There are two bits of news. First of all, I want to humbly (*cough*) mention that my UC Press book, A Diagram For Fire, is one of two joint winners of the American Ethnological Society’s Sharon Stephens Prize. The prize committee was kind enough to give me an excerpt from their assessment of the book, where they stated

“This was a masterful analytical contribution to the anthropology of Christianity by bringing North American Christianity into dialogue with the vibrant field of global Christianity at a time in which understanding why so many evangelicals see Trump’s election as evidence of a miracle is a central question for many of us.  Your analysis of how the Vineyard churches are each local and distinct instantiations of a set of practices that can still be seen by participants as part and parcel of an overarching movement is an analytically productive set of insights that travels well beyond the confines of anthropology of Christianity. Yours was a beautifully written ethnography in which you managed to achieve what so many of us struggle to do — bring complex and unruly ideas into linear sentences with a compelling clarity.   We especially appreciated that on almost every page, you have an original take on either an ethnographic encounter or long-standing theoretical concern.”

In addition to those very generous words from the committee, this is an honor for several other reasons. One is that my fellow co-winner has written an amazing book, and so just to share the dais with her is a bit of a head-trip. But on top of that, a lot of the books that won this prize in earlier years were incredibly influential to me, were important touchstones in developing my arguments,  were written by trusted colleagues, or radically expanded what it was that I thought that ethnography was capable of doing.

The second bit of news is that I have an article out in Religion and Society: Advances in Research. This article builds on one that came out last year, where I discussed what I might call the ethno-anthropology of American Charismatic Evangelicals. In the more recent article, I expand on the idea of a Christian ēthnos to think through how a certain kind of ethical process, coupled with Nietzschean ressentiment, doubled eschatologies, and demographic crisis, can crystalize the otherwise ephemeral idea of Christian Nationalism. This is an issue that’s not going to go away, so I think that producing theoretical accounts of this phenomenon is more important than ever.