Benjamin D . Crace - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Book Reviews by Benjamin D . Crace

Impossibly continues Jeffrey Kripal's decades-long effort to legitimate the paranormal as an esse... more Impossibly continues Jeffrey Kripal's decades-long effort to legitimate the paranormal as an essential field for academic inquiry. More immediately, it comes on the heels of his 2022 release, The Superhumanities (UCP), a text that is nearly a prerequisite for Impossibly's readers. In fact, one chapter of Impossibly is made up of material Kripal had decided not to put in the former. In this text, however, Kripal is seeking to establish both an ontology and epistemology

Nova Religio

Reviews of two new Cambridge Elements

Review of Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies by Richard Savill... more Review of Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies by Richard Saville-Smith

Nova Religio, 2024

Review of a four Cambridge Elements on New Religious Movements

Nova Religio, 2024

Founded by Las Vegas real estate and aerospace billionaire, Robert Bigelow (b. 1945) in 2020, the... more Founded by Las Vegas real estate and aerospace billionaire, Robert Bigelow (b. 1945) in 2020, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) seeks "to support research into the survival of human consciousness after physical death and, following from that, the nature of 'the afterlife'."1 To that end, the BICS held an essay competition ("The Contest") that began in January of 2021 and asked "What is the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness beyond permanent bodily death?" Essayists, restricted to 25000 words, were also required to present "proof beyond a reasonable doubt.' Out of thousands of international applicants, only 204 went on to the next round that included potential cash prizes of 500,000forfirst,500,000 for first, 500,000forfirst,300,000 for second, and $150,000 for third place. Ultimately, more prize money was added and distributed among the other twenty-six finalists when they were announced in November of 2021. The twenty-nine winning essays were then collected and published in five volumes bound in red leather with gold-leafed pages. First place and the half million purse went to American parapsychologist and interviewer Jeffrey Mishlove, second to Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist and NDE (Near Death Experience) researcher, and third to Leo Ruickbie, a British sociologist and paranormal investigator.2 The judges were Christopher C. Green, a forensic

Nova Religio, 2023

Review of four different Elements in the Cambridge Element Series

Christianity and Literature, 2022

Nova Religio, 2022

As a nonfiction expansion of his novel 2011 Journal of a UFO Investigator, David Halperin’s Intim... more As a nonfiction expansion of his novel 2011 Journal of a UFO Investigator, David Halperin’s Intimate Alien is at once autobiographical and encyclopedic, offering personal reflections and a wide survey of the field of ufology through the carefully constructed lens of a scholar of religion. As such, he takes a hermeneutical approach to the phenomenon, asking “What do they mean?” rather than “What are they?” or “Where do they come from?” (3). In the wake of Carl Jung’s thesis in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959), Halperin seeks to make sense of the “hidden” human story of the UFO: “The UFO mystery is…the mystery of us” (8).

Nova Religio

Reviews of two new Cambridge Elements

Nova Religio, 2024

Review of a four Cambridge Elements on New Religious Movements

Nova Religio, 2024

Nova Religio, 2023

Review of four different Elements in the Cambridge Element Series

Christianity and Literature, 2022

Nova Religio, 2022

This presentation looks at Thomas Merton's use of the I Ching to gain insight into his vocational... more This presentation looks at Thomas Merton's use of the I Ching to gain insight into his vocational struggle. It suggests that his successful use helped concretize his understanding of Asian traditions as valid and valuable.

Explores the echoes of British emergentism in Eliot's poem; a condensed version of my article for... more Explores the echoes of British emergentism in Eliot's poem; a condensed version of my article for the Eliot Studies Annual

Presentation explores how The Righteous Gemstones series functions as equipment for living within... more Presentation explores how The Righteous Gemstones series functions as equipment for living within its Southern Gothic context.

Society for Pentecostal Studies Annual Conference, 2024

By exploring the way millennial eschatology first shaped Pentecostal responses to visitors from o... more By exploring the way millennial eschatology first shaped Pentecostal responses to visitors from other worlds, this paper argues that the contemporary cultic milieu has garnished similar responses toward migrants or “aliens.” This paper first examines William Branham, Gordon Lindsay, and Frank Stranges’ commentaries on the rise and growing popularity of the UFO phenomenon through the 1950s and 1960s. This brief survey tracks the shift from pluralistic interpretations to the hegemonic demonic interpretation while highlighting the accompanying nationalistic and apocalyptic milieu. It then discusses how this othering and demonizing of extraterrestrials continues through to “illegal aliens,” largely through a resurgence of a similar nationalistic-apocalyptic milieu, the appropriation of “alien” discourse, and “conspirituality” (Ward and Voas, 2011). In conversation with Robert Menzies’ recent work, it concludes by arguing for a stronger amillennialist frame for American Pentecostal approaches both towards migrants and putative visitors not of this world. Such a re-framing resists a creeping apocalypticism unto quietism or right-wing activism and the city-on-a-hill nationalism of American Evangelicalism.

In the Western imaginary, the afterlife is closely interconnected with the apocalyptic frame. As... more In the Western imaginary, the afterlife is closely interconnected with the apocalyptic frame. As the sacred canopy falls, contemporary apocalypticism has reconfigured post-mortem survival to mere physical survival and the zombie has become “the only modern myth” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972). As Vervaeke et. al (2017) have argued, “the symbol [of the zombie] ultimately draws its aptness from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection.” Thus, the predominance of the zombie zeitgeist together with increasing apocalypticism signals this shift from metaphysical, neo-Platonically informed construals of the afterlife to materialist dystopic or even annihilationist and nihilist conceptualizations.
Religious responses to this shift to the immanent frame (Taylor 2007) within the Christian tradition have ranged from increased political involvement, to attention to social justice issues, to ecological awareness to a newfound appreciation for emotional and mental health and an embracing of alternative medicine: the body, the body politic, here and now has upstaged the by and by.
Both this shift and “aptness by perversion” of the zombie zeitgeist are negotiated in the character arc of Gabriel, a black Episcopal priest, in the television series The Walking Dead. As a symbol of bygone transcendence, Gabriel’s struggle with his faith forms a central narrative thread in the series, and he remains a key character from Season 5 to the final season. In a broad sense, he is the sole representative of Southern Christianity in a post-apocalyptic world.
And yet a central premise of this proposal is that The Walking Dead is less about a dystopic future and more about the present-day loss of meaning and metanarrative. From this, I explore the ways in which Gabriel deconstructs the priest trope by foregrounding a kind of immanent and humanistic theodicy with a subjective spirituality that reflects a post-Christian moral and metaphysical universe.

This paper advances the interdisciplinary thesis that the religious and apocalyptic aspects of wa... more This paper advances the interdisciplinary thesis that the religious and apocalyptic aspects of war-era England and Continental Europe have been under interrogated as context for Eliot’s contemporaneous and later poetry. This context forms what I call the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility that is at once a hue within the larger cultural milieu of the era and an aesthetic/poetic consciousness. This sensibility emerges from several different threads. One thread is the recurrent scriptural motifs from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation that index the growing diffusion of a dispensational historical hermeneutic where even military actions become auratic instances of prophetic fulfillment. Another strand is a sharp rise in Marianism attended by a neo-medievalism that sacralizes feminine purity, reconfiguring it as an eschatological harbinger. This sensibility populates the cinema, nationalistic propaganda, and theater of the time. Collocating war posters, Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920), and the 1915 play Armageddon, this paper excavates Eliot’s immediate lifeworld as context for his poetic distillations of this consciousness. Looking briefly at how “The Hippopotamus” (1919) serves as prologue to the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility that permeates The Waste Land, I go on to demonstrate how a sensitivity to such a poetic may generate new and surprising ways of reading Eliot’s most famous work. In particular, moving through the dense allusions of that poem’s final lines and notes, I argue the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility so structured and saturated Eliot’s consciousness that the end of the poem is its telos and as such its actual beginning. This affords a recapitulative reading of the text that resituates it closer to the underlying war consciousness of Four Quartets instead of the “blasphemous” “Hollow Men.” In doing so, I reframe Eliot’s conversion career as less of a personal decision and more as part of a collective religious movement shaped and catalyzed by the Crusade now known as World War I.

Oord and Schwartz's theocosmocentrism potentially allows for conceptual space for entities who ar... more Oord and Schwartz's theocosmocentrism potentially allows for conceptual space for entities who are more similar to God than to humans in terms of physical to mental ratios within dual-aspect monism. These entities, while part of creation, are, given the spectrum of relational hierarchy suggested by Oord and Schwartz, "closer" in kind and degree to God's experience and influence than to creatures below the human. This paper, following Oord and Schwartz, suggests that dual-aspect monism is a perceptual philosophical solution to the twin problems of idealism and materialism. Following Jeffrey Kripal's thought, this means that the monism underneath the physical/mental aspects could be conceived of as a tertium quid that manifests itself into these two aspects. Or, more eloquently, he "posits an unus mundus or One World of Now beneath the complimentary domains of the mental and material that "split off" this deeper reality or Ground within our own brain-mediated temporal experience."1 Thus, the dual aspects of dual-aspect monism belong firmly to the realm of phenomenological exploration (brain-mediated temporal experience) while the now qualified monism means holding an agnostic methodological ontology based on the hypothetical One World of Now.

PAMLA presentation on American Evangelicalism's obsession with the UFO phenomenon and how it gets... more PAMLA presentation on American Evangelicalism's obsession with the UFO phenomenon and how it gets rescripted theologically.

SAMLA presentation on The Walking Dead through the lens of incarnational theology

Religion and sex, the mystical and the erotic, have always co-existed in a generative tension. On... more Religion and sex, the mystical and the erotic, have always co-existed in a generative tension. One helpful way of understanding the embodiment

This presentation, given at the annual Glo-Pent conference, discusses the ways in which the kafal... more This presentation, given at the annual Glo-Pent conference, discusses the ways in which the kafala system of sponsorship in Kuwait shapes Renewalist and Pentecostal groups.

Explores J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and the creation of American identity through one's origins... more Explores J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and the creation of American identity through one's origins. Presented at Northeastern Modern Language Association

Looks at evangelical reservations concerning the popular personality test, the enneagram, in term... more Looks at evangelical reservations concerning the popular personality test, the enneagram, in terms of appropriation from the so-called New Age movement and other strands of late Modern esotericism.

Explores the interfaith possibilities of a Stoic pneumatology and dual aspect monism.

Explores the phenomenon of incubi interaction through a Pentecostal lens.

According to biographer Ralph Wood, O’Connor once quipped that if she were not Roman Catholic, “s... more According to biographer Ralph Wood, O’Connor once quipped that if she were not Roman Catholic, “she would join a Pentecostal Holiness church” (30). Actual Pentecostals, however, do not populate her imaginary as much as one would assume. Instead, various forms of revivalists and idiosyncratic ‘fundamentalist’ Protestants are woven throughout her narratives. But, Pentecostal Holiness is a rather specific type of tradition, and it is more than passingly strange that out of the entire Southern milieu, O’Connor would attach herself (at least theoretically) to this particular one. Of Southern (mostly white) Pentecostal Holiness churches of the 1950s, the largest denomination was the Church of God. In her 1954 short story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” O’Connor directly references the Church of God, making it the only such reference in her entire corpus. Whether or not the Church of God was the Pentecostal Holiness church she had in mind, it is impossible to know. Yet it does suggest that the more salient features of that tradition might open up new interpretative horizons for reading elements in that particular work. This paper first offers a short overview of Pentecostalism, an historical account of the Church of God, and a summary of its most distinctive practices for context. Then, drawing on Mariella Gable’s concept of O’Connor’s “ecumenic core,” I suggest that there is an underlying pneumatological unity centered on mystical experience that both sources O’Connor’s admiration of Pentecostal Holiness and can serve as a cipher of sorts for reading “Temple,” a mystical core, so to speak. Aside from multiplying interesting interpretive possibilities, I conclude that Classical Pentecostalism is an oft-overlooked but significant contextual factor in O’Connor’s art.

Utilizing previously unpublished material, this article seeks to fill in the historical record co... more Utilizing previously unpublished material, this article seeks to fill in the historical record concerning mystic-monk Thomas Merton’s views on Pentecostalism and the nascent charismatic movement. After locating Merton’s historical significance and contemporary relevance, it analyzes Merton’s views expressed in 1963, then gives a brief history of the relationship between Vatican II, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and Merton, with a focus on a series of conferences he gave as responses to the charismatically-influenced House of Prayer movement. Then it moves to an account of Merton’s more nuanced perspective of 1968, offering an interpretative framework for understanding his perspective. The essay concludes with some trajectories for future research and a call to revisit Thomas Merton as a mystical theologian of experience and key figure in the history of Catholic-Pentecostal dialogue.

A Tale of Two Toms: The Ascetic Response to American Literary Modernism Three days after the att... more A Tale of Two Toms: The Ascetic Response to American Literary Modernism

Three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Thomas Merton entered the Trappist Monastery. Having converted to Catholicism in 1938 while teaching English at St. Bonaventure University, it was a decision long in the making for the author who would go on to write one of the most influential Catholic autobiographies in Christian history, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). But before Merton was a monk, he was a Modernist, through and through, and attempted to channel that movement’s creative energy into the quasi-autobiographical novel. According to his life-long editor and friend, Naomi Burton, a young Merton had come to her in early 1940 with two complete novels for publication: The Labyrinth and The Man in the Sycamore Tree. She could not get either through to publication. A year later, Merton brought her another novel, then called Journal of My Escape from the Nazis (later called My Argument with the Gestapo). She recalls, “I liked it and again tried to sell it, but this was even tougher. It was 1941. How could one interest anyone in a book about an imaginary visit to England and France.” Imaginary, yes, but, at its heart, was still Thomas Merton, who had left Europe in 1935, and, in 1968, remembered encountering Nazis in France while hiking in the Rhine Valley in 1932. Its autobiographical elements certainly include Merton’s new-found commitment to Catholicism; Mary Gordon observes, “And woven lightly in, a pastel thread through the saturated primary colors of the cloth, is Merton the convert, making his way through the world with a new anointing.” And yet “Merton is under the sway of Joyce, the Joyce of Ulysses and perhaps most especially of Finnegans Wake.” In short, My Argument is a Modernist novel by a Catholic convert reflecting on the 1930s and the early days of the 1940s. It, perhaps, then belongs more to the 30s than the 40s; Merton himself notes, “[The novel] is about the crisis of civilization in general, and the Germany it deals with is still largely that of Bismarck and the Kaiser. It is the Germany that accepted Nazism.” And, it is shot through with Merton trying to, “attempt to define its [the world] predicament and my own place in it” to “gain access. . . to my own myth.” Merton’s spiritual response to Modernity, presaged in the novel, was ascetic renunciation in the hills of Kentucky.
In the latter part of the 1930s, Eliot began his masterpiece, Four Quartets. Around the same time as Merton was teaching English, converting to Catholicism, and considering the monastic life, Eliot published “Burnt Norton” and then “East Coker.” In 1933, Eliot had separated from his estranged wife and moved in with Father Cheetham, the Vicar of St. Stephens, a high Anglo-Catholic church. This arrangement allowed Eliot to explore his own monastic tendencies and was the context for the opening poems of FQ. Arguably one of the creators of Modernism, Eliot’s spiritual response was to live out what Joshua Richards has called his “ascetic ideal.” A mixture of mysticism and self-renunciation, this ideal is neatly summarized in Eliot’s own words, “ardor, selflessness, and self-surrender,” developed through “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”
Building on historical and biographical context then close readings, this chapter seeks to interrogate the two Toms’ ascetic responses to Modernism as manifested through Eliot’s early FQ poems and Merton’s posthumously published (1968) and oft-overlooked, pre-monastic novel. In doing so, I demonstrate how Merton and Eliot’s post-conversion ‘readjustment’ and redeployment of the Modernist ethos provides both their contemporaneous audiences and readers today with “equipment for living” as a Christian in a non-Christian world ever on the verge of total war.

This article suggests grounding a pluralistic, participative pneumatology in the Hebrew Bible's D... more This article suggests grounding a pluralistic, participative pneumatology in the Hebrew Bible's Divine Council theology, its New Testament equivalents, and the modern-scientific emergentist paradigm. Within this framework, I then explore a cosmic re-envisioning of water-Spirit baptism through Mark's account of Jesus' baptism and its pneumatological overtones. The essay ends with a reconstituted theology of glossolalia as cocreative, angelic dialogue that is recommended for practical theological ends to encourage wider practice of tongues in Pentecostal worship.

This paper seeks to develop an accommodationist theology of prophetic mediumship that critically ... more This paper seeks to develop an accommodationist theology of prophetic mediumship that critically incorporates ancestral presences. It argues that ancestral presence in the practice of prophecy can be supported by non-Western and non-Protestant theologies, scriptural evidence, experience, and the ecumenical church tradition. It suggests that mediumship is a helpful way of thinking about the prophetic while also maintaining a pluralistic pneumatology informed by intercultural theology. Such a theology, it is argued, can underwrite practice in which the experiential presence of holy spirits intensifies the evangelical proclamation of Christ's victory over death and sin.

This article argues that "The Dry Salvages" represents a theopoetic synthesis of personal experie... more This article argues that "The Dry Salvages" represents a theopoetic synthesis of personal experience, emergentism, Christianity, and Eastern thought. By isolating and detailing philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's thought in particular, the emergentist strand stands in relief to the others, offering new interpretative horizons in light of Eliot's indirect and direct engagement with the philosopher. These new horizons are then explored through a close Whiteheadian reading of the poem through thematic and structural points of confluence. Finally, that Eliot's work so readily conforms to Whiteheadian philosophy not only denotes influence, but also a kind of Wittgensteinian "family resemblance."

This article outlines the general history of American Evangelical Christianity's textual response... more This article outlines the general history of American Evangelical Christianity's textual response to the UFO phenomenon, framed by the literary genre of the jeremiad and as part of the apocalyptic turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with its early entanglement in the 1940s and moving to the present, it highlights the shifts in the narrative from angelic harbingers to demonic co-conspirators. The article pays particular attention to a new Evangelical approach to the phenomenon through novelization that at once mirrors contemporary politicization and utilizes the literary form to initiate adherents. While "new" in some regards, the extended discussion and examination of Michael Heiser's novel The Façade reveals a continuity with earlier forms of occult literatures birthed in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, the metaphysical and mystical nature of UFOs together with the similar qualities of the novel have been and are being appropriated by American Evangelicals in a hyperreal mode to extend their cultural influence.

This article contests the current narrative of the development of the Pentecostal theology of ton... more This article contests the current narrative of the development of the Pentecostal theology of tongues. It argues that 19 th and 20 th century Spiritualism is a critical and overlooked contextual factor in the historiography of the transition from xenolalia to glossolalia, and, consequently, Pentecostal theology more broadly. Its rival claims to hosting spiritual communication formed part of the backdrop against which a Pentecostal theology of tongues emerged. In light of Spiritualism's impact, I conclude that the missionary disappointment narrative needs serious revision. Further, I conclude that the historical psychical research into Spiritualism has potential purchase for contemporary pneumatology.

Amos Yong has argued extensively for “a “spirit-filled” pentecostal imagination, one that include... more Amos Yong has argued extensively for “a “spirit-filled” pentecostal imagination, one that includes not just the Holy Spirit but also angels, demons, and other spiritual beings and powers.” Emerging from this cosmological framework, he observes:
. . .[P]entecostals of various stripes also believe in all kinds of intermediary, disincarnate spirit beings. Often these are the spirits of recently dead or long-dead ancestors, separated from their bodies but still capable of interacting with. . . their living descendants; this is particularly prevalent in regions of the global South among pentecostal groups whose indigenous worldviews include the spirits of deceased ancestors possibly interacting with the day-to-day lives of their descendants.
Allan Anderson’s ethnographic work among pentecostals in South Africa layers Yong’s observation above of a spirit-filled pentecostal imagination in practice. In general, Anderson points out that the interaction with deceased ancestors is one of the major features of African popular religiosity. He sees this emphasis on the ancestors as arising from the traditional view of God as inaccessible and remote:
Ancestors are usually seen nearer to God than their [his interviewees] living relatives are. Many. . . said that ancestors were mediators between people and God, God’s helpers who revealed God’s will to people. When people wanted to speak to God they should go through ancestors.
These relationships with the ancestors are on equal footing, not subservience to divine beings. They are “relationally real,” that is, regardless of the ontological status of the spiritual entity in the eyes of scholars, the relationship is real. Anderson draws a parallel between African ancestor interaction with saint cults in Catholicism and Orthodoxy: “[T]heir traditional rituals are not unlike the prayers to the saints in some Christian traditions.” Such similarities might partly explain the most common and widespread response of African Pentecostals: confrontation, “where the presence of the spirit world is acknowledged but is demonized, so that an important part of Christian rituals consists of getting rid of Satan.” He continues:
The weight of evidence points to the fact that for most members of these churches, the commemoration of ancestors is rejected. Ancestors do appear to Christians, but their response as believers is usually to reject any visitation. The ancestors, they believe, are not really ancestors, but demon spirits impersonating them that need to be confronted and exorcised for they only lead to further misery and bondage.
For these respondents, the spirit world is real, but the spirits who contact the living are demons. Thus, a significant portion of ministry in African pentecostalism deals with deliverance and exorcism in opposition to the ancestor rituals and commemoration. Anderson sees this attitude as a result of western missionary influence that often generates tension and conflict with traditional familial respect. But honoring one’s ancestors can be quite burdensome and require significant time and resources—resources that might better be suited to one’s service to God through the church or for one’s living family. The payoff, however, is that the ancestors “protect their living descendants from evil and witchcraft.” Neglecting one’s duties to one’s ancestors, however, can bring about troubling consequence once that protection is removed. Here one can begin to understand why pentecostals see such observances as upstaging the role of God and faith in Him; Holy Spirit empowerment must surely entail freedom from these snares.
Along the spectrum of Christian responses to the spirit-filled world, Anderson also notes accommodation—a position eschewed by most African pentecostal churches. Nevertheless, for some, the ancestors acted as “the mediators of God, who sometimes revealed the will of God to people, and who inspired the prophets.” But Anderson also found a wide variety of practices and beliefs within this category as well, ranging from the observance of ritual killings to mundane protection, healing, and assistance.
Although Anderson’s work is largely descriptive and analytical, it elides well with the development of Yong’s call for a spirit-filled pentecostal imagination. In that mode, then, this article seeks to offer a constructive (and at times, speculative) pneumatic thanatology that lies between complete capitulation to pre-Christian African traditional religiosity and the confrontational stance of western missionary influence. I would like to offer a position of critical and functional accommodation utilizing the Wesleyan quadrilateral for methodological and rhetorical structuring purposes.

This paper surveys materializations of spiritual entities across the Orthodox spectrum, seeking t... more This paper surveys materializations of spiritual entities across the Orthodox spectrum, seeking to develop a "thick description" of the phenomenon. This survey will demonstrate that spirit materializations play an important and consistent role in the conversation on Orthodox mysticism and have deep implications for its study. I then push the envelope further, offering a contemporary, non-Orthodox account of spirit materialization that highlights the inherent difficulties of dualistic substance metaphysics assumed in Orthodox theology. I then suggest that a naturalistic theology may serve as a better dialogue partner moving forward for the empirical study of Orthodox mysticism.

Taking as its starting point, Philip Jenkins’ The Great and Holy War: How World I Became a Religi... more Taking as its starting point, Philip Jenkins’ The Great and Holy War: How World I Became a Religious Crusade, this paper advances the interdisciplinary thesis that the religious and apocalyptic aspects of war-era England and Continental Europe have been under interrogated as context for Eliot’s contemporaneous and later poetry. These aspects form what I call the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility that is at once a hue within the larger cultural milieu of the era and an aesthetic/poetic consciousness. This sensibility emerges from several different threads. One thread is the recurrent scriptural motifs from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation that index the growing diffusion of a dispensational historical hermeneutic where even military actions become auratic instances of prophetic fulfillment. Another strand is a sharp rise in Marianism attended by a neo-medievalism that sacralizes feminine purity, reconfiguring it as an eschatological harbinger. This sensibility populates the cinema, nationalistic propaganda, and theater of the time. Collocating war posters, Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920), and the 1915 play Armageddon, this paper excavates Eliot’s immediate lifeworld as context for his poetic distillations of this consciousness. Looking briefly at how “The Hippopotamus” (1919) serves as prologue to the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility that permeates The Waste Land, I go on to demonstrate how a sensitivity to such a poetic may generate new and surprising ways of reading Eliot’s most famous work. In particular, moving through the dense allusions of that poem’s final lines and notes, I argue the Anglo-Catholic apocalyptic sensibility so structured and saturated Eliot’s consciousness that the end of the poem is its telos and as such its actual beginning. This affords a recapitulative reading of the text that resituates it closer to the underlying war consciousness of Four Quartets instead of the “blasphemous” “Hollow Men.” In doing so, I reframe Eliot’s conversion career as less of a personal decision and more as part of a collective religious movement shaped and catalyzed by the Crusade now known as World War I.

Explores the possibilities of a Stoic pneumatology and dual aspect monism.

Proposal for a presentation on Coptic Orthodoxy's "power encounters."

Short proposal exploring the ways Pentecostals are depicted in Flannery O'Connor and on the TV se... more Short proposal exploring the ways Pentecostals are depicted in Flannery O'Connor and on the TV series Justified.

This paper explores the relationship between the existing kafala system in Kuwait and the resulta... more This paper explores the relationship between the existing kafala system in Kuwait and the resultant effects on Coptic Orthodox practice in a milieu I label as neodhimmitude.

New Historicist approach to Eliot's play The Cocktail Party featuring a newly discovered letter f... more New Historicist approach to Eliot's play The Cocktail Party featuring a newly discovered letter found by the author.

Examines Thomas Merton's use of the I Ching as a psychoanalytic tool rather than divinatory, alth... more Examines Thomas Merton's use of the I Ching as a psychoanalytic tool rather than divinatory, although he recognized the latter.

The Journal of American Culture, Jun 1, 2015

American Evangelicals and the 1960s Axel R. Schafer, Editor. Madison: University of Wisconsin Pre... more American Evangelicals and the 1960s Axel R. Schafer, Editor. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.American Evangelicals seeks to complexify and problematize the reductionist trend in interpreting the rise of the evangelicalism in the United States as a reaction to the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s or what the authors refer to as the "backlash theory." In a similar vein as Philip Jenkins's Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006) and Mark Noll's insightful body of work on American Evangelicalism, this text fluidly investigates elements in and around the "long decade" (pre-1960s and into the 1970s) that, taken together, provide alternative understandings of this extremely complex socio-historical phenomenon.American Evangelicals is divided into three different parts with three to four essays per section. The Introduction, it should be noted, was written by the late Paul S. Boyer and represents the distillation of a lifetime of scholarship. The first section, "Talkin 'Bout a Revolution? Evangelicals in 1960s Society and Culture" examines the relationships Evangelicals had with oil, the language of the 1960s, and race and gender issues. Part Two, "Raging Against Leviathan? Evangelicals and the Liberal State" explores the interplay between Evangelicalism and the prison system, the Constitution/Supreme Court, public funding of religious agencies, and Vietnam. The final section, "Taking it to the Streets? New Perspectives on Evangelical Mobilization" looks at Evangelical reactions to Vatican II, engagement with European missions, and the Evangelical Left's move from personal to social responsibility. Representative and nuanced in its scope, the text is alternatively surprising and thought-provoking.One of the more outstanding contributions to the volume is Darren Dochuk's "Prairie Fire: The New Evangelicalism and the Politics of Oil, Money, and Moral Geography." In his chapter, he "presents the 1960s as the crucial decade during which the organizational ties between evangelicals and corporate America were cemented and the religious language that legitimized and spiritualized corporate (petro-)capitalism emerged" (8). His retrospective analysis provides a basis for understanding the link between economic developments in the 1960s and the rise of Reaganomics and the Texas/Bush nexus. Moreover, he illustrates how big oil courted Billy Graham, perhaps the defining evangelical figure of the last four decades. …

The Journal of American Culture, Jun 1, 2014

The Journal of American Culture, 2015

The Journal of American Culture, 2014

Pneuma , 2023

After some basic background and outlining of key contextual elements, this article examines Willi... more After some basic background and outlining of key contextual elements, this article examines William Branham, O.L. Jaggers, Gordon Lindsay, and Frank Stranges’ commentaries on the rise and growing popularity of the UFO phenomenon through the 1950s and 1960s. This brief survey tracks the shift from pluralistic interpretations to the hegemonic demonic interpretation while highlighting the accompanying nationalistic and apocalyptic milieu. It concludes with a brief deconstruction to clear the ground for future potential research.

Pacific Coast Philology , 2023

This thesis reveals, describes, and critically analyses the complex and little-studied lifeworld ... more This thesis reveals, describes, and critically analyses the complex and little-studied lifeworld of elite Coptic Orthodox Christians living in Kuwait. As a sociotheological study, it contributes towards a greater understanding of the Coptic Orthodox Church's lived theology and diasporic situation on the Arabian Peninsula. Following a grounded theory, qualitative approach using interdisciplinary methods, the aim of the thesis was to describe Coptic Orthodoxy in Kuwait and then rescript the data to contest, complicate, and construct various sociological and theological theories. Material was gathered from St Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church through participant observation, interviews, and literature analysis. The material was situated within the backdrop of the current literature, Coptic history, and the Kuwaiti context described as restrictive clientelism. Selected data were analysed sociologically and theologically. Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual theory was a primary tool. Data on prayer were analysed using a model based on a sociotheological reformulation of the theory of theosis grounded in the experienced activity of the Holy Spirit or pneumatic piety. The results of these analyses were placed in conversation with Pentecostalism for contextual, comparative, and dialogical purposes. The manuscript concludes with the contributions of this thesis while noting the future challenges and possibilities for continuing research. GLOSSARY OF ARABIC AND COPTIC TERMS 2 abaya: long black head covering and robe for women ᵓAbūnā: Respectful, titular term for monks and/or priests; literally, 'our father'. Al c Aṣabīyah: group feeling or social solidarity among Muslims; associated with Ibn Khaldūn's work Amir: the ruler, in this case, of Kuwait. Typically a hereditary title Arākhina (Arabic)/archon (Coptic/Greek): a lay elder in the Coptic Church, typically privileged, influential, and comparatively wealthy al-daff or nāqūs: hand cymbals Agpeya (Coptic): Coptic prayer book similar to the Book of the Hours baraka: roughly, 'blessing' and sometimes equated with 'grace' but takes a variety of forms and meanings baṣīra: revelatory insight about something hidden or in the future deir: monastery dhimmī: non-Muslim living under Islamic law dinar: Kuwaiti and other Arabic countries' form of currency. Currently, 1 dinar is equal to 2.38 British pounds (as of February 2018) dīwānīa: receiving room for guests in Kuwaiti culture dishdāsha: traditional long white robe worn by Kuwaiti men dīwanīa: a formal room part of Gulf Arab's homes used for entertaining visitors. felāḥīn: the poor, rural working class. al-ghūs: payment and work system managed by pearling captains which engendered a form of indentured servitude similar to the present-day work system of kafāla haikal: the altar area ḥalāl: ritualistically 'clean' food; similar to Judaism's concept of kosher ḥamal: Eucharistic bread ḥanūt: a blend of spices and oils used to cover the cylindrical reliquary of Coptic saints ḥarām: sinful or forbidden ḥāris: a manager or general caretaker of a property; another name for security guard jelābīah: lower-class Egyptian robe for males jihad: the mandated expansion of Islamic dominance kafāla: sponsorship system in the GCC (Gulf Cooperative Countries) kafīl: sponsor al-kāhin: officiant during the Divine Liturgy makfūl: the sponsored Mālikī: one of the four branches of Islamic jurisprudence. Kuwait draws on this school of thought for its interpretation and application of shari c a law, particularly for family law. It prioritises the Qurᵓan and certain sayings of Muhammad (hadith). māyrūn (Coptic): special anointing oil prepared infrequently and used to sacralise icons, churches, altars, etc. metania (Coptic): a formal prostration usually during prayer or petitions Miṣr: Egypt muthallath: metal triangle nadi: sports or other types of clubs niqāb: cloth that covers the most of a woman's face 2 All Arabic words are transliterated and formatted according to the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies word list and transliteration chart. All words are Arabic unless otherwise indicated and proper names are not italicised. iii qalansuwa: traditional monk's head covering made up of two black pieces sown together in the middle with white crosses (6 on each hemisphere) embroidered on it. qurbān: pre-sanctified bread not used for the Eucharist. Often distributed after the service. Ramaḍān: Islamic holy month of fasting from sunrise to sunset. rasūl: Christian Arabic for 'apostle'; Islamic Arabic for 'messenger', usually only applied to Muhammad and a few earlier prophets such as Ibrāhīm (Abraham) and I c īsa (Jesus). Ṣa c īdī: Egyptian Arabic for an uncultured, rural person usually from Upper (Southern) Egypt ṣalāt: For Muslims, this describes the formal, ritual prayers but simply means 'prayer' of a variety of types for Copts. salīf: loan al-sha c b: the congregation, literally, 'the people' Shahāda: the Islamic declaration of faith: 'There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God'. al-shammāmsa: the choir shari c a: Islamic religious, ethical, and social law shaykh: title of honour used for important males in positions of authority or influence. Also used of a ruler and an Islamic cleric. Shi c i: minority branch of Islam Sunni: majority branch of Islam suq: market area, usually at the city centre tailasana: white head covering worn by the priest during the liturgy taliah: deification or divinisation umma: Islamic nation or Islamic community Wahhabi: a puritanical reform movement of Islam begun in the early twentieth century. wāsṭa: system of influence and relational connections CHAPTER ONE

Journal of Pentecostal Theology, Sep 21, 2020

Eastern forms of Christianity are being mined as possible sources for deepening and renewing Pent... more Eastern forms of Christianity are being mined as possible sources for deepening and renewing Pentecostal-Charismatic theology, particularly its pneumatology. While applauding these efforts, this article suggests that such strategies are myopically focused on Eastern Orthodoxy while ignoring the riches of Oriental Orthodoxy, the Coptic Orthodox legacy in particular. By providing comparative accounts of Coptic practices of the charismata with the author’s experience within the neo-charismatic milieu, the essay surveys points of contact to heighten interest and underscore potential avenues of pneumatic inquiry.

Greenwood Press eBooks, 2022

Nova Religio, Nov 1, 2022

historical narratives of the objects, makes for a nuanced discussion. In the chapter about magic ... more historical narratives of the objects, makes for a nuanced discussion. In the chapter about magic wands, Morgan delves into a fascinating cultural study of comparative mythology. At the same time, the chapter sometimes leans too much towards the expository and not enough towards the analytical. The sociopolitical history of Notre Dame Cathedral in chapter 5 is comprehensive and compelling, providing the clearest support for his ideas about the importance of materiality in religion while simultaneously reiterating the themes of an object's agency and web of interrelationships. chapter 6, "Words and Things," associates the changing labels placed on a Polynesian deity object with an evolving perspective on colonialism. While the connection between language and thing seems tenuous at first, by the end of the chapter, the point is quite convincing. Morgan's conclusion correlates these three case studies, respectively, with the concepts of networks, focal objects, and agency, returning to the initial themes. The book includes fifteen color plates, fifty-four halftones, resources for classroom use (supplemental readings, key terms, online suggestions, and a writing guide), endnotes, bibliography, and index. Course resources have excellent potential to spark curiosity and questions among students, scholars, and general readers, especially the extensive references and insightful writing prompts. This study follows current academic trends in its emphases on agency and webs of interrelationships-think of the rhizome metaphor. In line with the relatively new field of material religion, in which he is a major player, Morgan breaks with traditional approaches to objects as inert artifacts that play little more than a symbolic role in a static religion. Instead, he recognizes objects as dynamic, integral, and even transformative to the history and very nature of their religions.

Nova Religio, May 1, 2023

Nova Religio, Feb 1, 2019

Nova Religio, Nov 1, 2022

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 25, Issue 3, 2022, pp. 139-141.

Handbook of UFO Religions is a massive and significant contribution both on the critical study of... more Handbook of UFO Religions is a massive and significant contribution both on the critical study of ufology and on its ties to contemporary minority religions. Divided into five parts with twenty-four chapters, its eclectic, interdisciplinary, and international group of contributors extends the conversation beyond the Anglo-American confines that often circumscribe such endeavors. Several of the essays, however, are perhaps too specialized. Authored by second-language academics, the result is stilted, often-jargon laced, idiomatic prose that requires not a little extra focus to decode. Nevertheless, the text will surely serve as a significant starting point for future research into the intersections of religion and ufology.

Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online, 2020

Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 2023

Dystopian States of America: Apocalyptic Visions and Warnings in American Literature, Film, and Politics, 2022