This semester, however, I expanded the exercise to think about embodiment more largely, or how exactly we come to embody socially, historically and culturally crafted identities like gender but also race and class. What can we learn about social norms, cultural preferences or even religious devotion with attention to one body (mine)? How can we learn to interpret the terrain of physical bodies? What are the props, to conjure Erving Goffman, that bolster, and sometimes detract, from not only our “presentations of self” in daily life but also our presentations of social norms and our cultural habits? While Craig invokes Pierre Bourdieu, habitus and deviance in his excellent post on the radical act of painting one’s nails (if a dude, excuse me, a man), I evoke Sean McCloud (who employs Bourdieu on class) and R. Marie Griffith’s lovely discussions of historical and cultural work of bodies inDivine Hierarchies and Born Again Bodies respectively.

For discussions of embodiment, I made myself into the subject of academic inquiry (aren’t we already?), the object of the critical gaze of my students. Gender me, I said to my classes. Race me. Class me. And religion me, which is another post for a different day. The body, I explained encouragingly, is a political, social, cultural and religious map. It is physical, material and biological, but it is also the repository of desire, ideology, need, imagination.  It is an object, and it is an idea. The body is the archive of the physical, the social and the metaphysical. It is the site of me, you and us. What do I, this body, in front of all of you, embody? I ask them beseechingly. 

Continue reading here.

Instead of blogging about fraternal rituals (you’re welcome), I’ll direct all of you to some quality reading this morning about how we write, what we write and how we look.

1. Ben Alpers at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog takes on the question of whom academic historians write for and discussions of accessibility. Here’s a preview:
I’m as much as a believer in broadly accessible history as Cronon or Potter. And, lord knows, I’m not in favor of boring history (though I think we can all think of great works of history that are boring). But the story we tell ourselves about academic history appealing to a mass audience is to a very great extent a myth.

Public interest in academic history is limited to a very small number of historians, generally writing on a small number of topics. And most popular works of history are written by authors who are not academic historians. The current New York Times Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction Best Seller List contains four works of history (broadly understood) among the top fifteen books, none of them written by an academic historian: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson at #7, Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dougard at #8, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand at #10, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot at #13. No works by academic historians appear further down the list, either.

2. Rachel Toor on whether book reviews are actually worth our time at The Chronicle.  Here’s a sample of Toor’s well-placed grouchiness:

If the current climate in publishing and academe requires that scholars be ambitious and accessible, that they write clearly (if not simply) for more than the 15 people in a sub-sub-subfield, then professors will have an opportunity to become engaged in American cultural, social, and political life in meaningful ways. The monograph and book-review sausage factories are not, I think, the best use of our collective cerebral resources. It’s better to write one good article than to review 20 books, and even better to write one good book.

3. Ed Blum’s curated a lovely series on the faces and places of Christ at the Religion in American History blog with posts from David Morgan, Anthony Pinn, Arlene Sánchez Walsh and others. This curation paves the way for Ed and Paul Harvey’s new book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, available in September. Here’s a preview of the series from Ed:

Looks matter. They can mean the difference between life and death, freedom and incarceration. They can make millions, and they can ruin fortunes.

These were exactly the kinds of issues that drove Paul and I as we wrote about The Color of Christ: how people looked at Jesus, how they imagined him looking at them, and what role appearances of the sacred played in America’s long saga with race. At the end of our writing, we were in search of a cover image. How would one evoke the passions, problems, and perils of living with material depictions of the immaterial? 

Tonight (3/9), I’ll be on the radio talking religion and women’s bodies on “Trailblazers”  with Howard Gluss. My segment starts at 7:30 pm PST (or in my time zone 10:30 EST). Feel free to listen as I try to make sense of the place of religion in the current contentious debates about contraception, abortion and reproductive rights. Live-streaming is available at http://www.1100kfnx.com/

This particularly apt as the end to my week, since my 300 level students have been watching George Ratliff’s documentary Hell House (2003). For those of you who don’t know what Hell Houses are, they are alternative haunted houses in which sins are enacted (embodied) as a method of evangelism. In the documentary, it becomes clear that women’s bodies are the battlegrounds for many Pentecostal discussions of sins, as women’s bodies continue to be in current public debates too. To see how my students reacted, check out our tweets under the hashtag #rest351

Here’s the trailer to Hell House:

So here are some things to pay attention to while I get back in the swing of blogging:

SPLC Chart of Hate Groups, 2010

1. Hate Groups are on the rise (again!) in the U.S. At the Huffington Post, Brian Levin walks us through the new Southern Poverty Law Center data for 2011. Here’s a sample:

The 2011 figures are the eleventh consecutive annual increase and the highest number since the SPLC began enumerating hate group totals in the 1980s. In 2000 there were just 602 of these groups nationally. While 2011 hate crime numbers are not yet tabulated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the agency counted 6,624 hate crimes in 2010 in the United States, an increase of only 26 from a 14 year low recorded the previous year. A 2010 analysis by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions found that from 1999-2009 white supremacist and anti-government domestic extremist plots were only surpassed by those undertaken by radical Salafist and al-Qaeda followers during the decade. 

The emphasis is all mine, folks. Interestingly enough, the number of Ku Klux Klan organizations declined while paramilitary and militia groups rose significantly. I want to look at the numbers myself, and I’ll blog about what this means for historians and religious studies scholars a bit later.

2. Historiann weighs in on Rush Limbaugh’s use of “slut” at a private citizen by suggesting he might be a dumba$$. I couldn’t agree more. (On a side note, if you are wondering how to define this term, Mother Jones provides a flowchart with kittens.)

3. At Time, Jessica Winter queries: “Are women people?” This provocative question is her entry point into the increasingly hostile debates over contraception, transvaginal ultrasounds, pregnancy and legislation surrounding all of this. Winter writes:

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway. This debate has reached critical mass, and leaves me uncertain of my legal and moral status. Am I a person? An object? A ward of the state? A “prostitute”? (And if I’m the last of these, where do I drop off my W-2?)

4. Check out John Turner’s review of John Modern’s Secularism in Nineteenth Century America at Religion in American History.  Turner writes:

Modern has written an extended critique of Common Sense philosophy and historians who have embraced it in their analysis of the history of religion in the United States (chapter one contains an extended engagement with Mark Noll). Modern “contends that human agency was an remains an open question … For those living within a secular imaginary, decision about religion were often one’s own, yet the range of available choices had been patterned and shaped by circumstance. Institutions making their invisible demands. Media generating models of particular choices. Machines enabling you to interact with your decisions and those of others. A choice being made before it presents itself as such. Unseen somethings haunting the day.” Toward the end of his book, Modern uses Foucault’s “notion of subjectivization” “to call into question a dominant paradigm of American religious historiography that continues to operate according to the same epistemological and political principles that gave rise to the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century.”

Available at booksellers everywhere, pretty much

Well, folks, believe it or not, Gospel According to the Klan has now been out for three months, and slowly, the book is getting some reviews mostly online and at some news outlets. They are mostly good, (and sometimes they are tough). Additionally, I am still getting used the prospect of people reading (and buying) my book. So, here’s what folks are saying:

Michael J. Altman, Remembering When the Klan Tried to March Through Town:

That said, Baker’s book is an extremely important work. Her analyses of gender, nationalism, and material culture are strong and useful for anyone looking for a model. Furthermore, her use of the periodical literature and analysis of  representation and rhetoric offers me a model for my own work with representations of Hindus and Protestants in my sources. The chapters hold their own as individual readings and can be put to use in a number of undergraduate courses while the book as a whole ought to be a part of any seminar on race or nationalism and religion.

Just take the dust jacket off if you read it on an airplane–I discovered that the hard way.

(I feel like that line should be attached to all promotional materials. I included an image of the cover as a quick reminder of why that might be the case.)

Ina Hughs, Two New Books Offer Peak Behind the Klan’s Sheets, Knoxville News Sentinel

From Baker’s perspective, the Klan has a convoluted and somewhat misunderstood past. She puts a lot of focus on the religious implications of its history and the role religion plays in nationalism.

Kevin Boyle, The Not-So-Invisible Empire, New York Times

At the end of the book, though, Baker steps back from her texts. Suddenly her analysis becomes more pointed. Yes, the Klan had a very short life. But it has to be understood, she contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-­Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken. And sometimes it spreads, as anyone who reads today’s papers knows, fed by our fears and our hatreds.

Kenny Paul Smith, A Brave New Book, Religion Nerd:

I have called Gospel According to the Klan a brave new book. This is so for two important reasons. Firstly, Baker has exposed something about American cultural history that many of us may not wish to see: namely, that both religion and mainstream society participate in the ugly, even violent, side of American nationalism….Secondly, Baker has also exposed something unpleasant about the rest of us, those who do not concur or sympathize with Terry Jones and feel repulsed by exclusionary religious nationalism (Christian or otherwise): namely, that we have a tendency towards forgetfulness, and towards imagining American history and the American mainstream in ways that reflect our own preferences.

Not too bad so far, I think. I’ll post other reviews and commentary as they become available. Please feel free to post or send any feedback on Gospel directly to me. I would love to hear what other readers think, feel, like, hate, etc. about the book.

 I have nothing to say really, except that I like this meme. Carry on, Feminist Ryan Gosling.

Stories take flight (or some other nonsense).

This weekend, the New York Times published an editorial entitled, “The Art of Listening” by Henning Mankell. The author discusses his move to Africa as a method to “see” the world beyond his own European perspective, and the editorial reads a bit like a travelogue. Time seems slower. Stories are not linear. Listening becomes more important than the sheer drive from knowledge. The not-so-embedded critique of “Western” culture comes to the forefront. While I don’t entirely disagree with Mankell about the hegemony of Europe or America or the sped up version of contemporary tech culture, these romantic narratives make me a bit twitchy. The idealization, the romanticizing, of another place dissolves complexities and messy realities.

Mankell argues that “we” (I assume he means those of us in the first world or maybe just white folks of European descent or maybe he likes the royal “we”) have lost the ability to listen. “We” cannot abide silence, and we rush to fill it up with as many words as possible. “We” talk but don’t listen. Chatter, chatter, chatter.

Mankell offers this critique of “us” to present the lessons he has learned from 25 years in Africa and as a vehicle to promote African literature as the “new” literature for global consumption. He writes:

If we are capable of listening, we’re going to discover that many African narratives have completely different structures than we’re used to. I over-simplify, of course. Yet everybody knows that there is truth in what I’m saying: Western literature is normally linear; it proceeds from beginning to end without major digressions in space or time.

That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive. Just as an example. (Emphasis mine.)

African story telling offers something different: exuberance, circularity and conversations with the dead. The African context does offer something different and unique, but the sharp contrast appears because of a generalized vision of linear storytelling of a generalized West. Tidiness in narrative is as much about how we envision the function of stories as it is the actual story. Perhaps, the critique works better if it is about the conventions of storytelling not the stories. What are the differences in storytelling praxis? How do we train our narrators? What makes us narrate certain stories in certain ways? (If you can’t tell already, I have a thing about narration these days.)

The circuitous narrative that Mankell describes is one I recognize and embrace as a part of my white Southern upbringing. Stories moved forward and backward. They involved a few people or many. Context mattered. Lessons were learned or not. There was always reckoning with the dead, the broken, the lost or the tragic. Humor was key, even in the most inappropriate moments. Stories became a way to describe where we were, why we were there, who stayed, who had left us, why they had left us, what that meant for us, how we fit into a lineage or how we didn’t fit. These stories were sometimes linear, but they were most often convoluted and confusing even when they were supposed to bring clarity and give meaning. Sometimes they were blatantly false, but they were good stories. I emerged from a line of storytellers (as well as stoics who avoided certain stories), so I guess I am wholly unsurprised at my career choice. Part of being in this lineage was the ability that Mankell uplifts: listening. To make sense, to tell a better story, one had to embrace the previous story. To listen to the details, add flourish and performance, and to be aware that those gone are never really gone as historians attest.

So, all-in-all, I like Mankell’s description of humans as Homo narrans, storytelling persons, as opposed to Homo sapiens. He writes:

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.

Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.

Beefsteaks when I’m hungry

Something tall and cool when I’m dry

Give me greenbacks when the times are hard

Sweet heaven when I die–Blue Dogs, “Sweet Heaven When I Die”

While reading and re-reading Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, a couple of songs replayed over and over in my head. His lovely and haunting collections of essays made my thinking musical. Perhaps, it is the beauty of his language, the lyrical quality of his descriptions, that direct me to hymns and pop songs (which is on my taste, not Sharlet’s). Perhaps, it is because his reflections on religion, trauma, belief, unbelief, practice and loss feel like poetry. I cannot read his book without music, so songs emerged as the beginnings of my analysis. Every time I started to review this book, the music came to me first. Music evoked spaces I once inhabited as well as spaces in which I currently reside. Thus, I cannot review his book without referring to the accompaniment of music. Hopefully, Sharlet will not mind since music appears in his work from Cornel West as “blues man” to a club named “the Church” to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Dock Boggs’ “Down South Blues” to the songs playing at Sweet Fanny Adams, the motel and bar. Maybe the music even puzzles him a bit too.

The first song starts playing as soon as I see the title, Sweet Heaven When I Die, which my brain somehow translates into “When I die, Hallelujah, by and by” from the Christian hymn, “I’ll Fly Away.” I misread his title every time I puzzle over the image on the cover. Somehow humming this tune seemed to fit with Sharlet’s explorations and excavations of the religious lives of Americans from his college sweetheart’s continual return to the Bible to make meaning to the martyrdom of an anarchist to militarization of Christian youth in BattleCry to worship with German evangelicals and the construction of purity. Sharlet, as Brent Plate puts it, catalogs “weird religion.” Sharlet’s approach both deeply personal and documentary showcases individuals trying to make sense of their lives, their traumas, as well as attempts to create meaning out of chaos. His interlocutors try to find justice, try to heal themselves and others and try to navigate expected and unexpected losses.

Sharlet gives us glimpses into American religions writ small, individuals navigating worlds of faith. He writes about Molly Knott Chilson, his college girlfriend, “Her liberalism became Christian, and her Christianity was gentle and yet thick with the blood of scripture: the darkest passages of the prophets to which she’s always been drawn…” (12). Or Cornel West: “His religion is that of the night side of scripture, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and a Christ story as awful as it is redeeming” (50). Or Chava Rosenburg’s writing about the Holocaust: “Beauty, not God, sustained her” (132). Vera Schnabel, his interpreter at the German Church of the Way, embraced both Jesus and America via music (and she also hums “I’ll Fly Away). Sharlet writes about her conversion:

The song lifted her up high, and up there in the sky she was an angel, just like her black brothers and sisters. She wasn’t an America, she wasn’t German, she was nothing: She disappeared into the clouds and came out the other side a believer (153).

Moreover, Sharlet catalogs the development of American fundamentalism from the perspective of not only Ron Luce, the founder of BattleCry, but also the young adults at his Honor Academy as they struggle with sin, sexuality and “secularism.” The specters of gender loom large in “She Said Yes,” as Honor Academy attendees confront limited gender norms as sexuality becomes the language for and of sin. Moreover, Sharlet does not shy away from issues that make religious people and scholars of religion nervous. He tries to figure out the “price tag” of religious movements without turning to discussions of charlatanism or inautheniticity. While following a New Age healer, he notes, “You get what you pay for” (198) without snark. Capitalism resides in religion and spirituality (just ask Darren Grem or Richard King).

The second, likely more trite, song is a pop song. Sharlet cajoles, “Pop is religion, a source of stories and a conduit for myths, the smoke and mirrors by which large groups of people get together and…get ‘vulnerable’” (225-226). I heard it on the radio (it stuck with me, haunted me, maybe). “If I Die Young” by the Band Perry reflects on loss, trauma and the “sharp knife of a short life” in a slightly off-kilter melody that reverberates. Sharlet also navigates loss, trauma and the lack of meaning (see also John Corrigan on meaninglessness). Many of the essays circle the trauma of every day life, unintended hurt and the loss of loved ones. In “Bad Moon Rising,” the memory of the author’s dead mother and uncle haunts while accompanied to the CCR song of the title. Cornel West discusses “death shudders,” despair and coming to terms with the “reality of death, ordinary life–waiting to die, living as you never will” (60). In the last essay of the collection, “Born, Again,” the life of Dock Boggs is juxtaposed with the loss of a friend’s infant and a meditation on “quitting.” Sharlet pens:

An input of energy results in motion. Simple math, nothing more than 2+2=4. Pages pile up and become books; babies grow up and become children.

The belief that either will necessarily prosper…that “things will work out,” is grotesque: tragic and comic at the same time, funny because it’s sad, sad because it’s funny, awful because it just might be true. Seen from a distance, through a telescope or at the far remove of “art,” a story or a painting or a poem or a song [or scholarship?], both the most mundane of expectations…are the painful spectacle, grievous mismatches of desire and power, of want and the ability to make it so (248-249).

All of Sharlet’s interlocutors, his conversants, his interviewees, seek to manage trauma. How do we manage when ordinary life is about wounds rather than hope? How do we make sense of hurt, trauma, death, quitting, capitalism, consumerism, spirituality, music, art, or religion? (Or do we?) What do we do in the grips of a “death shudder”? Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die flirts with old questions of suffering and meaning while suggesting that folks are just “trying to become human” but “not there yet” (259).

But this also proves useful to those of us who “write” religion as our scholarship. Sharlet’s work pushes me to think about how we write the lives of our contemporaries or those long dead. How do we write trauma? How are scholars making meaning out of the messiness of individual lives? Or should we embrace the meaningless as an analytic frame too? What happens when we pay attention to religion writ small? What kinds of stories do we gain? And what kind of stories do we lose? The work evokes, and songs become my analysis, which makes me wonder how art can be helpful in our interpretations (Jason Bivins and Julie Bryne likely have much more to say about this). Why does this book come to me in song?

[Cross-posted at Religion in American History]

I'm back! I'm back! But not in black!

As noted in a previous post, my semester (4 classes, job applications, student advisor-ing, conferencing, public talks, etc.) gobbled up all of my time (and I didn’t even post all the other things that require keeping a small human, some pets and a beleaguered partner alive). In other words, I have been BUSY! My semester is now wrapping up, and my grading is somewhat under control. Delayed writing beckons and pleads with me to just finish up. All of this means that I will be back to blogging as of NOW.

To tell you the truth, dear reader (there is at least one of you, right?), I miss blogging. Deeply. I crave this form of writing. During the semester, I would long for the time, the opportunity, to blog. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, since I have blogged at Religion in American History since 2007. Heck, I even self-identify as a blogger in a variety of venues.

The reason might surprise, though. I don’t blog because the internet needs my opinion on American religious history, gender, race, class or religion in all kinds of formats. I am definitely not seeking fame or fortune. (Is this even possible anymore?) Blogging has become part and parcel of my scholarly process. As I work through new ideas, new historiographies and new content areas, I blog to force my thinking into concrete form. It functions as a weirdly public venue of note-taking and analysis. Blogging provides a way for me to work through my research and teaching ideas in short and testable format. The concise and precise nature of blogging means that I have to wrangle with making sense of new projects as well as older ones in meaningful and understandable way for both fellow scholars and a general public. This form of writing lets me say something quickly and coherently as well as get timely feedback from others. Blogging removes some of the intellectual isolation of the academy and forces me to put words to my thoughts about our contemporary moment as well as historical ones. It is about my research but also about my particular view, expertise even, that empowers me to comment. I might be a voice speaking into the nothingness of the internet, but people (I am looking at you, Historiann!)  *do* occasionally read what I write.

Moreover, it allows me to experiment more and more with how I write and what style works best for both my subject matter but also for my analysis. This experimentation, then, shifts my scholarly praxis of arranging words on the page as well. Sometimes my blogging makes a topic more clear. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it illuminates interesting questions about methods of study or my evidence. Sometimes it documents that a topic can be exhausted in a post, which is helpful information to have. Blogging refines my scholarly endeavor. Moreover, the use of constant and continual writing makes me into a better writer. Through this format, I feel like my writing has become more my own and less something I was trained to do. It helped me find a much needed voice to finish my book, and now, I want to experiment more and more with my style. This is a confidence that I somehow lacked before. Blogging has made me more adventurous in both my style and content. How else could I write about steamy Mormon calendars, trauma in religious life or zombies? (Oh wait, I am writing about zombies for real.) It makes me bolder, and I am glad to be back to it.

Now, I am off to grading. But, readers, I have come bringing a gift. Rock out to AC/DC, and I’ll be back soon. I promise.

What do you know? I am wearing that very dress today.

It’s down the rabbit hole of piled up exams, books to be reviewed, reading responses, conference papers, public talks, and oh, job applications too! It’s that season (the busy one called Fall), friends, and I am polishing my CV and shining up my job letter. I am also consuming alarming amounts of caffeine to accomplish the mountain of tasks that seem to pile up at this time every year. All of this means my blogging is at a small hiatus. Not to worry, though, most of the applications are due in early October, so I’ll be back sooner than you can legitimately miss me.

Available now!

If you really miss me, the *book* is now available via  Amazon and other booksellers. For some strange reason, there’s a used copy for $85, but the brand-spanking new copy is $29. (Do the math!) I am happy to hear any thoughts, suggestions, queries, or questions about the book, so please feel free to send them along.

 I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here–Johnny Cash, “Hurt”

What might surprise is that the run-ins pierce and balm in so many ways. The neighborhood does this to some bodies and not others, I guess. But if you have a body that feels like the skin does not hold things in or keep them out, if you are made partly of memories of cuts and sutures, it might do this to you.–Julie Bryne (emphasis mine).

Nights ago in a rush of class preparation, I finished Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (originally published in 1980, the year I was born) for Hinduism unit of my Gender in Global Religions course. The book is as starkly beautiful as it is wrenching. The prose matches the blunt social realism. Desai writes about adult siblings in Old Delhi both before and after the partition of India into India and Pakistan. Unflinchingly, she details the wounds of childhood that each siblings carry with them, which haunt as well as taunt them as they grow old and gray. The wounds remain, even in the lightness of forgiveness, and Desai creates ambivalent characters who the reader can admire in a moment and despise the next. In her study of family life, Desai communicates the miscommunications, the snubs, the love, and the pain of the ordinary. She documents the ways in which gender, class, and religion mark the siblings differently and set them in opposition.

The headstrong, and sometimes cruel Bimla, sacrifices herself upon the altar of family, even as she dreams of something more than marriage and domesticity. Her dreamer of a brother, Raja, pines to be a hero or a poet as he abandons his family in the pursuit of higher status and position. And the youngest, Tara, imagines that she will be a mother, and a mother she becomes as well as the wife of a civil servant. Yet she is not the ideal, and she wants more for her daughters than traditional domestic roles. The novel springs forward and back to show how the characters were formed by early experiences, some traumatic and others mundane, and Desai conjures the joy as well as the pain and disappointment of family. The yearning of childhood dreams thwarted by realities of adulthood. But, the wounds she catalogs carefully and lovingly. The siblings harm often without intention, and the pain lingers. Tara feels guilt at running away while Bim was attacked by bees, and she imagines it as a prime accounting of her character, her lack of heroism. Tara carries this wound, until finally, her courage rushes forth from her in confession and apology. Bim shakes off the apology and anguish by pointing out that something that so defined Tara did not even exist firmly in her own memory.

In Desai’s characterization of Bim, the sense of frustration is palpable. Bim wanted more than nursing her sick family members, and she achieves a career as a teacher. Yet, she remains in the painful home of her youth, haunted by dead parents, a dead aunt, and memories of youth. Even in a world she made bend to her will, her wounds are starkly present for reader’s view. Desai writes:

Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally….All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean….These were great rents torn in the net that the knife of love had made. Stains of blood that the arrow of love had left. Stains that darkened the light that afternoon. She laid her hands across her eyes again (165-166, emphasis mine).

While reflecting on how to discuss Desai and wounding with my students, a colleague passed along a link to freq.uenci.es: a collaborative genealogy of spirituality, curated by the fabulous Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern. The project seeks to find out what happens when one asks artists, writers, and academics to describe, inscribe, and define spirituality. I like many others have eagerly waited to the launch of this genealogy, and Julie Bryne’s “Saint February” is a piece, an invocation really, which should not be missed. Byrne’s personal experience of  an inexplicable illness, a wound, serves as her place to mediate both her physicality and spirituality. “Saint February” is a spiritual meandering from the neighborhood and personal interaction to a sore throat to Catholicism and the sensory to past trauma to the academy. We wander with Byrne as she evokes the complexity of everyday life, the place of memory, and importantly, the purported place of the scholar. Her wounded body, her throat, is blessed by Saint Blaise alongside medical treatment as an art more than a science. She writes:

So, as you see, were it not for St. Blaise, I would not be here to tell you this story. I would not have returned to my classes that semester, would not be chewing over the meaning of spirituality for an online collection, would not be remembering waiting in lines, would not be walking home from Tony’s in Bed-Stuy with good broth for a sore throat.

The blessing matters, and the existence of blessing complicates Byrne’s position as a scholar. She continues:

But wait … this is no way to end the story. Don’t mess with people, people in the guild, my guild, my people. Don’t mess with my head. Leave out suggesting that St. Blaise was actually involved. Leave out hinting that without St. Blaise I would be dead. It was doctors who operated and sewed me whole. If St. Blaise supposedly saved my life, then why didn’t all those blessings years earlier work? If I am having a fit of wanting to thank a saint, I can do it on my own time. Would I say this stuff in the classroom? Do I really believe … ? (Emphasis mine).

Her queries, her positioning, conjures again the difficulty of religious studies, the ephemeral, the ineffable, and the (un)believable. How do we manage the rents, the cuts, and the wounds? How do we explain to our peers and our students not only the embeddness of religion in history and culture but also its deep embeddness in human bodies and lives? We make our bodies, Byrne notes. She alludes to the longer chains of history too. Our bodies bear memories and cuts of a longer history too. We can walk around the religious, but how do particular traditions, rituals, beliefs become parts of these bodies? Do I really believe is complicated by scars and sutures rather than explained away. By including St. Blaise in her invocation, Byrne highlights the complex place of religion in one individual’s life and documents strongly that belief is always about bodies. While Bim’s love wrenches her both emotionally and physically, Bryne’s throat causes the queries of belief. Emotion to body. Body to belief. Belief back to body. Memories remain.

Johnny Cash sings, “I hurt myself today,” in a gravelly voice, and his invocation of pain lingers. His video for his Nine Inch Nails cover of “Hurt” includes images of a crucified Christ with images of younger Cash, the empty museum dedicated to him, and his aged body. This song places me dramatically in a chain of memory: a young widow, a funeral for her husband in which this song echoed and lingered, an altar call, my grandmother’s stacks of haphazard CDs with Cash and Merle Haggard among them, clouds of cigarette smoke, and her t-shirt with Cash on the front. The pain it invokes. My body cannot hear the song without a rush of something ineffable and uncomfortable, a rent to the gut and the mind. A reminiscing I don’t want to make. Cash’s hurt becomes my own, and I cannot shake it from my skin, my own body. It lingers. It doesn’t bounce off.

And yet, I listen, and I think. I ponder how our wanderings, bodily, spiritual, religious, emotional, make us the scholars, the people, who we are. Chains of memory and history bind us clearly; they are inescapable. As scholars of religions, we *walk* around religions that bump and shuffle us all the time. What about those that Julie notes “don’t bounce off”? And what would our scholarship look/sound like if we invoke/evoke our positions, our chains, our memories? Would it truly be more art than science? Or would it be more honest and haunting? Would we have to admit Cash’s hurt, Bim’s tortured love, and Julie’s sutures?

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, and remember to rock out!

Katrina Gulliver (@katrinagulliver), the founder of #twitterstorians, marked the second anniversary of the group today. And I wanted to pass along birthday wishes too. I am exceptionally late to the Twitter party, even later to twitterstorians, since I only joined Twitter a mere (couple of) months ago. My social media runs more Facebook, but I was intrigued at using twitter as a way to more publicly connect with other scholars as well as drum up attention for Gospel According to the Klan. Putting my bad habits of self-promotion aside, Twitter is a fascinating venue to connect with not only fellow American religious historians but also other cultural, American, and public historians too. Post a question, get a tweeted reply. I get quick analyses of news stories as well as fellow twitterstorians sending me links to my current research interests.

Just last week Stetson Kennedy, the famed Klan unmasker and Civil Rights activist, died. How did I hear about during my weekend? Not on the news, not even on Facebook (until a little later), but rather through a fellow twitterstorian. Chris Cantwell (@cdc29) tweeted it to me. While I was hesitant about the prospect of microblogging, I am slowly incorporating Twitter as scholarly praxis. I can’t wait to see how I feel on twitterstorians’ birthday next year

Run away, it's a ghost!

This summer, I decided to test out some of my new research interests in the paranormal, monsters, horror, and religion on my poor-unsuspecting-can’t-I-just-graduate-already? students. We read Joseph Laycock’s “The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the Context of Secularization” to discuss how an artifact of popular culture emerged as folk religion/piety. Laycock smartly uses the reaction to the film by movie-goers, the press, and religious movements and individuals to problematize narratives of secularization. He poses the question: Why there is a supernatural turn at the supposed height of secularization theory? What follows then is a profile of Blatty, the reception of the film, and discussions about the American practice of exorcism. Laycock documents the “very conscious fear of demons and the supernatural” (5) that emerges as well as the increasing interest/belief in the paranormal.

Much like other works on religion and horror, Laycock attempts to get to the root of cultural fear and the fervent belief in the paranormal. Why do Americans purport belief in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural agents? What does our research look like if we apply Robert Orsi’s “abundant empiricism” to this supernaturalism? Or apply Orsi’s critique of religion-as-belief to the studies of the paranormal? How are Americans enacting, embodying, and engaging the paranormal?

While the students were reading about The Exorcist, I was reading sociologist Michael Cuneo’s American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (2001). Though this book is now a decade old, the interest in exorcism might not be as obvious, but lurks still in American culture.  Cuneo’s fascinating book examines the origins of American exorcisms in the 1970s and the increase in popularity of the practice after the release of The Exorcist. He interviews Catholic exorcists, Protestant deliverance ministries, and lay exorcists, and he attends deliverance services in which demons of lust, procrastination, and pride are expelled. Moreover, Cuneo aptly assesses the romanticization of the priest/exorcist as hero in both the religious and popular imagination. In film and pulpy fiction, priests save the day by taxing their bodies and souls in attempts to rid people of demons. The masculine hero might even sacrifice himself to save a poor demon possessed girl. While I was reading I pondered the fascination with demons, the unsatisfying nature of Cuneo’s (among others) “the devil made me do it” defense. American Exorcism was at its best in the heady descriptions of deliverance services and in the interviews with practicing exorcists. The cacophony of possessed souls screaming curses and moaning, the physicality of possession with (high) arching bodies and contortion, and the often calm assurance of those who battled with demons make for a rich tale of what deliverance and exorcism *feel* like. The fluidity of possessed and deliverer becomes apparent too: sometimes one must deliver others from demons, and sometimes one must be delivered. The possessed gnash, moan, and writhe on the floor, and then, get up and calmly deliver others. The change-up signals the fluidity of roles as well as a clear understanding possession is not a static state of being.

Creepy, creepy.

For me, Cuneo as interlocutor proved to be an interesting commentary on ethnographic practice and the relationship one has with subjects. Clearly, some of Cuneo’s conversants wanted him to be delivered/exorcised too. Observation was not enough for them; they craved his participation as legitimacy of their action. To participate would signal the reality of possession, and his refusal unnerved some. In his descriptions of the services and his role as observer, it is clear the complexity of the scholar’s position. The question that Cuneo doesn’t answer purposefully is the question of authenticity: Are demons “real”? Do demonic forces exist? Cuneo admits that this question is the one he encounters the most, and it is a strategic move to not answer the question of whether possession or demons are *real* but rather to report the reality of demons for the possessed, the deliverance ministries, and the exorcists. Rather than debunk the presence of supernatural, this interlocutor attempts to document this extraordinary religious expression. These are clearly “abundant events”; social networks and relationships abound. Exorcism is surely real.

A larger question lingers: Why do demons become popular and present in a period of wealth and so-called secularization in the U.S.? Cuneo wonders about the presence of demons in suburbia and the practice of deliverance and exorcism among middle class white Protestants and Catholics. Much of the book is an attempt to showcase how mainstream this supernaturalism is by emphasizing who expels demons and who wants to be exorcised/delivered.  Cuneo describes polo shirts, khakis, twin sets, understated jewelry, good purses and loafers that leader and members of these ministries wear. Their hair is coiffed and maintained. They are generally polite, when not demon possessed. They work at banks and in schools. They are white collar and firmly middle class.

At first, I nodded accordingly as any good reader should, but as I continued to read I wondered how class status becomes configured as a legitimator of religious experience. Are demons less real when the working class reports them? Is skepticism acceptable when the lower classes, the impoverished, report the supernatural? Why does class status authenticate demons (or not)? This seems to reflect earlier trends in religious studies scholarship, deprivation theories and familiar class stereotypes attached to religious adherence, that Sean McCloud aptly documents in Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religions & Religious Studies (2007), which I blogged on long, long ago. McCloud notes, “Those who wield less social, cultural, and economic power usually also have less control over how they are represented. Historically, working-class and minority groups and individuals have been imagined in ways that satisfied the desires and fantasies of dominant classes” (21).  Religious movements of these groups, then, faced derision, skepticism, and critique both because of class status but also because of the class sentiments/stereotypes of the scholars discussing them. While reading American Exorcism, it became clear that there was something at stake in showcasing the mainstream nature of exorcism/deliverance and its deep atttachments to the American middle class. Documenting the middle class presence in exorcism functions to legitimate its presence and practice. Of course, the question of authenticity doesn’t matter because (white) middle class Americans are involved. Favored class status authenticates, and thus exorcism is real because of its class status.

Cross-posted at Religion in American History Blog

Live streaming is available at KFNX1100AM. My segment is at 8 pm PST and Paul is on at 8:30 pm PST.

At the end of June, the Huffington Post’s Tim Suttle queried “Why are evangelicals losing influence?” This claim of decline emerged from a Pew Research Center survey of evangelical leaders globally, in which 82% claimed that evangelicals were losing influence over culture. The blame, of course, landed firmly on the “rising tide of secularism.” Suttle disagrees with the causation, and instead he notes, “If evangelical influence is nose-diving we have no one to blame but ourselves.” The jeremiad of declension remains alive, well, and likely weary, and it seems fly in the face of presence of evangelicals in American culture. Is evangelicalism on the decline? Or it this a method to chastise evangelicals into action as well as reflection?

Declension and its sister narrative secularization ebb and flow in public discourse and historiography with assertions in both that this moment (“no, not that one!”) is certainly a moment of decline. The crucial time when religion might not be present in public life but rather avoidable, contained, and private. Declension narratives seem to hinge on the abject hope that certain religious voices will lose presence and popularity (the question of which voices becomes very, very important). Religion is in decline, isn’t it? What is meant exactly by religion generally seems to be an association with mainline Christianity. As one might imagine, I am not terribly interested in mapping out this statistically (though the statistics are alluring). Yet the fervor that emerges anytime new survey data suggests decline is a different story. Just this morning, a group of my summer students presented the recent findings of Barna Group study of religious change to discuss the religious character of the American nation. The study reports that 40% of all adults in the U.S. fit the moniker “born again”, which is not a self-identification by survey respondents, but rather Barna’s label. Does this data suggest decline?

While reading Suttle’s article on declining evangelicals, I couldn’t help but wonder how political figures like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann trouble this self-reported decline.Perry, after all, hosted “The Response” this weekend, and Rolling Stone imaged Bachmann as a Christian crusader (Janine already covered this here). The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza profiled Bachmann’s religious roots. Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner puts Perry and Bachmann head to head in a discussion of who would win the conservative Christian vote.

Continue here >>>

One of my Facebook friends  asked a question I have been asked a dozen times in a dozen different ways: How do you study this?  To which I still don’t have a great answer. I usually respond with the tried and true, “Somebody needs to.” But, that answer is not entirely genuine. Of course, someone needs to. The question, instead, is why do I? The real answer is less formulaic, more personal, and telling. And it is not open to public consumption just yet. But rather, I ask another set of questions: why/how does violence get deeply intertwined with religion? (Or hatred? Or intolerance?) What do we learn at this intermingling, or rather this cohabitation? And why is there a reluctance to study these cohabitation as religious? Why do we try so hard to separate (some) religions from violence and not others? How does the focus on extreme violence obscure the ordinariness of violence and harm in every day life? Why can’t some be qualified as terrorists?

What is a Christian terrorist?

So, this isn’t our normal fare here at RiAH, but I couldn’t help but draw attention to the concern over the language of Christian terrorism in the American media coverage/speculation about the recent terrorist actions in Norway. What is it about the label “Christian terrorism/terrorist” that bothers so? And how does domestic terror in the U.S. also get coded? (Hat tips to Paul Harvey, Matt Hedstrom, John Koyles, Jeremy Russell, and Mike Altman for links and Facebook conversations that lead to this post.)

“We now live in an age of unprecedented violence….Reliance on coercive power as the primary method of convincing others corrodes the moral fiber of society, creating a world shorn of human sensitivity, justice and a stable order….The penchant for stereotyping the other is frequent, true self-examination is uncommon. ”—Deepak Tripathi

On July 22, 76 people died in a bombing in Oslo and an attack on a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utoya in Norway. The Guardian labeledthe event “one of the worst atrocities in recent European history.” The Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik stands accused of both attacks, and yes, he admitted committing both crimes while also labeling them “atrocious” and “necessary.” Though media speculation suggested early on that the bombing in Oslo was an act of Muslim terrorism, the accused Breivik is not a Muslim. Rather the “terrorist” in question is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white guy with reported ties to both the European Far Right and Christian fundamentalism. At Religion Dispatches, Mark Juergensmeyer pushes the analysis further by pointing out that Breivik, like Timothy McVeigh, is not just a terrorist but a Christian terrorist. He writes poignantly:

If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones. Breivik was fascinated with the Crusades and imagined himself to be a member of the Knights Templar, the crusader army of a thousand years ago. But in an imagined cosmic warfare time is suspended, and history is transcended as the activists imagine themselves to be acting out timeless roles in a sacred drama.

For Juergensmeyer, both young, white, “self-enlisted soldiers” believed that their acts would “triggers a great battle to rescue society from the liberal forces of multiculturalism that allowed non-Christians and non-Whites positions of acceptability.” Both were the opening salvo in a battle to save their respective societies from the lethal grip of leftist politics/policies that they believed prevented white Christian men from attaining their rightful places of power and dominance. While Juergensmeyer and the European news outlets have no problem identifying Breivik with Christianity, specifically Christian fundamentalism, there is a hesitation, a slip even, in some American news coverage. What does it mean that he might be a Christian terrorist? Why would we associate Christianity with a “madman”, “a “lone gun man”, or a deranged individual? What is at stake in associating Christianity with terror? At USA Today, Cathy Lynn Grossman queries:

Who here knows exactly what’s meant by Norwegian Christian fundamentalist?…Is he a terrorist because he’s Christian or a Christian who happens to be a terrorist or, if he’s a terrorist, can he really be a Christian at all? And isn’t that exactly the same points Muslims make about terrorists who claim to be Islamic?

The desire to separate Breivik’s terrorist actions from his religious affiliation is telling. Note Grossman’s central question: can a terrorist really be Christian? These questions assume that terrorism and Christianity can easily be parsed out. They are separate becomes a statement of fact. This “fact” then obscures that religion and terror can be intimately bound, informed, constructed, and embodied. The desire to separate says more than the separation. The rhetorical move suggests the clear hesitation in binding Christianity to a powerful word such as terrorism. (I’ve written on why we need to focus on this before here and here.) What emerges as more important, however, is the desire to ignore Breivik and the tragedy he created. Separation leads the way to obfuscation.

On his radio show, Glenn Beck labeled Breivik a “mad man” while also making it clear to listeners that the European Right and the American Right are not comparable (to which I say, what?). Moreover, Beck uses the tragedy to make larger claims about the threat of Islam, multi-culturalism, and the Left in general. “Multi-culturalism and political correctness are killing Europe” rather than the hostility and anger about such that pushed Breivik into defensive action. Beck further claims that the summer camp was a political camp akin to the “Hitler Youth.” His quick reference to Hitler shifts the focus from the massacre of teenagers to the so-called dangerous politics of the camp. He further asks, “Who would do political camps for kids?” The answer seems to be only liberals, who thus endanger their own children. (For the entirety of Beck’s opinions on Oslo and Utoya, click here.)

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial about how the Oslo bombing was committed by extremist Muslims. Today, they provide an opinion piece by Bruce Bawer, who writes about the threat of “radical Islam” for Europe. Breivik reportedly admired his writings on the Islamic threat. Bawer begins by stating that he, like “pretty much everyone,” imagined that the “Islamic terrorists” bombed Olso. Importantly, he shifts gears to argue that Europe’s multiculturalism is to blame for Breivik’s actions. If Europe continues down the path to “Islamization,” then Bawer assures the reader that extremists like Breivik will continue to act. After all, Europe isn’t protecting citizens from the “rise of Islam.” For both Beck and Bawer, the accused terrorist is not the most important component of a tragedy that claimed 76 lives. Rather, these actions (while “atrocious” and “necessary” in Breivik’s own terms) become the stepping stones to critique Islam’s so-called threat to both Europe and America as well as a way to bash the despised political correctness that supposedly suffocates modern culture. The real tragedy is the larger fragmentation of society because of dreaded multi-culturalism’s attachment to diversity and difference, not the loss of life. A white Norwegian man killing fellow Norwegians to defend the nation (and even a continent) from its citizens gets lost in the translation. A white Christian extremist becomes an outlier, and there is no articulation of the possibility of Christian terrorism. It doesn’t exist in this rhetorical overindulgence.

Obscuring the obvious questions becomes part of a certain nationalist agenda, in which Muslims remain deeply wed to terrorism. In the case of Oslo and Utoya, Muslims and terror were invoked (and continue to be invoked) in spite of the fact that no Muslims were involved. Ignoring even the possibility of Christian terror ignores the way in which terrorism has political, racial, and religious baggage. By making Breivik simply a crazy individual, we avoid not only his act of Christian terrorism but also the daisy chain of white Christian (male) terrorism in Europe and the U.S. We should quit labeling these events as sporadic, random, and loosely connected, and instead, wonder what connects McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Hutaree (white Christian militia), Breivik, and the Ku Klux Klan. The answer might be a potent imagining of white Christian nationalism that assumes only white men can defend, save, and destroy us. Thus, they act, retaliate, and harm to recreate/fight for a fabled white Christian nation (or continent), free from the troubling demands of diversity.The yearning to get back to a moment of power and dominance (even though, in many instances, white men are still the folks in power) leads to not only inflamed and insensitive rhetoric but also violence and brutality. Perhaps, we should find the connections in their imaginings to understand why they fight/maim for a“cosmic battle” between good and evil. Perhaps, we should rid ourselves of the assumptions about Muslims and terrorism because with these casual assumptions we might never be able to reckon with the possibility, much less the reality of Christian terrorists.

Wednesday Round Up: Must Read Edition

While Paul is away, the blog will go on (and on) with a new series on religion and masculinity (see Charity’s first post here) and the long overdue return of the Gender and the American Religious Historian series. We have to keep all you readers busy, so y’all breathe a deep sigh of relief when Paul returns. Anyone, contributor or guest poster, who would like to submit posts to either the masculinity or the gender series, please send it along to kellyjbaker (at) gmail (dot) com. The more the merrier!

Happy Wednesday everybody! Here are some must-reads for the middle of the week.

First, the Center for the Study of Religion & American culture posted the proceedings from the second biennial conference. The proceedings from the 2009 meeting are also available. RiAH bloggers provided our thoughts on the conference (Elesha’s here and here, Janine’s here, Paul’s here and mine), and now, the excellent papers are available to all of you who missed the lively conference.

Second, check out our own John Fea‘s “Can the Study of History Heal the Culture Wars?” at Patheos. Here’s a snippet:
…I could not help but wonder if the thing that ails us most is not our failure to engage in activism, but our failure to understand and empathize with those with whom we might disagree. Perhaps our failure to bringing reconciliation and healing to our divided culture is, at its core, a failure of liberal learning, particularly as it relates to the study of history. Christians and secularists can team up in social justice projects, and Barack Obama can give stirring speeches about ending the Red State-Blue State divide, but until the American people develop the discipline of listening to one another, we will remain stalled in our attempts at reconciliation.

Third, Craig Martin interviews Manuel A. Vásquez about his More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford 2010), which I will be reviewing a bit later for the blog. Martin describes Vásquez’s project in these terms:

More than Belief is very much a “theory” book, as it provides a comprehensive introduction to modern and postmodern theories (feminist, anthropological, sociological, philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, etc.) relevant to the study of that thing we call “religion.” Along the way Vásquez criticizes each theory considered, selects the best elements of each that he finds worth saving, and synthesizes the useful remainders into his own general theory of religion. What was astonishing to me about the book was the scope: Vásquez moves from the mind/body problem in Plato and Descartes to the rejection of dualism by Spinoza and Nietzsche, to the origins of phenomenology in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to social constructionism in Foucault and Butler, to Deleuze and Haraway, to cognitive science of religion, and so forth (this list includes highlights from only the first half of the book—I wasn’t joking when I said “comprehensive”!). Vásquez ends up arriving at a naturalist but non-reductive materialist theory that emphasizes embodiment, practice, and global social networks.

And here’s Vásquez on the role of theory in the study of religion:

Today, I am far more skeptical that theory can solve all social problems. Although some of my Jesuit teachers were killed by the military during the Salvadoran civil war precisely because of their ideas, I am keenly aware that there is always a painful gap between theory and practice (even when theorizing is a form of practice). Moreover, I do not see the theorist as some sort of Sartrean emancipatory hero, always choosing freedom over bad faith. As Bourdieu tells us, being an authoritative theorist requires a habitus, a habitus that is formed by one’s privileged trajectory in the fields of knowledge production. Still, I do theory as a critical engagement with particular problems or impasses. I agree with Foucault that theory should be driven by a “limit-attitude,” a situated “permanent critique of ourselves.” It should grow out of “our impatience for liberty.” As such, theory should be a passionate endeavor “oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.” This normative stance, which implies that theory should be useful not just in academia, but, to the extent possible, to our being-in-the-world, is a corollary of a materialist epistemology that stresses immanent becoming.

For more the rest of Martin and Vásquez’s conversation, parts one and two are available.

This means that zombies and monstrosity are on my mind, but not on my writing schedule. C’est la vie! What I would like to be doing is reading Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value, which sits on my Kindle mocking me. (Yes, I have a Kindle.) For a dose of Zinoman, check out his series on “How to fix horror” at Slate. My favorite zombie commentary for the week comes from my favorite blue monster, Cookie Monster.