up worlds rather than turn our eyes to heaven. We might want to keep reading romance rather than live a…
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Considering Barbie (and Marriage and Singleness)
Being human can be very uncomfortable … People make up things like the patriarchy and Barbie to endure how uncomfortable it is. Jen and I saw Barbie over the weekend. We both liked it; were both surprised by it. I thought it was funny and smart and multi-layered to a degree that I still haven’t fathomed. The film’s reframing of sexual politics as an existential problem allows it to address deeper human questions that apply to both men and women. I also found it surprisingly compassionate. It managed to proclaim the let’s-take-down-the-patriarchy part of its message without anger and without, as Jen put it, being preachy. Barbie’s final rejection of…
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What’s the Point of Christian Fiction?
What’s the point of Christian fiction? Can it do any good? Should it even exist? These are some of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been working on several novels over the last ten (or thirty) years or so. I have found them difficult to answer, but here are some scattered ideas that I have tried to rake into a pile. Should Christian Fiction Even Exist? From one point of view, the whole notion of “Christian fiction” is dubious or offensive From one point of view (often a “literary” point of view), the whole notion of “Christian fiction” is dubious or offensive. Christians should seek to…
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The Little Hunter Who Ran on Water
One of the projects I am currently working on has required me to generate several background myth-cycles. Here is a story from one of those mythologies. In the larger novel it appears as a tale from a children’s book called, “Tales From Lands Afar”. Perceptive readers might recognise allusions to several other stories from the real world within it. Here is a tale that the old women of the Kalari tell in their hoop and skin houses on the shingle coves of the great and dark Otter River. It comes from long ago and tells of Irgolan, who is also called Tamashye, in stories from other places. In the days…
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Medieval Bikkies for Jen
Back in June 2021, I made some bikkies for Jen’s birthday. I wanted to copy Dr Ella Hawkins’ amazing and painstakingly hand-painted masterpieces but I didn’t have the skill / patience / time / eyesight. Fortunately, I do have a bit of technical cunning, so I found a whole lot of images of illuminated manuscripts online, cropped and imposed them in a grid, then sent them to a cake shop that was able to print edible ink onto fondant sheets. Meanwhile, I made some gingerbread dough, rolled it out and cut it into a grid of 40mm squares. I made a 38mm square cardboard stamp (I think I covered it with…
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Reading and Writing – Literal Magic
I recently had the opportunity to talk about “Reading and Writing to the Glory of God” at the RTC in Melbourne. Here is an expanded version of some of what I said. Is there anything closer to magic than reading and writing? The idea that by making some marks on a page, you can send your very thoughts into another person’s brain is bananas. And it gets even wild when you realise it works with dead people too. How can we ever get used to being able to read the minds of people who lived 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia? How is it possible that even then, those people possessed…
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I2C Multimedia Project
Please note, this won’t look much good on anything other than a landscape display—i.e. desktop or iPad etc.—sorry mobile users. Many years ago, I worked with AFES Victoria and Mustard Schools ministry to produce a Flash-vased CD-Rom for an evangelistic event at the Melbourne Forum. It was complicated project and had its share of technical challenges. Our video quality was pretty low too (as you will see if you run it). But it was a lot of fun to make and I learned a lot. I loved talking to the staff and students who contributed. And I enjoyed working with the very clever Josh Johnston who built the rotating-cross animation…
