K Lofton
Biographic Data
| ID | 15355 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Lofton |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Lofton |
| SIGNATURE | LOFTON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1069-4945 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Religious Studies in a Billionaire's Era
Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, survey data emerged suggesting Americans love singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and Americans increasingly revile universities. (Brenan 2023; Dellatto 2023) Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, 10/7 occurred. Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future …
What's Next
What's Next Kathryn Lofton (bio) To break up is to take a different position toward the thing departed. These essays argue together that one kind of break, that of being ex a religion, offers a strong vantage from which to analyze the totalizing norms religions designate. The voices here assembled appraise what storifying does to identities that are neither in nor outside, but constitutive in the direction of "ex." As convenor Shira Schwartz expl…
A Brief History of the Mormon Smile
No one likes a frowning face.Change it for a smile.Make the world a better placeBy smiling all the while.1The day before I presented the Smith-Pettit lecture at the 2022 meeting of the Mormon History Association at Utah State University, I entered the Eccles Center and ran into someone who asked me if I was the person speaking about the missionary grin. I quickly corrected him, “No, on the Mormon smile.” Missionary grin seemed to me an epithet, i…
Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism by K. Mohrman (review)
Reviewed by: Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism by K. Mohrman Kathryn Lofton K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Few books enact critique with as much pertinacity as Exceptionally Queer. K. Mohrman argues a discursive trope, Mormon peculiarity, and tracks its persistence in public culture. Anyone who wants to think well about the Church …
Pausing on a Sunday: What Kind of Secular is the American Musical
The musical in which this song appears includes archetypal depictions of the modern artist and his attendant gendered capacities and failures. Sondheim would point out: its lyric is a single sentence; it is a description of a process; it includes a word, “forever,” that he observes makes him cry
No Queers Here
Taylor G. Petrey'sTabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism uses a word that has an activist past and an electric capacity. This is a word also worn out by its bandying; it is a word perhaps nearing retirement. That word is queer.Tabernacles of Clay is not a book about queer life. It is not a book with any people who call themselves queer, or think within the traditions of queer political activism, or who articulate feelings o…
Pulpit of Performative Reason
This essay observes that a hostile relationship to religion is an elemental component of contemporary debates about gender and sexuality, and this hostility has its origin in a specific movement, freethought. A long line of Anglophone self-described freethinkers argues that human beings embrace religions because they cannot think without direction. TERF voices echo this explanation as they seek to right what they determine are wrong figurations o…
Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, By Carolyn Chen
Journal Article Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, By Carolyn Chen Get access Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley By Carolyn Chen Princeton University Press, 2022. 254 pages. $27.95 (hardcover). Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton Yale University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad019, https:…
Observational Secular: Religion and Documentary Film in the United States
Documentary addresses religion poorly, and there is no significant documentary film criticism engaging religion.Yet religion has been a subject for documentary
Our Political Economy
IF YOU LISTEN to a conversation about money or work among scholars, you are likely to hear a stock set of responses. Grousing will predominate, interspersed with irritation at a generalized administrative overlord. Performances of bureaucratic cluelessness will occur alongside assertions from those who claim to know how it works (while underlining they do not like how it works). There will be a shared sense that being disoriented is the right aff…
Gospel Minstrelsy
American Religion 1, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 137–149 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.08 Review Essay GOSPEL MINSTRELSY on Bob Dylan, Trouble No More: 1979–1981 The Bootleg Series, volume 13 Columbia Records (2017) Kathryn Lofton Yale University, New Haven, USA You have to begin by capturing in words something that is only partly about words. It isn’t not about words. It is just that words are the wr…
Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2)
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The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation
Theology in U.S. history is often misread as metaphor. In this concentrated study of black Protestant leaders in North Carolina, Matthew Harper shows that placing themselves within biblical stories allowed black Protestants to chart their future. Harper does not want us to see the black use of biblical narratives as an abstract illustration of their political choices or economic experiences. He seeks to demonstrate that theology preceded politica…
Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park by James S. Bielo
Reviewed by: Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park by James S. Bielo Kathryn Lofton James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 225 pp. This work offers simultaneously an anthropology of Christianity, religious tourism, and project management. In Ark Encounter, James Bielo serves as a decidedly moderate observer of a $150 million USD “to-scale” re-creation of th…
Political Spirituality, or the Oprahfication of Obama
Can't Help Lovin': David Chidester's Pop Culture Colonialism
This article examines the likability of hip-hop star Kanye West and The Voice champion Jordan Smith to explain the colonial terms for our pop culture taste. The writings of David Chidester establish the tie between religion and colonialism as an axiomatic one; he also argues that popular culture is a rich site for formations of religion. West and Smith offer an opportunity to argue the connection between these two strands of scholarly observance,…
Consuming Religion
Religion and the Authority in American Parenting
This article reimagines the history of parenting as a subject for the study of religion. Through a schematic description of parenting in the United States, I observe the expanded responsibilities and increased social expectations for parents in the formation of child identity. Focusing on the concept of parental authority, I argue that the relationship of authority between parent and child is an important document of religious history in a secula…
Theorizing Africana Religions
These edited proceedings of a 2013 symposium at Northwestern University are organized around the question of how to theorize the study of Africana religions across wide expanses of time and space. An international body of scholars representing the fields of history, religious studies, anthropology, American studies, sociology, African studies, classics, and African American studies gathered in a two-day event to consider the past, present, and fu…
Commonly Modern: Rethinking the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversies
Let us begin with the problem of binaries. Stark differentiation strengthens the consequences of difference. If you label something "sacred" for example, and suggest its opposite is "profane" the maintenance of that difference becomes quickly outsized because their difference is contingent on their connection. "Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions," Émile Durkheim writes. "Profane things are those things to which …
Homesickness: An American History
Journal Article Homesickness: An American History Get access Homesickness: An American History. By Susan J. Matt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii, 343 pp. $50.00.) Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton Yale UniversityNew Haven, Connecticut [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 4, March 2013, Pages 1199–1201, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahis…
Forum: "Contemporary Mormonism: America's Most Successful "New Religion
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Secular shadowboxing
The Body (Under Review): On Manuel Vásquez’s More than Belief
What sort of critique of religious studies will enjoin religious studies to think about its premises? This essay evaluates an important contemporary critique of the study of religion, Manuel Vásquez’s More than Belief . The author provides a summary of Vásquez’s argument, and then turns to an analysis of Vásquez’s evidence. In More than Belief , Vásquez tracks the development and effects of mind-body dualism on the study of religion. The differen…
Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief
What is belief? Is it a usable categorical for analysis in the study of religion? This was the subject of a one-day workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University on April 15, 2011. The participating scholars were asked to present comments on the meaning of belief for their own research. This text introduces a sampling of these responses prompted in part by a set of advance readings that represented the bibliography of …
Religious history as religious studies
What is the relationship between religious studies and religious history? Academic historical thinking emerged in part to repudiate ecclesiastical traditions of history, making the difference between religious history and histories of religion a question of denominational rivalry more than a difference in sect. Scholars working in the academic study of religion and the academic study of history have increased self-consciousness of this contingenc…
Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States
This essay argues that the emergence of new factory systems and market cultures in the United States included the promotion of “industrial religion.” Industrial religion is a discourse that attributes suprahuman power to raw materials and the mechanical technologies employed to convert those materials into consumer goods. Through descriptions of coal production in the Appalachian Mountains, factory supervision in the South, and soap promotions in…
Practicing Oprah; or, the Prescriptive Compulsion of a Spiritual Capitalism
Religion and the Authority in American Parenting
This article reimagines the history of parenting as a subject for the study of religion. Through a schematic description of parenting in the United States, I observe the expanded responsibilities and increased social expectations for parents in the formation of child identity. Focusing on the concept of parental authority, I argue that the relationship of authority between parent and child is an important document of religious history in a secula…
Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief
What is belief? Is it a usable categorical for analysis in the study of religion? This was the subject of a one-day workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University on April 15, 2011. The participating scholars were asked to present comments on the meaning of belief for their own research. This text introduces a sampling of these responses prompted in part by a set of advance readings that represented the bibliography of …
Homesickness: An American History
Journal Article Homesickness: An American History Get access Homesickness: An American History. By Susan J. Matt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii, 343 pp. $50.00.) Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton Yale UniversityNew Haven, Connecticut [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 4, March 2013, Pages 1199–1201, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahis…
The legacies of Oprah Winfrey: Celebrity, Activism and Reform in the Twenty-First Century
After 25 years on the air, Oprah Winfrey's celebrated talk show left television in May 2011. By the time it concluded, The Oprah Winfrey Show had reached more than 40 million viewers a week in the
The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist
Between 1886 and 1931, Christian publishing houses in the United States offered an unprecedented biographical profile of the contemporary American evangelist as an unambiguously modern figure. Sold at tabernacle tents, Christian bookshops, and church fund-raisers, these texts simultaneously document concerns with the modern landscape as they regale readers with the styles and stories of headlining American Protestants, including Dwight Moody (183…
Public confessions: Oprah Winfrey's American religious history
Nothing in The Oprah Winfrey show is a surprise. The show's arc is so commonplace, so predictable, that it is the premise of her viewer's rapt attention: they watch to experience the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation. That Winfrey herself is a particular type—a loudly “spiritual”, self-declared “black woman”—only compels viewers further into her corporeal and material utopia. Through her carefully racial self-descriptions,…
The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism
Scholarship on early-twentieth-century American Protestant modernism appears to have arrived at an impasse. Although scholars continue to explore the biographical contours of modernist individuals, and theologians still review the capacity of modernist theologies, the body of analytical scholarship on the "modernist impulse" has failed to keep apace with the glut of materials addressing its fraternal twin, fundamentalism. Published in 1976, Willi…
Commonly Modern: Rethinking the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversies
Let us begin with the problem of binaries. Stark differentiation strengthens the consequences of difference. If you label something "sacred" for example, and suggest its opposite is "profane" the maintenance of that difference becomes quickly outsized because their difference is contingent on their connection. "Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions," Émile Durkheim writes. "Profane things are those things to which …
The American Spiritual Culture and the Invention of Jazz, Football and the Movies
Journal Article The American Spiritual Culture and the Invention of Jazz, Football and the Movies, by William Dean. New York: Continuum, 2002, 240 pp.; $24.95 (cloth) $16.95 (paper) Get access Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 65, Issue 2, Summer 2004, Pages 177–178, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712406 Publish…
Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Women Evangelists – Priscilla Pope‐Levison
A.J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist – By R. G. Robins
Religion and the American Nation: Historiography and History – By John F. Wilson
Practicing Oprah; or, the Prescriptive Compulsion of a Spiritual Capitalism
The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist
Between 1886 and 1931, Christian publishing houses in the United States offered an unprecedented biographical profile of the contemporary American evangelist as an unambiguously modern figure. Sold at tabernacle tents, Christian bookshops, and church fund-raisers, these texts simultaneously document concerns with the modern landscape as they regale readers with the styles and stories of headlining American Protestants, including Dwight Moody (183…
The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism
Scholarship on early-twentieth-century American Protestant modernism appears to have arrived at an impasse. Although scholars continue to explore the biographical contours of modernist individuals, and theologians still review the capacity of modernist theologies, the body of analytical scholarship on the "modernist impulse" has failed to keep apace with the glut of materials addressing its fraternal twin, fundamentalism. Published in 1976, Willi…
Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. By David Chidester
To begin, this is not a book to be condensed into singular argument or condensed summation. Authentic Fakes should not receive a review; it deserves a revue, a monumental spectacular reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin Keith or Baz Luhrmann. Since text functions without the three-dimensional vivacity of vaudeville, perhaps it is wisest to focus at the level of the chapter, to try to capture just a moment in the text. Consider, then, the beginning of…
Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden
Journal Article Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden Get access Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. Princeton University Press, 2007. 337 pages. $35.00. Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton Indiana University, Bloomington [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy …
Public confessions: Oprah Winfrey's American religious history
Nothing in The Oprah Winfrey show is a surprise. The show's arc is so commonplace, so predictable, that it is the premise of her viewer's rapt attention: they watch to experience the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation. That Winfrey herself is a particular type—a loudly “spiritual”, self-declared “black woman”—only compels viewers further into her corporeal and material utopia. Through her carefully racial self-descriptions,…
Elvis Religion: The Cult of the King – By Gregory L. Reece
The Religious Dimensions of Advertising – By Tricia Sheffield
Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. By Webb Keane
As the twenty-first century barrels into its second decade, Christianity's global fortunes seem to enlarge without abatement. The best tallies suggest that one-third of the world's population is Christian, with one-third of those Christians living in former colonies. It is then maybe inevitable that the first epochal statement on the history of Christianity would be made by an anthropologist. Straddling the shifting (geographic, institutional, ec…
Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States
This essay argues that the emergence of new factory systems and market cultures in the United States included the promotion of “industrial religion.” Industrial religion is a discourse that attributes suprahuman power to raw materials and the mechanical technologies employed to convert those materials into consumer goods. Through descriptions of coal production in the Appalachian Mountains, factory supervision in the South, and soap promotions in…
Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
"Today on Oprah ," intoned the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tuned in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in Winfrey’s empire—Harpo Productions, O Magazine , and her new television network—an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah liked, needed, or believed something, she offered her audience nothing less than spiritual re…
Religion and the American Celebrity
In American culture, is the celebrity a divine figure, or just another commodity in the marketplace? The author maps a series of strategies for the study of celebrities within the study of religion and America, focusing on the concomitant production of Britney Spears as a religious figure, a religious sacrifice, and a consumer product
The Body (Under Review): On Manuel Vásquez’s More than Belief
What sort of critique of religious studies will enjoin religious studies to think about its premises? This essay evaluates an important contemporary critique of the study of religion, Manuel Vásquez’s More than Belief . The author provides a summary of Vásquez’s argument, and then turns to an analysis of Vásquez’s evidence. In More than Belief , Vásquez tracks the development and effects of mind-body dualism on the study of religion. The differen…
Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief
What is belief? Is it a usable categorical for analysis in the study of religion? This was the subject of a one-day workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University on April 15, 2011. The participating scholars were asked to present comments on the meaning of belief for their own research. This text introduces a sampling of these responses prompted in part by a set of advance readings that represented the bibliography of …
The Sigh of the Oppressed: Marxism and Religion in America Today
The legacies of Oprah Winfrey: Celebrity, Activism and Reform in the Twenty-First Century
After 25 years on the air, Oprah Winfrey's celebrated talk show left television in May 2011. By the time it concluded, The Oprah Winfrey Show had reached more than 40 million viewers a week in the
Religious history as religious studies
What is the relationship between religious studies and religious history? Academic historical thinking emerged in part to repudiate ecclesiastical traditions of history, making the difference between religious history and histories of religion a question of denominational rivalry more than a difference in sect. Scholars working in the academic study of religion and the academic study of history have increased self-consciousness of this contingenc…
Homesickness: An American History
Journal Article Homesickness: An American History Get access Homesickness: An American History. By Susan J. Matt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii, 343 pp. $50.00.) Kathryn Lofton Kathryn Lofton Yale UniversityNew Haven, Connecticut [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 4, March 2013, Pages 1199–1201, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahis…
Forum: "Contemporary Mormonism: America's Most Successful "New Religion
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Secular shadowboxing
Theorizing Africana Religions
These edited proceedings of a 2013 symposium at Northwestern University are organized around the question of how to theorize the study of Africana religions across wide expanses of time and space. An international body of scholars representing the fields of history, religious studies, anthropology, American studies, sociology, African studies, classics, and African American studies gathered in a two-day event to consider the past, present, and fu…
Sociology (28 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (23 works) · History (20 works) · Art (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (16 works) · Religious studies (15 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (13 works) · Media, Religion, Digital Communication (10 works)