publications & digital scholarship

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility.

The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike.

Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas – as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness – at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies.

Contributors include Herman Bausinger (Tübingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan), Christian Marchetti (Tübingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow (Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac Weiner (Ohio State).

Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations re-mediates the diary of a Toronto missionary-journalist named Frederick H. Du Vernet, who visited the Rainy River Ojibwe of Treaty 3 territory in the summer of 1898. Developed in consultation with people from Rainy River First Nations, the website documents Ojibwe responses to Christianity through multimedia storytelling that includes perspectives from the past and present.

Visit Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations. 

The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land, University of Chicago Press, spring 2018.

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, a settler-mystic living on northwest coast of British Columbia invented radio mind: Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Through retelling Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment,The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land shows how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Following Du Vernet’s journey westward from Toronto to Ojibwe territory and across the young nation of Canada, I examine how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Du Vernet knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church. Testifying to the power of radio mind with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church and his country made. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.

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Responses to The Story of Radio Mind

Panel on The Immanent Frame with essays by David Walker, Miranda Johnson, and myself here and here.

Conversation with Eric Klein for the Radio Survivor podcast: listen here.

Review by Amanda Porterfield on Reading Religion: read here.

Conversation with Hillary Kaell for the New Books Network podcast: listen here.

Buy The Story of Radio Mind on Amazon or on Chapters.

None of us, no matter where we live or who we are, can innocently assume that we live on a different planet from the nightmare world of the gunman and his white nationalist story. But ours is a whole earth. We worry that a construction of the humanities that does not teach students to look to cultural differences in terms of their complex, reality-based relations, weakens the prospects of a peace that would include all of us. In this sense it makes our job as religionists and humanists that much harder.

With my colleagues Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Steven M. Wasserstrom, I wrote a response to the Christchurch massacre, reflecting on white supremacy and the challenges humanities departments face in light of its rising tide.

Read it here.

 

Where do ideas come from? What difference do methods of scholarship make in generating new ideas and perceptions that we then channel via writing into theoretical conversations that resonate with others, or at least with other scholars? Uncanny or rational, spiritual or empirical, the genesis of thinking cannot be pinned down.

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My 2018 book The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land was part of The Immanent Frame’s forum discussion entitled Modernity’s Resonances: New Inquiries into the Secular. My contribution to that discussion can be read here.