Just last week, I was reading Deena Weinstein’s landmark 1991 study Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the final chapter, which deals with metal’s “detractors” from across the political spectrum. While conservative criticisms of heavy metal are well-known through the work of groups like the Parents Music […]
Author Katy Scrogin uses Václav Havel’s discussion of hope and fear to address the problem of individualism in US political life.
The following is a guest post by Jonathan McGregor. Jonathan is a Ph.D. student in English and American Literature and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His research interests include 20th century and contemporary American fiction, modernity and postmodernity, secularity and postsecularity, religious epistemology, and political theology. His favorite book is […]
In his latest book, “The End of Evangelicalism?”, pastor and professor David E. Fitch explores the possibility of evangelicalism surviving, in some form, throughout the 21st century. Fitch utilizes the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek to deconstruct what many evangelicals hold most dear–inerrancy of Scripture, the decision for Christ, and belief that the U.S. is a […]
William T. Cavanaugh effectively challenges contemporary treatments of religion and its culpability in violence, but his study raises other questions about what occurs theologically behind the church’s disordered politics.
This essay is neither for nor against Glenn Beck. The philosopher Michel Foucault warns us to be suspicious of proper names because they tempt us to ascribe agency to the person instead of to the overall flow of discourse, knowledge, and power out of which the person emerges as an agent. I seek to provide […]
When Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz was at the apex of its initial popularity, I was starting as an undergrad in Oregon at Multnomah Bible College (now Multnomah University).1 Miller’s book swelled like music on our campus and others like ours. Many of us carried a secret fear that the joke all Bible and Seminary students […]
Geoffrey Holsclaw gives a brief history of social impetus for capitalism and considers the Eucharist as a true paradigm for economic exchange.
A review of James K. A. Smith’s *The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts.*