Welcome
Dear reader, this is a DRAFT publication of my new project. You can expect about 1 chapter a month for the next year. Thank you for reading!
For the next year, I will serially release DRAFT chapters of Fandoms and Faithful Reading: What Wizards, Jedi, and Swifties Can Teach the Church.
This book is one many people have encouraged me to write after hearing me speak and teach about how stories shape our imagination and what it is like to be part of God’s story, so I decided to share it here.
Synopsis
What if being part of God’s people looked more like being a Star Wars or sports fan than saying the sinner’s prayer and attending church?
When my daughter read Harry Potter, she was enchanted by the Wizarding World. Yet, like so many students who enter my classroom, she deemed the Bible boring. As a Christian parent, I was frustrated—how and why had we exchanged the rich story of the Bible for tedious morality and right answers? As a Christian literary scholar, I was fascinated—why isn’t the biblical world engrossing like the Wizarding World, Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, or sports fandoms?
Fandoms and Faithful Reading uses narrative theory to frame Christian faith as a rich and evocative story world that we learn to inhabit much like fans inhabit fandoms. The book examines how Evangelicals have fetishized doctrine and lost the plot, reclaims the Bible as a community forming text, and builds a practical framework for eating, decorating, conversing, and reading our children (and ourselves) into the People of God.
Overview
We are suffering a crisis of the Christian imagination. Many faithful Christians hardly read the Bible at all. Those who do read the text as a collection of inspirational phrases, moral prohibitions, self-help advice, and some scattered facts about cosmology, human origins, and ancient history. As a university English professor, such reading strategies don’t surprise me. In the classroom and church, I’ve learned that most Americans are literate but not literary—people read for basic information but struggle to read modern novels and relatively recent poetry well. So it is not surprising that Christians fail to read an ancient collection of narrative, poetic, legal, prophetic, and epistolary literature well!
The death of the literary imagination has led to a crisis of hermeneutics, of the Christian imagination, and Christian community. But what if we could re-learn how to love the story of God and God’s people? And what if we could let our shared love for the story world of God’s people foster a vibrant and creative community like our favorite fandoms?
This book is for Evangelicals—be they faithful evangelicals, frustrated evangelicals, or former evangelicals—who know that the Bible tells a story, who believe that the God behind that story is good, and who long to be a part of that story…but who feel alienated from the text and from the practices of Christian community.
This book is for pastors, teachers, and leaders who are tired—tired of performing church as a product for everyone else to consume, tired of doctrinal debates that stifle the imagination and conversation, and tired of the dismissive pluralism that reduces the Christian faith and life to one’s personal preference—and need a renewed vision for being part of God’s people.
This book is for Christians who “parent”—parents, grandparents, care-givers, teachers, and pastors—but who are not equipped to foster a robust, historic, story-shaped faith in their homes and communities…for their children or for themselves!
This book is for everyone who wants to rediscover the captivating story of the Bible and imaginatively inhabit that story through ordinary life: slow Sabbaths, reimagined holiday seasons, lively conversations, and even LEGO builds.
The Plan
If you like the book, please subscribe (for free) to receive updates when I release a new chapter (which will be about once a month, maybe a bit more frequently). I’d love to hear your thoughts on the work as I continue to develop this project. Then encourage 5-10 friends to subscribe as well. I’d like this work to be available as a resource to help people take up their role in the great, old story of God and God’s people., but that can only happen with your help — learn more at DrJessHughes.com/HELP
grace & peace,
Dr. Jessica Ann Hughes