Lake In dreams, I circle a page. It is lapis, lapping, with arms of water. I wake up on a November morning and write: I meet at the page: water….
Contemporaries Essays
Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal
Introduction How can ambivalence operate as oppositional emotion work for women of colour activists in Europe? As the “simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotional or cognitive orientations toward a…
Gestures of Refusal: Introduction
“Better the errant path than the known world.” — Saidiya Hartman1 In a time marked by the worsening social, political, and environmental crises of late capitalism, gestures of refusal have…
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…