RD10Q

The vision of justice and political progress that reigns in American culture and progressive religious circles is one of restoring the individual’s dignity, which imagines the individual—even as a member of a community—as somehow whole. This vision of wholeness, however, often has to function differentially: for my wholeness to be meaningful, then someone somewhere, if only imaginatively and fantastically, has to be understood as lacking wholeness, as needing restoration.

“The book for me is personal as well as political. A lot of people, myself included, were raised to believe that religion and sexual minorities were incompatible—that it really is God versus Gay. Personally, I chose the ‘God’ side for ten years, repressing my sexuality and cutting myself off from other people. Even when I finally gave up, I still thought that coming out would be the end of my religious life. In fact, it was the beginning of it.”

Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too.

Take your monsters seriously. The language of metaphor and symbol is not enough to explain and explore their meaning. You may just want to be left alone with your tub of popcorn but there are layers and layers of meaning in the horror genre…and a larger historical experience the monsters we love were born from.

Religious historian Jennifer Graber discusses her examination of Protestant prison reformers, in which she upsets common assumptions about evangelicals, and our images of kind-hearted Quakers and bloodthirsty Calvinists.

Frequently assumptions are made about what happened after the Council without actually doing the social history necessary to make accurate descriptions of what occurred in parishes. Conservatives cite the mythical nuns-wearing-miniskirts but they neglect to interview Catholics of the “Greatest Generation” who actually lived through the transitions. Something called “the Sixties” gets blamed for all the problems in Catholicism, but the nitty-gritty scholarship has not been done to legitimate pointing fingers.