Publications

Article under review with Religion & Literature Journal

In this article, I draw attention to multiple intersecting Derridean traces in Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” to interpret how his theology emerges in the poem. On the one hand, Wilde joins a tradition of prison literature, which carries an awareness of the present non-presence of freedom within the jail cell, with the walls and guards serving as a constant reminder. On the other hand, the ruins of the Royal Abbey of Reading on the site of Reading Gaol emphasize a present non-presence of a monastic theology that treats incarceration as a form of penance and encourages an active religious imagination. Utilizing both traces together, I interpret “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” as an example of Wilde’s theology of imagination and sorrow, in which the religious imagination becomes a means to recognize how we are interconnected, particularly in our sorrow. Moreover, the Ballad demonstrates how the prisoners become an ecclesial community through sorrow and the imagination—seeing Woolridge as a Christ-like figure—in contrast to the mechanization of the prison authorities who distance themselves from the realities of capital punishment.

Forthcoming volume (June 2024) co-edited with Carolyn M. Jones Medine in the Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture Series.

Questing through the Riordanverse is the first edited volume solely dedicated to the works of Rick Riordan. This volume explores how Riordan’s works relate to Religion and Theology and also examines the books in general. Despite containing an expansive world, including over twenty books over the past seventeen years, and being popular among its target audience, scholars have not given the Riordanverse as much sustained attention as other Young Adult and Middle Grade fantasy books published during the first part of the Twenty-First Century. This volume begins to address that vacuum, drawing from a number of fields, including Psychology, Media Studies, Queer Theory, and African American Studies, to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of Riordan’s works and their impact on Religion and Theology. Contributors represent a diverse background, including perspectives from young scholars and students who grew up with the series to senior scholars considering where the series fits in the tradition of fantasy, religion, and literature.

My chapter in Questing through the Riordanverse: Studying Religion with the Works of Rick Riordan

Riordan’s writing follows a fantasy tradition that circles around death, while also offering the unique perspective of an immortal god who has temporarily become human. In The Trials of Apollo, the Olympian Apollo is made human and spends the series attempting to regain his godship. Along the way, he faces the deaths of friends, his own bodily injury, and the threat of death himself. Ultimately he learns that to be human means to be vulnerable. Following Judith Butler in Precarious Life, this is not just his own vulnerability, but the ways that he becomes vulnerable once he is in relationship with others. In this way, the series becomes a meta-reflection on the power of death and how humanity is able to respond as we face its power. Moreover, since we are also in relationship with Apollo and the other characters, we realize that we are vulnerable as well, and in the face of their deaths we are reminded what it means to be human. This idea of humanity contrasts with those presented by others, such as Augustine’s who defines it in relation to rationality. Instead, it focuses our connections to one another and, in turn, the responsibility we have in the face of vulnerability. In essence, to see suffering is to see humanity on display, which demands a response.

Article in Journal of Religion and the Arts 28, no. 1-2 (2024): 170–95.

Oscar Wilde and Paul Cadmus both utilize their art to renegotiate how we imagine our relationship to sin within Catholicism. This article draws attention to resonances between their approaches by presenting a Wildean queer theological aesthetic as a framework to interpret Cadmus’s art. A Wildean framework utilizes the excesses of both Catholicism and queerness as a foil for each other to create pauses for the imagination in a culture and religious tradition that risks falling into mechanization. In the space of that excess, we are allowed to escape the trap of existence to live as Individuals, claiming sin as an excess that offers an imaginative pause out of mere existence. Applied to Cadmus, a Wildean framework focuses on how Cadmus’s works also engages queer and Catholic excess to renegotiate Catholic guilt around the body and instead see the body and its sin as a site to know the Self.

Early inspiration for this article emerged during my Museum Studies coursework at UGA and the Georgia Museum of Art, including an "Daily Inspiration" IG post about Paul Cadmus.

Article in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 19, no. 3 (2023): 284–304.

While museums have long been referred to as “secular shrines,” resembling the devotional attitude given to religious figures, with the rise in museums dedicated to candidates for sainthood, we are seeing how religious institutions are starting to use the museum model to create religious shrines as well. These are private institutions, separated from the Church proper, in order to avoid any charge of creating a public cult for the saint-to-be (and so endangering the cause for canonization), and instead creating a shared space for private devotions. Given the history of museum practice, which has often overlapped with devotional models, the museum becomes a natural means to create this shared  private space for people to venerate the candidate for sainthood, while also petitioning for their later canonization.

Article in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Advanced Access)

Many interpretations of fandom communities as religious focus on fandom in relation to the “world religions” and the institutional authority they carry. By way of contrast, I aim to interpret fandom based on religious practice, primarily the Christian Cult of the Saints as a practice of religious devotion. The perspective of religious practice emphasizes that the communities that form as fandom often exist in tension with more traditional religious networks, similar to saint cults. To demonstrate this parallelism, I explore community formation around saints and fantasy characters as serious play expressed in Books of Hours and fanzines.

Doctoral Dissertation

In the past twenty-five years, fantasy literature and media have exploded, capturing the imagination and gaining a following. Given fantasy’s history with religious writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and the dedication of fandom communities, scholars have attempted to explain the connections between fantasy and religion. This was an area of exploration for the first generation of Arts, Literature, and Religion scholars. Now, a second generation is addressing these genres to further define “religion” and its limits. I propose to explain fantasy’s connection with religion by putting it in conversation with the lives of Christian saints. This approach allows us to speak of fantasy as a serious religious practice, while still different from traditional conceptions of religion. Fantasy literature, thereby, becomes a “second hagiography” that ritually opens a liminal space for individuals to enter to shape and own identity through the religious imagination. My interpretation acknowledges that modern Americans, as the Pew data indicates, have left traditional religious movements, and over a quarter of Americans identify as “spiritual,” suggesting increasing disconnections to religious traditions. The devotion to fantasy, individually and in fan groups, however, acknowledges that there is spiritual hunger to engage with the religious imaginary. Young people, particularly, turn to fantasy to enter a religious frame of mind that mediates relationships with the world around them. Moreover, they claim ownership over these new hagiographic figures because they play a part in shaping the narrative that informs those relationships. This mirrors the ways scholars describe the participatory relationships between the cult of the saints and its devotees. Hagiography proves a fruitful comparison to fantasy due to their literary and functional similarities. In the space both genres create, we can speak about humanity’s relationship with God, relationships with other human beings, and a lived morality.

Master's Thesis

Angelomorphic Pneumatology--the belief that the Holy Spirit takes the form of an angel, most notably the seven archangels of greatest power, in its interaction with humanity--is widespread in the Early Church, especially the Church associated with Alexandria. Overtime, however, as Trinitarian Theology, Christology, and Pneumatology develop, this theology slowly disappears. Angelomorphic Pneumatology morphed into a belief that the Holy Spirit is an angel (instead of just taking the form of an angel) as people, such as Arius, attempted to better distinguish between the members of the Godhead in reaction to Monarchianism and Two-Stage Logos Theology. Angelomorphic Pneumatology then almost completely disappears as it becomes associated more with Arianism and it is caught up into the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople as the bishops battle the Arians and the Pneumatomachians. Interestingly enough, though, some remnants of Angleomorphic Pneumatology survive into the later Church, such as the seven-fold distinction of the Holy Spirit.