The Digital Evangelicals: Contesting Authority and Authenticity after the New Media Turn

Abstract

suspicion emerges in chapter 5 where she makes much of David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King. It, too, deals with responses to boredom in the improbable context of lectures on tax regulations as found in an accountancy class. Its teacher is a Jesuit priest, which enables the main character of this unfinished work to find a “Jamesian divinity in the fundamental elements of his data-based bureaucratic world” (97). This broadly relates to what Mosurinjohn is perhaps seeking for the study: the right relationship between “psychic interiority and affective collectivity” (98). A depressive, Wallace left a two-page suicide note inside the manuscript. Somewhat of a celebrity writer working on the frontiers of the counterculture and postmodernity, he made two definite efforts to become a Catholic through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), although, in the end, did not convert. A similar sense of taking matters to a theological frontier seems to haunt this rich, condensed, and thoughtful work which opens out many vistas for further advance. The author works well across many disciplinary areas to produce a work of originality and creativity. In a sense the study is perverse for she has managed to open out a theology of the mundane, more usually treated as its graveyard.