Religion and Politics after January 6

Join Tracy Fessenden and Abram Van Engen in a public conversation that puts Culture and Redemption and City on a Hill in dialogue, reflecting on how the thesis of each has fared in light of the January 6 insurrection. Fessenden’s book explores American secularity and public spheres; Van Engen’s book offers a history of American exceptionalism. Both books consider the long legacies of puritanism in America, and both scholars will discuss together the puritans as template, generative or otherwise, for writing about religion and literature in America. Mark Valeri will moderate the discussion and join the discourse with reflections from his book The Opening of the Protestant Mind.

Tracy Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on religion and American literature and the arts; gender, race, and sexuality in American religious history; and the relationship between religion and the secular in American law, culture, and public life. She is the author of  Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018) and Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton University Press, 2007; 2013); co-editor of Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Columbia University Press, 2013) and The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001); co-editor of the North American Religions series at New York University Press, the Religion Around series at Penn State University Press, and the journal Religion and American Culture for Cambridge University Press. She holds degrees in religious studies from the University of Virginia and in English from Yale. 

Abram Van Engen is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published widely on religion and literature, focusing especially on seventeenth-century Puritans and the way they have been remembered and remade in American culture. He is the author of Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 2015) and City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2020). He earned the Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and his undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy from Calvin College.

Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics and currently serves as the Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His areas of specialization include religion and social thought, especially economics, in America; Reformation theology and the political history of Calvinism; Puritanism; and enlightenment moral philosophy. His latest book describes how Anglo-American Protestant descriptions of other religions, and conversion from one religion to another, changed from 1650 to 1765: The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is also the author of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (Oxford University Press, 1994), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 17: Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733 (Yale University Press, 1999), Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), co-edited with Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Leigh E. Schmidt, and the co-edited Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy (Eerdmans, 2008). Valeri earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University, his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and his B.A. from Whitworth College.

More information on the Department of English website.