About Me

I’m a researcher, a writer, and a teacher who is deeply committed to social justice. I’m a scholar and a teacher because I think the world needs more thoughtful global participants. I believe that scholars have a duty to make their work useful to a broad audience, which is why I write. I believe in making what Civil Rights hero John Lewis calls “necessary trouble.” I try to make it regularly.

My scholarship focuses on religion, particularly conservative forms of Christianity; hate and extremism; gender and sex; ethnography and emotionally challenging research; motherhood, family, and disability; and the intersections of religion with popular culture, economics, family, and the law. My teaching focuses on my students. I want to equip them to more critically engage the world, specifically in relation to race and ethnicity, class, gender and sex, and religion and ideology. I love to work with students on original research projects and focus much of my teaching on that.