christianity and culture – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith & Fractured a Nation

By Scott J. Pearson | April 5, 2025April 6, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This history describes how evangelical culture and its attitudes about masculinity have shaped white Christianity and American politics. In so doing, it tries to describe why evangelical Christians, supposedly the among the most devout and religious, have chosen to support a politician who is anything but devout and resembling the Bible’s Jesus. Frankly, Kristin Kobes du Mez, a minister’s daughter, does an honest, thorough job. The evangelicalism she describes is wedded more closely to patriarchy…

Religion-Philosophy

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water & Loving the Bible Again

By Scott J. Pearson | October 3, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Fundamentalist and evangelical preachers often try to enforce a “literal” interpretation on the Christian Scriptures. That perspective often removes the affective, emotional, and wonder-filled components – precisely the original authors’ main points. The late Rachel Held Evans was raised an evangelical but became an outspoken mainline Protestant before her untimely death. Here, she tells her story alongside the Bible’s story. She tries to recapture some of the amazement that drew many to read the Christian…

Religion-Philosophy Society

Christianity and Culture by TS Eliot

By Scott J. Pearson | January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

I first read these essays while a senior at college. Now, about twenty years later, I reread them in a study on the English poet TS Eliot. Eliot uses language very carefully, as any poet should, but he is a poet approaching the world of an anthropologist. Further, he writes in an era (pre- and post-World-War-II) in which European culture was pulled apart at the seams and remade again. Eliot himself is an American transplant…