About Mark
I have many interests, some of which I hope are worth sharing here, and all of which may fit together in one place.
On my scholarly side, I have a Ph.D in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, with special interests in the relations between leftish cultural critique and US religions over the past few decades. For many years I taught on US religion and culture at the University of Tennessee. Before that I studied at Minnesota (Ph.D) and Yale (M.Div.). My roots are in the upper Midwest and I lived for a short but formative time in Mexico.
One pet peeve is the widespread assumption that US religion is overwhelmingly right-wing, while left-of-center religion is marginal and dying. These are misleading half-truths and it drives me crazy when they become self-fulfilling prophecies.
You can find out more about my scholarly work than you probably want to know if you click on my C.V. or this summary. I've written two books and dozens of articles, many of them accessible online via the C.V.
This site features only a subset of this work--short essays written since 2017 when I launched "Mark's Blogging Experiment" (which is still archived here). I've never blogged in a sense of posting a daily or even weekly stream, but I do relate my scholarship to emergent topics quite often, so I encourage you to sign up below to get new posts via email as they roll out.
The "writings" page includes "oldies but goodies"--a thread to bring back past work (sometimes reframed or lightly revised) when it illumines emergent topics. Since my articles sprawl across several dozen venues that often do not intersect, this helps to gather strays and/or forgotten pieces in one place.
I’m also a musician who plays in some sort of Americana style with a fair number of jazz voicings and a range of conceptual and rhythmic influences from musicians like Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Joe Strummer, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Ruben Blades, Bob Marley, Fiona Apple, and many more. It's not that I try to reproduce all their styles but I sometimes cover them with acceptable quality or capture their spirit in my own songs.
Click above on "Mark's Music Project" for more about my music or go straight to my Bandcamp site which gathers my best recordings.
You can explore overlaps between my scholarship and this music by clicking around this site for essays about music.