Archive for September, 2022

The Praise Band to English Professor Pipeline

Exchanging My Equipment for a Living I was recently searching for Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” when, by some algorithmic accident, the results confronted me with memories…

The Things You Can’t Teach in Evangelical Literature Classes

I deconstructed my faith completely while teaching English at an evangelical school, and while the school is not the main reason I left the faith, it is absolutely the reason…

Christian Rap and White New Calvinist Poetics

When I started college in 2008, I was a seventeen-year-old white Southern Baptist woman desperate to fit in at my liberal-leaning R1 university but also to find Christian friends. I…

Beyond the CBA: Constructions of Readers in Christian Right Magazines

Although united by broadly shared conservative theological principles and conservative political ideals, the homogeneity of the Christian Right is often overstated. Conservative Protestants, the largest component of the Christian Right…

The Varieties of Apocalypse: The Christian Right and Affective Response

Violence’s relationship to the sacred is one of the recurrent themes of religious studies.1 In the case of Christianity this theme has been regularly debated, given the core tension in…

Apocalypse, Now What? Evangelical Decline and the Turn to Conservative Conspiritualism

The Evangelical Apocalypticism that accompanied the demographic and political ascendancy of Evangelical culture in the final decades of the twentieth century was grounded in a kind of conspiratorial framework —…

Red-Pilling on Patmos: A Quick and Dirty Hermeneutic for the Evangelical–QAnon Connection

But it kind of came and went, and then I was wrong again, wrong again. I’m always wrong again. — Doug Jensen, Interview with the FBI, Friday, January 8, 2021…

Organized Discontent

In a 2006 New York Times article titled “Defunders of Liberty,” cultural historian Thomas Frank examined the sordid career of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in light of his indictment and…

Confessions of a ’90s Christian Culture Warrior

Its leering, bulbous eyes reflected the stark blue light of the full moon with their own jaundice glow. The gnarled head protruded from hunched shoulders and wisps of rancid red…