Mark Hulsether If music or group religious rituals can change the world—and I think at times they can—then the world changed during this performance.
Tag Archives: Christianity
Hell Houses and the Terror of the Gospel: A Conversation
Kelly J. Baker and John David Penniman Maybe the combination of intimacy and otherness is another way of talking about faith and terror, another way of getting at the particular Christ-hauntedness of the south?
How the Ouija board got its sinister reputation
Joseph P. Laycock By now, most have vague notions of the Ouija board horror narrative, in which demonic spirits communicate with – even possess – kids…The Ouija board, however, didn’t always have this sinister reputation.
Seven Questions for Erin A. Smith: What Would Jesus Read?
Erin A. Smith I purposely excluded sacred scriptures from the study, because I wanted to investigate the messy relay between the commercial and the transcendent.
Seven Questions for Matthew Avery Sutton
Matthew Avery Sutton I was not terribly interested in defining religion or the sacred. My focus was on how what my subjects would define as their religious beliefs and convictions functioned. I focused on the work that their religion did.
Literary Antecedents and Contemporary Reflections of Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman”
Carolyn M. Jones Medine As The Clansman demonstrates, the Ku Klux Klan was a structure within which white men acted out their vision of southern society and through which they used terror to enforce those visions. The KKK may have been the United States’ first cellular terrorist structure: it was and is covert, local and de-centered, mobile, and opportunistic, multiplying by opportunity and interpersonal connections.
A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness
Judith Weisenfeld The plot of The Birth of a Nation features two intertwined narratives: a political story that moves from national unity to division in war and back to unity, and a romance in which a couple unites despite the obstacles the war presents. The Birth of a Nation is also, of course, a story about the subjugation of people of African descent, a process director D. W. Griffith frames as carried out by honorable white men who had no choice in the face of social chaos.
Cutting up “The Birth of a Nation”
S. Brent Plate Cut up D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and it bleeds a little. Rearrange the pieces, as Griffith so expertly cut up film sequences, and put them together in new ways. Splice it into histories, the stories of photography, race, literature, the KKK, bodies, film technique, and it comes out looking different. But it’s gonna bleed. The following articles, are such cuts, such incisive interventions.
Birth of the Klan’s Nation
Kelly J. Baker At midnight on November 25, 1915, seventeen men climbed to the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia with a large wooden cross. On that Thanksgiving night, they lit the cross on fire and pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, American ideals, and “the tenets of the Christian religion. Read More…
Seven Questions for Eric Reinders
Eric Reinders Then I read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish about the making of the soldier’s body and I thought, yes, there might be a way to talk about monastic discipline in a new way.