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…
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Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
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…
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
Writing Under the Influence
In my library, I have what I call ‘the premier bookshelf.’ There I keep the books that I credit for providing the inspiration to earn a Ph.D. in History and…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
Dark Shadow: on Mike Davis and The Exiles
Angel’s Flight, the 1901 funicular that still graces Bunker Hill, serves as a visual touchstone for a certain version of Los Angeles, one characterized by both noir aesthetics and working-class…