I’ve been listening to Ella Henderson’s “Ghost” on repeat. I keep going to the river to pray ‘Cause I need something that can wash all the pain And at most I’m sleeping all these demons away But your ghost, the ghost of you It keeps me awake Throughout the day for at least two weeks, I […]
I’ve been thinking about monsters. Not the zombies I usually research and write about, but the language of monsters that lurks in our everyday speech. The rhetoric of horror is so pervasive and so present. It comes to us when we have something to speak that seems unspeakable. It is deployed to justify violence and harm.
This week, I have written something everyday: pitches, blog posts, drafts, and lists. I managed to finish an agonized column that I’ve been writing off and on for two months, and I should finish a review essay by early next week. I even sent off a pitch for a personal essay on tattoos, which is
Academic Writing Month: Bring it On! Read More
This week, I had the pleasure of giving the second annual Day Lecture at the University of Alabama. The Department of Religious Studies hosts a lecture on religion and popular culture in memory of Zachary Daniel Day, a former student who died unexpectedly at the young age of 26. His father, Charles Day, and stepmother, Nancy Campbell, established
I gave up many things for graduate school, and popular fiction was one of them. Training to be a religious historian meant that reading became my job rather than my beloved hobby. I only had time to read the 30 plus books assigned for seminars each semester. I’ve never read so much in my life
Genre Fiction Saved My Life Read More
Recently, a contributor to the Daily Kos noted that Noam Chomsky, the “legendary linguist/philosopher,” analyzed the zombie apocalypse for a group of students in a Skype session. What students? What kind of class? Where? (There’s no mention of these salient facts). A student asked Chomsky about the current preoccupation with zombies and the apocalypse in
On Chomsky and Zombies Read More