Month: February 2023

Folk Horror

That is not dead which can eternal lie… The term folk horror dates from 1970, and it originally applied to British films that explored the idea that potent ancient forces and deep-rooted evils survive in the landscape, scarcely acknowledged by the modern world. Commonly, these dark forces are mobilized by active witches or pagan groups,…Continue Reading Folk Horror

One Spring, Many Rivers

In 2015, I published an ambitious book titled The Many Faces of Christ  The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. The counter-intuitive argument was that most of the ancient “lost” or Gnostic gospels had survived at least in some parts of the world, and continued to exercise a surprising influence….Continue Reading One Spring, Many Rivers

The Christian World in 200AD

I have been developing a book proposal titled The End Of The Beginning: How The Jesus Movement Became The Christian Church, which would represent a snapshot of the whole Christian world as it around 200AD. As the title suggests, I chose 200 not at random, but because that is a critical moment in the formation…Continue Reading The Christian World in 200AD

Pennsylvania Religious History

I have been publishing on Pennsylvania history for forty-plus years. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time working on very local religious history, in Central Pennsylvania, and produced several blogposts on it. They are collected in the document that follows. I think it makes some useful points about how we “read” a historic landscape,…Continue Reading Pennsylvania Religious History

Occult City: A Book That Never Happened

I offer the following in what we might call the spirit of intellectual archaeology. Back in 2003, when velociraptors roamed the Earth, I had what I thought was a bright idea for a book project titled Occult City: Alternative Spiritualities in an American Metropolis, 1880-1940, the city in question being Philadelphia. That seemed sensible because…Continue Reading Occult City: A Book That Never Happened

Debating the Book of Mormon

Back in 2015, I was involved in a lively debate with the now sadly deceased Professor Bill Hamblin over the historicity of the Book of Mormon, a controversy that attracted quite a bit of attention. For that reason, I assembled what I believe to be a complete record of the (rather numerous) contributions to that…Continue Reading Debating the Book of Mormon

My Penn State Teaching

From 1980 through 2011, I taught at Penn State, and in a variety of departments. Originally I was based in Administration of Justice, but I also taught in American Studies, before focusing chiefly on Religious Studies and History, which is where I spent most of my years. (The two units were combined administratively). Through that…Continue Reading My Penn State Teaching

Unpublished Papers and Articles

These are several papers or articles by me that are “in development” to varying degrees, or which for various reasons are not easily available in print. Several were conference papers. In some cases, I have absorbed the material into some other work such as a published book, but in other instances the papers remain “orphans.”…Continue Reading Unpublished Papers and Articles