New Ideas & Research
Emerging questions and fresh areas of thinking
It’s Hard to Write a Novel about Jesus
My first book looks at how Victorian novelists explored the Incarnation through fiction. In doing so, they shifted the focus from what Jesus did to who Jesus was: a real man in real history.
I need your help to get a new book published… #ChristianBookKickstarter
My new book: Fandoms & Faithful Reading, is coming-out via Substack! BUT, I need your help (with a few clicks) to get it published to a wider audience in a traditional book format.
Design Thinking & The Liberal Arts
Before COVID-19, I started reading about design thinking because Jamie Turner shared an article about design thinking in K-12 classrooms. What I...
Mixing Water with Wine—Report on The Conference on Christianity and Literature
Last weekend I escaped the very brown and cold upper-Midwest for Oregon, where I presented a paper on Tim Winton’s Dirt Music at the Western...
Now Available! VIJ 43 and My Article on Adam Bede
The Victorians Institute Journal, Volume 43 has just been released, along with my article on George Eliot’s re-historicizing of Jesus in Adam Bede,...
PUBLISHED | “’Not an Average Man’: Eliot’s Commonplace Heroic and the ‘Beautiful Story’ of Jesus in Adam Bede”
VIJ (Victorians Institute Journal) will be publishing my article on Adam Bede in their forthcoming issue (#43)! This article grew out of a chapter...
VIDEO | My Dissertation in 3 Minutes
In this video I give an overview of my dissertation, The Quest for a Novelistic Jesus: Literary Relationships with Jesus in Victorian Realism. I...
‘The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity’ Symposium @ Notre Dame
At the end of March I co-chaired “The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity,” with Meagan Simpson. This Nanovic Institute-sponsored symposium brought...
Class, Classification, and Jesus | The 2014 NAVSA Conference in London, ON
The North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)’s annual conference was held in London, Ontario over the weekend. The conference brought...
VIDEO | Jesus and the Victorian Novel | A Dissertation Introduction
In the first of a series of videos, I introduce my Ph.D. dissertation by addressing three key questions: What did the Victorians think of Jesus?...
Kingsley and Narrative Form: The Mellon/ISLA Conversion and Literature Workshop At Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame is a great place to be when working on anything related to Religion and Literature. This week, I participated in the...
Gluttony, Justice, and Grace
Donna Simpson has been making headlines over the past few weeks for her goal of becoming the world’s fattest woman. News clips of the morbidly obese...