While literary critics have yet to theorize the relationship between post-1945 American literature and the white Christian Right in ways that are proportional to its political power and cultural influence,…
Archive for September, 2022
“We Must Choose Manhood”: Masculinity, Sex, and Authority in Evangelical Purity Manuals
In 2017, author and former youth pastor Joshua Harris launched a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary with an unusual premise: he would travel across the country listening to people tell…
When the Church Library is Bad for You: The Rigidity of Evangelical Women’s Fiction
In 1891, Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield expresses what was considered a primary function of the English novel in the nineteenth-century: to educate women with principles to live virtuously. In Tess…
Introduction
For some time, secular prophets have predicted the demise of the Christian Right, a politically muscular movement of mostly white conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons.1 Demographics suggest waning affiliation, as…
City of Quartz, City of Gold
In 2013 I drove across Los Angeles to watch South African-Canadian director Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium at the Cinerama Dome. A devastated Earth! An impoverished population without health care or reliable…