One of my favourite writers, Anne Lamott (Travelling Mercies, 2002), has helpfully reduced the Daily Office to its bear essentials.  Just one word is needed for Morning Prayer, apparent: ‘whatever’.  And just two for Evening Prayer: ‘ah, well…’.  I would also add my own version of a Midday Office – and here again, just one word: ‘Help!’. 

Almost thirty years ago, French philosopher Jacques Derrida minted a peculiar term that has come to have an ambivalent value as a currency: Hauntology.  Derrida introduced the word in his 1993 book, Spectres of Marx.  Hauntology was his portmanteau term (i.e., haunting and ontology) referring to the return or persistence of elements from the past, as in the manner of a ghost. Derrida wrote his book after the collapse of communism, and his term was meant to refer to the atemporal nature of Marxism – and chiefly its propensity and to be able to “haunt Western society from beyond the grave”.