For as long as I can remember Halloween, I have loved it. Consistently. Faithfully. Deeply. Halloween was often my favorite holiday, and it remains so. It was easier than the bigger holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, which required me to be shuttled back in forth between my divorced parents. Half a day with only family, […]
The Honesty of Halloween Read More
Last week, two interviews with me about Gospel According to the Klan went live. (Can you believe people still read and want to talk about this book? So awesome.) The first was a previous interview from 2013 with A. David Lewis on the Klan and zombies, which is now available as a podcast from the Religious Studies Project. Here’s
Interviews and Award Read More
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
Exorcising America’s Demons: Reflections on Possession and Class Read More
While I am prepping promotional materials and changing citation styles for an article (ouch), I shouldn’t be blogging, so I am not. Instead to continue the monsters theme, I post my new favorite Sesame Street skit (which aired last year) entitled True Mud. Sesame Street’s True Mud on YouTube This is, of course, a parody
To get into my newest project, a cultural history of zombies in America, I’ve been reading about monsters, monster theory, horror, zombies in all shapes, sizes, and phenotypes, and fear. This is an entirely new endeavor for me, and I had forgotten the exhilaration and exhaustion that define learning (and then writing) on a new
On (More) Monsters: Figurative and Real Read More