Writer
Jessica’s writing points out moments of surprise and possibility in the ways our lives, our scriptures, and our communities intersectWriter
Jessica’s writing points out moments of surprise and possibility in the ways our lives, our scriptures, and our communities intersect
Popular Book Project
(a work-in-progress)
Fandoms and Faithful Reading:
What Wizards, Jedi, and Swifties Can Teach the Church
Synopsis
When my daughter read Harry Potter, she was enchanted by the Wizarding World. Yet, like so many students who enter my classroom, she deemed the Bible boring. As a Christian parent, I was frustrated—how and why had we exchanged the rich story of the Bible for tedious morality and right answers? As a Christian literary scholar, I was fascinated—why isn’t the biblical world engrossing like the Wizarding World, Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, or sports fandoms?
Fandoms and Faithful Reading uses narrative theory to frame Christian faith as a rich and evocative story world that we learn to inhabit much like fans inhabit fandoms. The book examines how Evangelicals have fetishized doctrine and lost the plot, reclaims the Bible as a community forming text, and builds a practical framework for eating, decorating, conversing, and reading our children (and ourselves) into the People of God.
Overview
We are suffering a crisis of the Christian imagination. Many faithful Christians hardly read the Bible at all. Those who do read the text as a collection of inspirational phrases, moral prohibitions, self-help advice, and some scattered facts about cosmology, human origins, and ancient history. As a university English professor, such reading strategies don’t surprise me. In the classroom and church, I’ve learned that most Americans are literate but not literary—people today read for basic information but struggle to read modern novels and relatively recent poetry well. So it is not surprising that Christians fail to read an ancient collection of narrative, poetic, legal, prophetic, and epistolary literature well! The death of the literary imagination has led to a crisis of hermeneutics, of the Christian imagination, and Christian community. But what if we could re-learn how to love the story of God and God’s people? And what if we could let our shared love for the story world of God’s people foster a vibrant and creative community like our favorite fandoms?
This book is for Evangelicals—be they faithful evangelicals, frustrated evangelicals, or former evangelicals—who know that the Bible tells a story, who believe that the God behind that story is good, and who long to be a part of that story…but who feel alienated from the text and from the practices of Christian community.
This book is for pastors, teachers, and leaders who are tired—tired of performing church as a product for everyone else to consume, tired of doctrinal debates that stifle the imagination and conversation, and tired of the dismissive pluralism that reduces the Christian faith and life to one’s personal preference—and need a renewed vision for being part of God’s people.
This book is for Christians who “parent”—parents, grandparents, care-givers, teachers, and pastors—but who are not equipped to foster a robust, historic, story-shaped faith in their homes and communities…for their children or for themselves!
This book is for everyone who wants to rediscover the captivating story of the Bible and figure out how to imaginatively inhabit that story through ordinary life: slow Sabbaths, reimagined holiday seasons, lively conversations, and even LEGO builds.
Start reading Fandoms and Faithful readings now…
Beginning in November 2023, my serial publication of Fandoms and Faithful Reading: What Swifties, Jedi, and Wizards Can Teach the Church participates in the great literary tradition of serial publications started by Charles Dickens.
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Academic Monograph
Jesus in the Victorian Novel: Reimagining Christ
Bloomsbury Academic (January, 2022)
Jesus in the Victorian Novel looks at how the stories we tell shape—and even change—our thinking about Jesus. Beginning with conversion narratives and ending with the high realism of the late nineteenth-century, I argue that the genre of the realist novel and its way of depicting characters actually altered public thinking about who Jesus is and why his life matters.
Ph.D. Dissertation Thesis
University of Notre Dame
The Quest for a Novelistic Jesus:
Literary Relationships with Jesus in Victorian Realism
What do the Victorians think about Jesus? “The Quest for the Novelistic Jesus” answers this question by looking at nineteenth-century works (and especially novels) that present Jesus as a character in the story. Sometimes Jesus is quite clearly himself, as in Charles Dickens’s The Life of our Lord. At other times there are Jesus-characters who re-live the life of Jesus in Victorian England. To understand how these representations of Jesus reveal Victorian thinking about Jesus this project delves into church history, historical theology, biblical criticism, and the Gospels themselves.
Masters Thesis
Regent College
“At Peace and In Place”:
The Theology of Place in Wendell Berry’s Poetry
What does it mean to be “in place”? Our globalized world and transient lives can leave many people—especially young adults—longing for a sense of community. This research considers how American writer Wendell Berry’s ecological and theological construction of placed-ness helps us reconsider Biblical ideas about place, belonging, and community.
Book Chapters & Journal Articles
Bloomsbury Press: The Cultural Histories Series
“Literature” in The Bible in the Age of Empire:
A Cultural History
(Bloomsbury, 2024)
Christianity & Literature
“The “Supposed Fact” of Christ: Probabilistic Belief in Marius the Epicurean”
with Brooks Lampe.
(Forthcoming December 2024)
“John, Jesus, and the Historical Imagination of Victorian Britain.”
Requested for the John, Jesus, and History series, vol 7: Criteria for Determining Johannine Historicity. Ed by Paul Anderson. (Forthcoming)
Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi
Sham Synagogues and Fake Jews: Advancing the Thesis of Pauline Pagans at Smyrna and Philadelphia (Rev 2:9, 3:9) with B.E. Bruning
Victorian Institute's Journal, Issue#43
’Not an Average Man’: Eliot’s Commonplace Heroic and the ‘Beautiful Story’ of Jesus in Adam Bede
“Perplext in Faith”: Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts.
Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord and the Problem of Jesus