Coda: Secular Subjects

The academic experiences Everett Hamner describes in the introduction to this issue are, unfortunately, not limited to his education alone. Over the last decade, colleagues and friends have recounted to me such unpleasant tales, similar to my own. During my doctoral work, however much seminar readings in Derrida and Lyotard seemed naturally to cross-pollinate with my interests in religion, well-meaning professors repeatedly warned me not to write about religion in my dissertation, “or people will think this is just a religious project.” (Try replacing the adjective: would anyone have said, “just a political project,” “just a feminist project,” “just a race project”?) Once I landed that coveted, tenure-track research position in spite of it all (thank God), I arrived to be told during my first week on the job that, during my hiring meeting, someone had openly expressed concern that I might “be a religious fundamentalist.” Why? Because I gave a job talk about Christopher Smart? (I did.) Because afterwards I asked the audience to accept Jesus as their personal Savior? (I didn’t.) Besides being illegal, that comment mainly displayed which faculty member wouldn’t know a fundamentalist from Adam. I still shake my head at that one. By my reckoning, these experiences and dozens like them reveal much less about the relevance of religion in contemporary culture (high) and the intellectual mettle of the students and scholars who work on it (varied), and more about the general discomfort with religion in literary and cultural studies that such censures express (indisputable). Of this shall be the theme of this brief coda. But first, a word of hope: happily, I think, change is in the air, as this issue attests. The Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow has become the catalyst of a new generation of scholarship on religion and the arts, and here at The University of Iowa, an increasing number of Ph.D students in English (this fall, between a quarter and a third of the entering class) comes to the program drawn by our “Religion, Secularism, and Ethics” area (which they regularly report is “the only Coda: Secular Subjects