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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
Toni Morrison on Black Christian Conservatism
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,…
“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…
Ecology of Hope
If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from the classrooms, streets, and studios of forty years ago, then so be it; on the basis of…
Noir Politics in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz
“(Social) space is a (social) product,” Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, but this “fact” is “concealed” under global capitalism because space reduces the “real’…to a…
Against Confusion: Mike Davis’s Storytelling as Political Clarity
To the disappointment of my closest companions, I never tire of the opening lines of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. In fact, I try casting bardic inspiration on my students…