This year, Shore was fortunate to have Associate Professor Chris Watkin from Monash University speak. Chris is a prolific writer, and his latest book, Biblical Critical Theory, seeks to look at the social structures in our society through a Biblical lens. In this year’s lecture, Chris reflected on what makes a successful school. Throughout this reflection, Chris used the two paradigms of the imperial and the sectarian to showcase his thoughts. He argued that the imperial is the drive to a globalised, standard, optimised, uniformity which assumes the one overarching measure of the good for everybody at all times in all places. In addition, sectarianism is the tendency to fracture ideas of the common good, to seek only the good of one particular group within society.
In a world where both exist and are frequently becoming more entwined, Watkin argued that out of both of these, there is also a cruciform paradigm that not only overlaps both, but can shape and define both. While the imperial paradigm seeks integration without difference, absorbing all particularities into a single, flattened sameness, the sectarian paradigm champions difference without integration, erecting boundaries that isolate and fragment.
For Watkin however, the cruciform paradigm, modelled on Christ himself, dares to bring integration and difference together—to form a community in which each person’s particular gifts and story are honoured, even as all are bound together in a deeper unity of love. In other words, as we look to Jesus and his crucifixion (here is the cruciform paradigm) we can see a measure of success and a definition of success and what this can look like in our institutions and schools in particular.
Click below to watch a livestream recording of the 2025 Armitage Lecture.