How Does It Feel to Be Nobody? Emptiness in Christian America

John Corrigan

Thursday, 12 Mar 2015 at 7:00 pm – Gerdin Business Building Auditorium, 1148 Gerdin

John Corrigan is a scholar of American religious history and author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books on religion and emotion and religious intolerance. His new book, Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America, examines how the feeling of emptiness is an essential part of American Christianity, though one that is overlooked. Corrigan is the editor of the University of Chicago Press's History of American Religion book series, a Senior Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, and a co-editor of the journal Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. He is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion at Florida State University.

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Abstract
For many Christians in America, becoming filled with Christ first requires being empty of themselves. They feel empty and they like it that way. They cultivate the feeling of emptiness by performing bodily disciplines that represent emptiness, imagining time and space in connection with emptiness, and telling stories about emptiness. Corrigan asks: How does it feel to be empty? How do American Christian communities, comprised of empty people, construct collective identities?

Additional Bio
John Corrigan has served as regular or visiting faculty at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Arizona State University, Oxford, University of London, University of Halle-Wittenberg, University College (Dublin) and as a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. In 2014-15 he is the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair for the Netherlands.

His many books include The Hidden Balance (1987); The Prism of Piety (1991); Religion in America (1992); Jews, Christians, Muslims (1998); Readings in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1998); Emotion and Religion (2000); Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (2002); Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (2004), French and Spanish Missions in North America(2005), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2008), Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (2010), Religion in American History (2010), and The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (2010).

Cosponsored By:

• Philosophy & Religious Studies
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)