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By Kenny Smith

Dr. Kelly J. Baker is a lecturer in Religious Studies and Americanist Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Seemingly indefatigable, she has written for numerous academic and popular publications, has two additional books and several scholarly articles currently in the works, serves an editor for the award-winning American Religious History blog, oversees panels and groups within the American Academy of Religion and American Studies Association, all the while teaching a full-load of university-level courses each semester, raising a young daughter, and encouraging aspiring graduate students at other institutions.

A glance at her resume suggests a broad range of teaching and research interests: world religions in America, apocalyptic and Rapture-oriented movements, the figure of the zombie in contemporary culture, religious intolerance in the South Park series, and of course, the early 20^th century rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and its relationship to “mainstream” American religion and culture, precisely the focus of her new book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930  (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011, 326 pages). 

Like all good historical work, this book complicates our understanding of the past, and thus also the present, by bringing to light previously overlooked and under-appreciated narratives. Specifically, Baker explores the print and material culture of the early 20^th century Klan: for instance, Klan newspapers such as the Imperial Night-Hawk and the Kourier Magazine, Klan robes and hoods, photographs of Klan initiations and gatherings, etc.. Most historical accounts, she explains, present the early 20^th century Klan as an extremist movement driven solely by concerns for racial and nationalistic purity, to the obvious and often brutal exclusion of African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. Thus the Klan appears as a paramilitary organization on the margins of mainstream American society, one that had little to do with the dominant religion of the time other than the coincidental affiliation of virtually all Klan participants with one Protestant denomination or another. When we take seriously what Klan leaders and spokespersons actually said, wrote, and did, however, a very different portrait emerges. 

The Klan’s political philosophies and practices, Baker argues, were inseparable from their Protestant Christianity. It is not simply the case that Klan leaders made use of Christian symbols and language, but rather that Klan philosophies and activities were predicated upon their understandings of the biblical text and the Protestant tradition. This is evident in what Klan leaders wrote (e.g., that “As the Star of Bethlehem guided the wise men to Christ, so it is that the Klan is expected more and more to guide men to the right life under Christi’s banner” 35), in what they wore (robes featuring crosses), and the rituals they enacted (e.g., erecting crosses, lining up in the form of a cross, reading the biblical text as a mandate for racial purity and superiority). 

More, Baker argues that the Klan is best understood not as vigilantes on the fringes of the social order, but as articulating (and implementing) what the majority of white Americans accepted as obviously the case.  As Baker demonstrates, the Klan was a broad, demographically and geographically diverse social, political, religious movement that competed, to some degree successfully, for a central position in the national consciousness and mainstream culture.

In helping to tease out this relationship, Baker points to the modern-day case of the Rev. Terry Jones, who in recent years garnered considerable media attention for threatening to burn (and then actually burning) a Qur’an in public. While a relatively small percentage of Americans will themselves publicly burn Qur’ans or join groups that do, studies consistently suggest that Jones’ attitudes toward Muslims reflect the opinions of large portions of the American public. Like Jones’ hatred of Islam, the Klan’s attitudes were mainstream, not marginal. 

Perhaps most controversially, the book’s final chapters explore the cultural legacy of the Klan as a “brand or style of religious nationalism,” and inquire as to its relationship to 21^st century forms of American conservativism, especially as it appears in the rhetoric of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party.  Baker acknowledges that “[b]inding people and movements to the Klan is an effective tool to showcase nefarious intentions and legacies,” and thus should be done with considerable caution. (263)  Still, there are important historical continuities. Beck and many in the Tea Party, she points out, express a distinctly Christian nationalism that seems bent upon the exclusion or marginalization of religious/cultural others, and the desire of much media coverage to paint Beck and the Tea Party as located on the fringes of American society recapitulates our long-standing assumptions about Klan history. 

I have called Gospel According to the Klan a brave new book. This is so for two important reasons. Firstly, Baker has exposed something about American cultural history that many of us may not wish to see: namely, that both religion and mainstream society participate in the ugly, even violent, side of American nationalism. To reveal this in a clear, detailed, and sustained argument can provoke precisely this ugliness.  As Baker explains in the book’s afterword,

I received my first death threat for [while writing for the American History Blog] simply suggesting that Americans need to recognize the place of Christianity and religion more generally in domestic terrorism and the larger hate movement. (252)

Secondly, Baker has also exposed something unpleasant about the rest of us, those who do not concur or sympathize with Terry Jones and feel repulsed by exclusionary religious nationalism (Christian or otherwise): namely, that we have a tendency towards forgetfulness, and towards imagining American history and the American mainstream in ways that reflect our own preferences.  

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By Heather Abraham

During a recent MARTA trip to Georgia State University’s downtown Atlanta campus, I had an interesting encounter with an outspoken and somewhat thought provoking middle-aged woman.  Arriving at the Chamblee MARTA station, I met up with a group of women, Jehovah’s Witnesses all, who regularly provide me with reading materials.  These lovely ladies are aware of my academic and professional interest in all things religious and have been most helpful in answering questions about their tradition and keeping my library materials on the Jehovah’s Witness movement up to date.

After exchanging pleasantries and materials, I proceeded to the MARTA train and settled in for the twenty-five minute ride into the city.  Almost immediately, a woman sitting across from me inquired about the materials in my hand.  She asked if I was a Jehovah’s Witness and I replied that I was not a member of the tradition but that I was studying their movement.  She quickly informed me that they weren’t “really” Christians and that their movement was one of the many groups of “false believers who are trying to steal the soul of Christianity.”

I did not engage her in a theological discussion but instead listened to what she was saying, asking her periodically to expand on her opinions or to ask about her sources. Suddenly, the topic turned away from the dangerous movements that “threatened the fabric of humanity” to the subject of prayer.  Always a subject of fascination and one that I have had little time to pursue, I listened intently as she explained her understanding of the power of prayer.

Apparently, this devout Christian woman belongs to a prayer group that meets regularly to pray for, in her words, “our nation, family, friends, and fellow Christians.”  I found it intriguing that the nation would be of first importance but continued to listen (and take notes) as she discussed how these prayers had helped so many and her belief that prayer is the “most powerful human force on earth.”  According to her, prayer is dangerous when used by those “who are enemies of our Christian Nation” and that Christians everywhere need to pray in groups to “counteract the evil prayers that are offered up daily.”

Evil prayers? Now she really had my attention!  Before I could ask what she meant, she continued expounding on these evil prayers and suddenly became agitated as she talked about how important it is to “pray for the deaths of our enemies, especially if they hold political office in our great country.”  I quickly asked if she prayed for harm to come to those she considered dangerous to her ideals?  “Yes”, she answered, “Of course.  I pray for the assassination of some holding top offices [Obama?].  I also pray for some to get terrible incurable diseases so that they have a long painful death.”  Hmmmm…  Curious I asked her if she was cursing those she disliked and actually not praying.  This sparked her ire and I was quickly and clearly advised, “curses come from Witches, Satanist, and sinners who can’t use real prayer because they are corrupted.”  She continued, “asking God [through prayer] to harm someone who is evil is a Christian duty.  Curses [on the other hand] are used to attack Christians.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately), my stop came and I continued my journey lost in thought about her curious definitions of prayers and curses.  Many questions formed in my mind: Was there a Christian tradition of praying for harm to another?  And, if so, from where did the tradition originate?  Jesus’ New Testament teachings seemed eons away from praying for the assassination of another.  How does one identify another as evil and thereby warranting harmful prayers?  When do prayers become curses and when are curses actually prayers?  Was this self-identified Christian woman a member of a small community that used prayer in this way?  Or, is prayer for harm widespread within certain Christian traditions?  Much food for thought and many questions raised.

Upon returning home, I rummaged through my library searching through various dictionaries and encyclopedias of religion in pursuit of definitions that may shed some light on my earlier encounter.  According to the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, prayer is defined as follows:

Prayer, direct address to the god(s), especially in the form of praise.  [In] Christianity prayer has four major dimensions, each of which may predominate in a given situation.

1. Speaking to God
2. Listening to God
3. Attention to God’s presence
4. Communion with other people.  Prayer with others is basic to Christian worship, and prayer for others (intercession) is common; yet private prayer also takes place within the context of some supportive Christian community.

Obviously, the type of prayer the woman on the train was referring to belongs to the first and fourth dimensions, but how does this definition help in the understanding of the type of prayer in which she was engaged?  Let’s look at the definition of curse.

Curse: powerful verbal formula designed to direct misfortune against persons or things.  See also anathema.

Interesting, but again, how does this definition assist us in understanding the “prayer for harm” phenomena?  See also anathema?  Anathema, a word that, for many, entered mainstream pop culture through the quirky antics of George Costanza in the Seinfeld episode called “The Revenge.”  George, wanting to improve his vocabulary, would periodically drop a word bomb into a conversation, thus showing his prowess with the English language,

George: Students can’t clean. It’s anathema. (explaining) They don’t like it.
Jerry: How long have you been waiting to squeeze that into a conversation?

Aside from George Costanza’s impressive but unenlightening usage and explanation, I referred again to the AAR approved dictionary of religion for a definition of anathema.

Anathema, In the New Testament, a Greek term referring to a curse.  In Catholicism, a declaratory condemnation directed by Church Authority against those who are deemed immoral, heretical, or blasphemous.”

Nice definitions all, but unfortunately, not much help in this situation.  Determined to find some information on “harmful prayers”, I did the unthinkable; I asked google.  In short order, google revealed a definition and source for harmful prayers—or imprecatory prayers defined as: prayers found in the book of Psalms containing curses beseeching God to punish the wicked.  According to Merriam Webster, imprecatory simply means curse!  So are imprecatory prayers cursing prayers?  Again, many questions and little in the way of answers.

Aside from the above four dimensions of prayer, I also found reference to five common types of prayer:  adoration, intercession, faith, petition, and thanksgiving.  Given my encounter with my fellow MARTA passenger and the little information I located on harmful prayers, I have to wonder if this is a new phenomena or one that is simply not a subject of study?  Should imprecatory prayers be added to the list of common types of prayer?  Are prayers and curses cousins that sometime merge? And, if so, how narrow is the realm between them?

I leave you with my many questions, and I hope many more of your own, but also with an example of an imprecatory prayer I found on google.  I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject and any source recommendations would be much appreciated.

Incitation to violence, by Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt

Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who issued press releases this week attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround us and tell lies about us. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 

There is a museum on the second floor of the home of the American Bible Society; that is in itself noteworthy. What that museum is doing is more noteworthy still.

The American Bible Society was established in New York City in 1816, the real heyday of public museum construction in Europe (though these newly unleashed energies of museum-construction took time to crystallize on this side of the Atlantic).  The Society was incorporated in 1846 and is housed today in a lovely, modern facility within eyesight of the revitalized area surrounding Columbus Circle.

The Museum of Biblical Art, or MOBIA, was founded just five years ago, emerging slowly as a thriving independent organization out of what had originally been a Gallery sponsored by the Society.  The creative conception that led to the creation of MOBIA is two-fold, and of singular interest to me, and I hope, to readers of “Religion Nerd.”

What happens when we bring art and biblical literature into closer conversation?

On the one hand, MOBIA is founded on the principle that the Bible is a “foundational book for our civilization,” and that the Bible is a “cultural and artistic touchstone.”  The Museum eloquently defends its view of the importance of biblical literacy if the academic life of the Humanities and the cultural life of a pluralistic democracy are to thrive.

But there is more to MOBIA than this.  For the converse is also true: artistic literacy is actually essential to biblically inspired “religions of the Book.”  Art historians and art lovers need the Bible.  But so, too, the Bible needs the visual arts.

MOBIA’s founding director, Dr. Ena Heller,  is the recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s 2010 award for creative achievement in Religion and the Arts. During a two hour tour of MOBIA and our very wide-ranging discussion, the wisdom and appropriateness of that award was made very clear.

MOBIA’s current guest exhibition is entitled “The Wanderer: Foreign Landscapes of Enrique Martínez Celaya,”  and was curated by Daniel Siedell in collaboration with the artist.  Celaya’s somewhat muted role in his own representation is a trope to which I will return shortly.

Enrique Celaya  was born in Havana, Cuba in 1964, though his family left the tumult of cultural revolution and emigrated to Spain in 1972; two years later, they re-settled in Puerto Rico.  Celaya remained there until he was eighteen, then went to the mainland to study Applied Physics at Cornell University.  He went on to pursue doctoral work in Quantum Electronics at Berkeley.

That all changed in 1991, when this aspiring twenty-seven-year-old Physicist decided to pursue a career in the visual arts instead.

He received his MFA from UC-Santa Barbara in 1994, then entered the uniquely creative aesthetic-spiritual environment in Claremont, California: at Ponoma College and the Claremont Graduate University, where he served as a tenured professor until 2003.

Celaya’s success came quickly, and he is well represented today at many of the most important museums with an interest in the same nexus of ideas explored so magnificently in his work: the Whitney and Metropolitan in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston.

Wearing his successes very lightly, Celaya left the west coast and returned to Miami, where he founded “Whale & Star,”  a studio whose name consciously echoes Melville, and whose physical structure makes it seem one part scientific laboratory and one part monastic retreat.

That deep connection–between religion of a sort, and science of a sort–is an essential part of the vision behind this work.  And more noteworthy still, the MOBIA show was conceived alongside of a second New York exhibition by this same artist: four large pieces that are currently on display at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Riverside. 

As Ena Heller makes clear in the catalogue for this show, the biblical connections to the work on display are not immediately evident; you have to work to make them appear. But this creative collaboration between the art-work and the viewer is central to Celaya’s craft.  Note the way that I said that: “the artwork and the viewer.”  I have not introduced the artist himself directly into the frame.  Similarly, Celaya’s work is intentionally constructed to force the close observer of the material world to think about his or her interaction with that world, while bracketing the question of Who has made it. 

God is not dead, so much as God is absent, silent, hidden.  Nietzsche knew this well.  But so did Isaiah.

That is one important reason why Enrique Celaya rejects simplistic labels.  He is adamant in his refusal to be described as a Cuban artist, or an expatriate one. He is just as adamant in his refusal of the term ‘atheist’, despite the fact that his views are non-theistic, and heterodox at best.  The reason, it seems, is that the scientists who are most aggressively “atheist” are also utterly materialist, as this artist, deeply moved by human imagination and creative immersion, is not.

Celaya’s fascination with the new vistas opened up to us by the quantum perspective reminds him that creative intuition and an explicit linkage of the material and the immaterial have become central “scientific” (not only artistic, or religious) perspectives.

They are equally at home in the pre-scientific monastic setting.

In short, Enrique Celaya is deeply interested in the realm of the sacred.  Hence his creation of “Whale & Star” as a place where scientific enquiry and contemplative community mutually inform and inspire.

An essential part of Celaya’s studio is a library-and-lounge where he conducts most of his interviews.  He reads widely in Continental philosophy and literature.  Nietzsche and Heidegger, Thoreau and Melville, William Blake and Anton Chekhov, are all central interlocutors and inspirations for the work.

And always, always, there are echoes of central biblical paradigms, never quite raised to the level of explicit reference: innocence and exile; nostalgic longing for a homecoming; wandering and (in the words of Ivan Gaskell’s superb essay in the MOBIA catalogue) “the mark of Cain.”  The aim of this work is, not to put too fine a theological point on it, reconciliation to the real, a kind of at-one-ment that is forgiving of all that makes materiality traumatic as well as incarnational or divine.

“Forgiveness sits in the sacrifice.”  That is how Enrique Celaya put it in an interview conducted for this exhibition.  Forgiveness sits in sacrifice.

This is a powerful intuition that is altogether compatible with orthodox Christian faith, though it does not belong there exclusively.  It reminds us of a marvelous comment Hegel made in a letter to a friend: “Salvation is through suffering, not from it.”

Too often, salvation is imagined as some sort of vaguely economic transaction between two agents in an unequal and unstable power relation.  God and the would-be believer, with God paying the blood-price that he or she lacks the resources to pay.  A very different picture emerges when we think of forgiveness, as Hegel clearly did, as an event that emerges out of the creative interaction between two individuals, neither of whom is in control of the situation. Forgiveness is an event, a ritual and a marvel, not an act or a decision of one person vis á vis another.  “Forgiveness sits in sacrifice.”

An exciting new movement may well be in the offing here.

It is, in part, an attempt to get out of the impasse created by an exclusive focus on the divine-human relation as one imagined as a sort of transaction between two individuals, one of Whom is invisible.  When Christian theology is sounded in an exclusively Protestant key, then the entire focus often rests on God and the individual.

What drops out of view with such a narrow focus is the world. A great deal of current theological speculation is aimed at precisely that point, to re-introduce this forgotten third element into our theological reflection: there is God, yes, and humankind, but there is also the world.

Focus too exclusively on the divine-human encounter, and two acute dangers tend to emerge.  On the one hand, the excessive focus on the individual can become narcissistic–unless we are very careful.  On the other, the excessive focus on the divine can become anti-humanist and inquisitional–again, unless we are very careful.

Hence this profound artistic return to the world.  The human-world encounter is in fact an encounter about which contemplative artists, among others, have had much to teach us.

Enrique Celaya meditates upon it brilliantly, and the twinned shows at the Museum of Biblical Art and Saint John the Divine in New York are, just perhaps, the ideal settings for such a meditation.

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Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Nerd Contributor and visiting instructor at Georgia State University, recently spent an afternoon In Conversation With Dr. Carolyn J. Medine, associate professer at the University of Georgia.  Kate and Dr. Medine’s lively discussion spans many aspects of Religious Studies including the responsibilities of teaching, current projects, the importance of mentoring, and the significance of the discipline of Religious Studies.

Carolyn Medine is an associate professor of Religion and in the Institute of African American Studies; her research interests are in Arts, Literature, and particularly Literature concerning the Southern and African American women’s religious experience.   She has written extensively on the works of Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, and other notables.  Dr. Medine’s research interests also include religion and politics, theory from the classical to the postmodern, and the intersection of classical and modern literature.  She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and teaches courses on Religion and Literature, African American Religions and Literatures, Religious Theory and Thought, and Women’s Spirituality and Writings. (Source: UGA) 

Religion Nerd is delighted to launch our In Conversation With series with this absorbing and insightful discussion.  In Conversation With will be an ongoing series that will periodically feature prominent academics in the field of Religious Studies, as well as Religious Leaders, and Religion Journalists in conversation with Religion Nerd contributors.  Welcome to In Conversation with Dr. Carolyn Medine. 

Current Projects: 

KDB: What are you working on? 

CJM: In teaching, I am beginning to read some new theory. New for me… it is probably not new for a lot of people. Giorgio Agamben… Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life… some of the latest Jonathan Z. Smith and a little bit of Said, Reflections on Exile, and that will be part of a graduate seminar. We are going to start with Foucault and Derrida and then move into these. I think it is important to go back to Derrida and Foucault and then forward. 

And in scholarship, my friend, Randy LeBlanc, and I just finished putting some essays together. The essays are on religion, politics, and literature… and so we have those out at a press. 

I am finishing up, actually I am about two-thirds of the way through my project on Southern Women and religion. I am focusing on women who are predominately not Protestant… so a Catholic woman, a Jewish woman, a Buddhist woman. I am looking at how these women in the South, are negotiating these different identities. 

KDB: That sounds exciting! Are you and Randy LeBlanc going to publish your set of essays? 

CJM: Yes- they are out at several presses right now. They are under review so let’s hope somebody wants them. They are odd in that they are so interdisciplinary. They don’t stay within boundaries so I think some presses may not know how to categorize them. 

KDB: Or know where to put them? 

CJM: Yes. We tried to pick presses that were more willing to cross boundaries like Palgrave… It is time… we have been doing this work together for years. 

KDB: Regarding your work on southern women of different religions, will this become a book?  

CJM: I hope so! I have a chapter on Jan Willis, Estella Conwill Majozo, who is a Catholic woman in Kentucky. She is very interesting because she is a poet and her brother makes sculpture, and they have joined together with an architect to create public monuments…including a Martin Luther King monument. They have done a Stations of the Cross kind of monument. With the three of them working together, it is very interdisciplinary. She is a fascinating woman… and a “cradle Catholic,” raised Catholic in Kentucky. She had left the Church and then came back. The chapter is I am struggling with is the Jewish one, and I want to use Alice Walker’s daughter’s work. She is a Jewish Buddhist. I also want to incorporate Stella Suberman’s The Jew Store. 

KDB: Is there anything in compiling this work that surprised you? Anything you didn’t expect? 

CJM:  Hmmm… that is a good question. It is probably that although they are practicing these hybrid religions they are very much embedded in community. So it is not the lonely quest. It is very feminist … womanist… and they are not just embedded in these communities of origin but also developing new communities. I think that has been the most surprising thing. And that it happens in the South…which, for most people, feels so homogenous…I think that has been the most interesting to me. But the South is far from homogenous… and if you look at a place like Atlanta, you see that. I remember growing up in North Carolina, we had restaurant run by a Lebanese family and I never thought about what religion they were, but there they were within the community. And my mother’s best friend was Roman Catholic. I wasn’t a religion scholar then… that may have been what got me being a religion scholar. It is just interesting to think about how that was all around me and yet I didn’t think about it. 

Events in the Discipline of Religious Studies  

KDB: In way do you think religious studies, in general, is going? 

CJM: That is a political and theoretical question; political because we have seen the split of the AAR [American Academy of Religion] and SBL [Society of Biblical Literature]. And that was a decision about where Biblical studies and theology “belong,” in some peoples’ thought, in the study of other religions. This has been a painful break, and I think most people don’t want to see that kind of intense separation–a lot of scholars play across boundaries. The untiring efforts of Emilie Townes, who was AAR president (she’s a dean at Yale), to address this separation and how to mend it must be mentioned, with honor.  The other part of it is that we have to deal with postmodern and postcolonial theory and the fallout after the deaths of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said. There is a sense that people are kind of taking a deep breath and thinking, “Thank God that is over”… but it is not over. It is just moving to a new stage in the voices of people like Tariq Ramadan, in Islam; Charles Hallisey in Buddhist Studies, and others.  In a way, it is a return to the thought of people like Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur—who were already constructivists.                                                                  

All in all, how we figure out that next step is going to be really challenging and exciting. We have to admit what we usually teach is elite religion–if you teach the world religions course you are teaching religion of people who wrote stuff down. This gives you a certain perspective on religion. How you get to the so-called popular religion or what the people were doing–this is what the postcolonial is about—is another, different one. We need both, though. Both tell the story.  There is also resurgence in the importance of narrative and story, and I’m glad… 

KDB: Me too! 

CJM: So I think that is going to be much more important. I wish more people knew how to deal with it, had tools from literary criticism—which includes all that theory!  All in all, however, I’m glad to see that it is part of the conversation again because I think we are really dealing with issues of representation. How we are represented in America in the Muslim mind and how we represent the Muslim, for example. We are in, at the point of, a big crisis of representation. Don’t you think so? 

KDB: Oh definitely, especially for young people. I think the questions they are asking are those that older generations get uncomfortable by. They seem to be dealing in a heightened way with what it means to be a religious person and to be a modern person… or a postmodern person.  

Challenges of Technology   

KDB:  What do you think about media, all the radical changes in media? Do you think this will change how we do what we do as scholars? 

CJM: Yes, because I think we are already dealing with technology. Sometimes, it is just as a tool in the classroom, that most of us my age don’t use very well. We are teaching a generation that is media saturated and that does two things. It makes them savvy in certain ways but, on the other hand, they have a difficult time really thinking about things. One of my students said when we were discussing some older theorists, “Wow! these people really thought about things… my generation, we just go to class and watch TV.”   I said, “Don’t tell me that.” 

KDB: That breaks my heart. 

CJM: It is as if the media takes over people’s minds… they are sort of paralyzed by it. I don’t like that… if you are going to engage in it, at least be able to critique it. 

KDB: Or at least be in conversation with it. That is where I think literature can be helpful. I feel that with literature, my students and I can come together and have something that we are talking about in the text… and I think you can use films in the same way. Actually, you can use any kind of media… as long as you come together to talk about it. The problem I think is that people usually just end up watching…and not being in conversation. 

CJM: It is changing the structure of our society as well. We are suspicious of smartness. We are suspicious of people that speak in long sentences, like academics, and we are suspicious of the intellectual life. We are so used to the sound bite. We succumb to “the loudest person wins” rule… to the lack of decorum.  That is not really conversation, just people screaming at each other. There are a couple of moderates, like Tavis Smiley and Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart is funny but there is seriousness there as well. 

KDB: You have to think… everything he says is to make you go a step further. 

CJM: Bill Moyers is retiring. My husband and I were watching TV the other night, and we saw a commercial for the Saturday night’s programming and it was cage fighting. It was going to be on CBS, and I said to Scott, “This is the network that used to do documentaries. It was a network that entertained but also educated. Now it is cage fighting.”

 KDB: We are back to the Coliseum … back to bread and circus. 

CJM: That is what bothers me, and of course that part of it is exploitative. We watch people beating each other up, accept that physical and psychic violence. And that’s not even to mention the material regarding children and pornography. 

KDB: I am not worried about the material, per say, because that has always existed. I am worried about the accessibility. The internet in general is strange because you gain the illusion of intimacy but you really don’t know who you are interacting with. 

CJM: People have the ability to create any identity–you can be anyone you want to be. You can create a whole persona to perform out of. It is an odd form of schizophrenia that I see people engaging in. Posting all those pictures… this makes me think that no one is actually living life in the present. 

KDB: They are taking pictures TO put them on facebook. 

CJM: The question is not, “Am I enjoying this?” but, rather “How am I going to show other people what I have done?” It is a performance of identity. Someone said on NPR that it is much like the age of Shakespeare. It is like the metaphor of theater like my friends Jim Hardy and Gale Carrithers wrote about:  all of this has to do with simulation and performance. The woman on NPR, I wish I could remember her name, said that the age of Shakespeare was an age when people were very aware that they were performing identity. Maybe we are [in] a neo-Elizabethan age. 

KDB: That is so interesting. I know NPR definitely helps me… in that it is how so many media outlets used to be… entertaining but also educating. 

Mentors and Mentoring 

KDB:  Who are the scholars, your mentors, who you feel have really shaped who you are as a scholar? 

CJM: Good heavens, yes! I’ve been extremely lucky. I’ve had some fine mentors and the more I work with young teachers, I realize how rare this is. One of my very first teachers was Michael Gaspeny, at Elon College. His specialty was American Literature, and there I was, at 16, a high school kid, taking his class…and he kept pushing me. I took all my survey courses with him. He would hand me back a test and it would have a note on it: “Well this is really good…try writing it in pen next time”– because I would write everything in pencil. So the next time I would write it in pen. And he would write, “This is really good… I think you need to read such and such,” and this was this constant kind of pushing that really challenged me. 

KDB: Like nudging? 

CJM: Yeah… his nudging. He was a great teacher. He still is a great teacher and a fine poet. Once I got to college, I met and studied with Ruel W. Tyson at UNC-Chapel Hill…Intellectually, as a teacher, I’m just mini-Ruel. We don’t think about the same stuff. He is anthropological, and he would read Pilgrim’s Progress every class. But I approach material like he does and present material like he does, I feel imprinted by him. Charles Long, another of my teachers, I feel very much imprinted by him. And in his way, Nathan Scott. I think I am just beginning to realize after twenty years in the profession how much I have internalized of him. I just bought a bunch of his books because I realized I only had two or three of his works. So I started ordering his books, because I want to get them before they are not available anymore. Robert Detweiller is another mentor. He just passed away recently. He set my career on a path that transformed it and me. There are so just many people that helped me. There were people at LSU—namely, Jim Hardy– that took me under their wings and showed me how to get through the tenure process and how to publish, but, more important, how to enjoy the intellectual life. 

Yes–I’ve been really lucky. I feel like I have had a guided career … it is strange to get older and be the guide. I’m still guided by senior scholars that take care of me…it is like my friend Randy says, “sometimes you just want to be taught again.” 

KDB: I think the same way. Sometimes I think how nice it would be to be the student in the classroom… but feel that the responsibility of leading the class is no longer on your shoulders.  

CJM: I got to teach with Charles Long, and it was amazing. He went over some of the things that he taught us in the first year of my MA at Carolina, and I thought, “Oh, that was what you meant.”  Of course, I am realizing this 20 years later. It is just funny to think that I had gotten just a piece of it and now listening to him again I got a bigger piece of it. And if he told me again, I would get an even bigger piece of it. It is odd to be around these great teachers and to realize how much they have instilled in you, knowledge and these patterns. I’m different and yet I am the same. 

KDB: It is very much like a lineage. You acquire your own way and own views, but you have borrowed patterns, reinterpreted patterns, and have morphed their patterns into something you can use.  

CJM: And you pass that on to your students. 

KDB: Well I have to say that you have definitely been my mentor, and I know many other young scholars see you as their mentor. I guess I never really knew how important it was to have a mentor until I met students who didn’t have one. I noticed that these mentor-less students lost their enthusiasm for their work very quickly. Having a mentor is something I am so thankful for. And I think it is true that you are shaped by your teachers.  

CJM: Every student will be different but you have to know that somebody has your back. 

KDB: It is like being a child… that you need to know that there is someone who will not let you walk off the cliff… 

CJM: And to catch you if you do. And there are some people that can’t do that. I know scholars who are terrified to publish anything that might contradict their mentor or something their mentor might get upset about. There should be no bullying in mentorship. A young scholar once told me that he would talk to his thesis director, and they would talk about his work, but after a while he could see that his director was not interested in him or his work anymore. I think I think I got this mentoring nature from the late Robert Detweiler who had the most generous spirit when it came to young scholars. He never felt diminished by helping others develop their careers. That can be a rare thing in the academic world where there is a pressure to publish, and the pressure to be a star. He was a star but he just liked young people. He liked new thought. He would set his students in places, saying “You need to be here” and “you need to be doing this.” This is stuff you don’t know as a young scholar. You need someone to look at the whole picture and send you in the right direction. 

KDB: To see the forest through the trees… 

CJM: Yes–because they have been through that forest and know the good spots and the dangers too.

Part II of In Conversation With Dr. Carolyn J. Medine will be featured on Religion Nerd on July 30th, 2010.

Sources: 

• UGA: http://www.uga.edu/religion/medine.html
• Transcripts by Kate Daley-Bailey from her May 14, 2010 conversation with Dr. Carolyn Medine