I guess I’m becoming less and less unique all the time, but I have personal friends who have been touched directly by a mass murder, perpetrated as a hate crime by a right-wing extremist.  By "touched directly" I mean they were there being shot at; one of them tackled the shooter. In my case this … Continue reading Normalizing Domestic Terrorism

I know I’m not supposed to play the proud parent too much, especially when my daughter (Lucia Hulsether) moves in some of the same intellectual circles where I made my own career. She needs to make her own way, and is succeeding at that project very well, thank you very much. I've also said that … Continue reading The Master’s Tools and the Master’s House–“Woke” Capitalist Style

I’ve just published an article in a new American Studies journal called Quarterly Horse that features concise scholarly interventions. Here it is for you to click on. It uses the case of a pioneering radio evangelist, megachurch founder, and Pentecostal empire builder—one of few such people who was a woman in a subculture that earned … Continue reading “Women’s Equality”: Does It Include Valorizing a Woman Who Preaches to the KKK at Her Own Megachurch?

There isn’t much point in sending readers from this little blog to the American Academy of Religion’s review portal, Reading Religion—I wish I could send traffic the other way!—but I want to link to a review I recently published there, on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American … Continue reading Empathy Walls: Thinking about People Who Are Oppressed But Love Trump

I was dismayed to learn that the Trade Lake Township board appears (at least temporarily) to be backtracking on its promise—voted under strong public pressure on June 13—to work vigorously to stop the proposed hog CAFO near Trade Lake. But I assume it is not too late to follow through. It is extremely likely that any … Continue reading Hip-Hop Music, 24-Hour Gun Ranges, and Hog Shit

Possibly my best song, and certainly a song that is close to my heart, includes these lines: The rain has turned the yellow grass Seven shades of green. . . . It’s only a moment that we can smell the rain, And taste the salt on each other’s skins. It’s only a moment and then … Continue reading Seven Shades of Green

In few days I head for my summer writing retreat, a log cabin in the Wisconsin north woods where my mom grew up. It is halfway between Minneapolis and Duluth as the crow flies. This is where I go to detoxify from the toxic parts of working at a giant corporate university, to focus on … Continue reading Corporate Logic Vs. the Environment, Quality of Life, and Even Its Own Self-Interest….Please Let’s Stop It!