Kathryn Lofton, “Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon” (University of California Press, 2011)

Hello and welcome to another episode of New Books in Religion. I'm your host Christian Peterson. For each program we choose a new book in the field of religion that's especially interesting and we chat with the author about that book. Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Catherine Lofton about her new book Oprah the Gospel of an Icon. In this very enjoyable read, Lofton cleverly unravels Oprah's story within the broader context of American religiosity and the academic study of religion. She contends that modern religion is not something distinct that we can analyze but should be conceived of as an interaction of various modalities which are often bracketed off as spirituality, commodity or corporatism. In our interview we explore various topics weaving in and out of the content of the book, covering politics, public policy, ritual, capitalism, 9/11, the University of Chicago and Jonathan Z. Smith, among other things. We also had time to discuss the website Frequencies, a co-curated project funded by the Social Science Research Council, as well as various reactions to the project from critics on the imminent frame. Lofton was a delight to talk to you as you can tell from her engaging presence and for those who have not yet read the book be reassured that her personality and sharp insight shines through the text. We had a lot to talk about so without further ado, here's the interview. Welcome to another episode of new books in religion. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Catherine Lofton about her wonderful, wonderful book Oprah the Gospel of an Icon. And thank you very much for joining us today, Catherine. I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you so much for having me, Christian. This is really exciting. Yeah, it's great. I must say, I found the book really to be excellent, not only in the content, but in the way you structured it, your writing is effortless and enjoyable. And it's really for being an academic book, it was one of those books I really didn't want to put down. So thank you for writing a great book. It's so long. You're singing me so much to me. You know so well. Like we were all people trying to not only speak to our communities or into our scholarship, but also we have, I did have this small fantasy that we could speak outside. So that means a lot to me. It means a lot to me. Thank you. Yeah, I think you did a great job. Before we get into this great book, could you just give us a little bit of background on who you are and how you got interested in the study of religion? Sure. You know, I always, because as a historian, you think, oh, this is a roshamam thing. I should immediately think of seven different points of entrance because how did it come to pass? But I converged on this plot. It was, it's the last thing I think, I think the first thing to say is this is the last thing I would have ever imagined doing with my life when I was, you know, a girl or in high school. I was raised in a context that I later find out the language for which would be something like a red diaper baby. And I didn't know what that meant. I wouldn't have known what that meant until I was in college and I heard that used by Professor's. But it's just that they was raised in Milwaukee by parents who were identifiably leftist and they were both raised in pretty Catholic backgrounds and they both left the church along with also getting pretty involved in the counter culture and particularly Milwaukee at the time in the southeastern Wisconsin, had a pretty strong socialist community and also just a very creative community, a lot of artists, a lot of people trying to think differently about how to live in lots of ways. And in different ways, my parents got involved in that to different extent. And we were raised, my siblings and I, I always used the language that we were raised in a secular orthodoxy, which just beyond dorky to say, but there is, you know, kind of rules and ideas about everything. So you know, you go to the grocery store, you know, the kind of pick and save and that you get a long lecture about why there were so many different kinds of ketchup and what's so wrong about where food comes from. And this is long before my gopala made a very understandable to all of those lights of disturbing. And so the world was a lecture. Like I was constantly being lectured and I would say inculcated and offered a kind of, relatively incoherent ideology because my parents, you know, though I would say, they're so state with what we would call the left, it was, you know, as incoherent as the left often is, you know. So there's no book I could point to and say, this was their theory of the world. No, I mean, it was a hodgepodge of their own very working class backgrounds and the kind of nascent reading that they were both doing about how we can make the world that was more equitable. And so they wanted all three of their children to go out in the world and, you know, kind of build a better world in some way or another. And I think one thing that it was very clear for my child, of my earliest memory, which also dates me as being, I suppose, pretty young, but my earliest memory is my father screaming at the face of Ronald Reagan, the television screen. And so there's just something wrong with the way that the country was being run and being conceived. And as it turns out, they had three children and you know, one is now a real estate attorney. Another one works in hedge funds and I am a professor. So I think that their dream was somewhat denied in the sense of all its kind of belonging to very old institutional structures. But I think all three of us kind of grew up plotting at different times that we were going to be everything from the heads of our own small countries to starting important activist groups that helped the poor and the south. I mean, these were the kind of fantasies that we circulated around. And perhaps, unsurprisingly, then, you know, each of us had a kind of reaction against that. And when I was starting to think about college, I wanted, I thought that what I would want would be a context where a kind of opposite view is being articulated. And so for me, that really drew me to go to, you know, again, a very geeky kid, obviously, if I'm dreaming in eighth grade about like an opposite intellectual fantasy, you can picture the kind of overall book-carrying character, the till-to-like person I was, that I thought I researched and, you know, the extensive research and found that the most conservative, one of the more conservative universities in the country was the University of Chicago. And I kind of like was bent upon going there with this idea that I would encounter, you know, the other, you know, sort of the very critique that had produced the Reaganomics that had been so much the source of childhood, English and anger. And so, so I kind of flooded and I had, you know, vision to my head. I was going to be a public policy major. And, anyway, so I go to college and I go to this university and was very, very fortunate to go there. It's a great place. But it was a place that was at the time. And I think maybe to some extent still is shrouded in a lot of like lore about the depression of the other graduates and the kind of belief place for an undergraduate life. And I didn't find it to be that way at all. I was so thrilled to be in a big city. I was so thrilled to be at a place with so many other people who were overalls and planned like college futures from eighth grade forward, you know, I was among my kin. And I was also really glad to be with a lot of people who were raised in incredibly different ways. It was the first time I life I'd ever met people from a lot of divergent economic backgrounds and, you know, I think backgrounds. It was just incredibly an encounter with a different world, I'll be obviously a very, very elite one. And in that context, I started studying public policy right away. That was kind of my passion. And I got very involved with all of the at the time. The Obama's were there. Michelle Obama was the Dean of Student Services. And she was really engaged in trying to make the undergraduate body who were a pretty geeky cohort who rarely left the library to get out into the city and be involved in the city. And I was doing a series of kind of volunteer engagements that were serving also as kind of sociology practicums. I think you would go and you would kind of get, not credit hours, but you kind of get experience in the field in a variety of nonprofits, situations. And I started going in particular to one soup kitchen and then to a youth program. So a soup kitchen kind of on the near north side and a youth program that particularly targeted kids in what was at the time kind of the fading Robert Taylor Holmes of the housing project that would eventually be faced out by daily. And in both context, kind of two things happened to me. One is, I really saw in this again shows. I mean, I hope the whole story sounds like the most naive, the working character in the world. You know, like, here I thought, you know, you could change the world, go meet you. And I go into the world and I discovered two things which are probably very obvious to everyone else in the world. One, it is really hard to change the world. Like it's a really hard thing. And I'm pretty sure that bureaucracy and pushing around paper are not the most effective way of changing the world, but that's what I was being trained in. I was being trained in thinking about how a situation and structures of situations are created with the best form of policy to form, to try to give the basic modicum of services to people. And the kind of devastating encounter was twofold. One is, I was at this soup kitchen one day. I was supposed to be taking all these notes. So you went this not reference a lot of notes on the circumstance. And I noticed this is a very, very big space. A famous large soup kitchen. I noticed that there were five other women. I would say young white women, all probably from Northwestern, UIUC, and University of Chicago, taking notes on the room. And I felt immediately this kind of revolve by myself. I sort of saw myself. And these women, I'm sure, are wonderful women who have gone on to notable service-oriented careers. But there was just something very strange I thought about a sitting corner as an observing, suffering of other people. And that felt very strange to me. But it was so integral to our training. And kind of learn and watch the world in this particular way. And then secondly, in the youth programs I was involved with, this was an amazing operation that did so many different things. And you know, had in its websites, continues to this day, to have all these kids who, because they go to these youth programs, in particular ways, they were both educational and recreational. They would go on to college and get scholarships. So this one is great kind of uploaded. of programs. But what I always found really upsetting about their press was that they could notice the number of kids who went through the crack. So I'd say in a given cohort, I did a Saturday morning mentorship program about 16 girls. One of them would be that story. The other 15 would not be on websites. And one of the things that I noticed between two summers is I came back and three of the girls who, the year before, had seen just really the dreadful, that struggling, it came from pretty difficult home circumstances. When I came back the following fall, I had been going home to work for the summer. They were all just a little bit more upright. They dressed a little differently. They spoke a little differently. And I asked one of them, what happened to you girls this summer? And they all three invited me to their church. And they went to this church, the South Side of Chicago, the Apostopthorchagog, which was run by the then kind of amazing legendary Bishop Arthur Bray here. And I had, if it's worth knowing right away, I had never been inside a church. I had been inside many synagogues for bar and botnets, but I had never been inside a church. I had a very strong view, very critical view of the church. The church here now is a model left up that was invented by my parents. And I went, and I was just, I mean, I was, in all those nights, I was just absolutely thwarted by what I witnessed by the sense too that this church had all of these ministries in operation. And again, that's a word I'd never been heard before. I cannot express the level of my ignorance. So I go and I had no, I had never seen kind of religious ritual accepted, like leap of faith with Steve Martin. I mean, I was just a blank slate when I came to the question of the legend. And then I go, and it was a very, I mean, a very powerful, enormous church. I'm not quite a megasturge, it was pretty big church. And I'm Pentecostal, one is Pentecostal. So, you know, you had speaking in tongues, you had amazing singing, but more importantly, more to my immediate eye, although the singing and the glossolale would become interesting to me, but if the media was the political exigency of this place and the way in which, and political here was changing from you, because I came in with this very liberal of your politics as large structural change. It's trying to create economic equality. And instead what I hear is all this, what I see here is all this small scale change. And again, this is solely familiar to people who are much smarter than I am on these subjects, but I just had never thought about, you know, family ministries, divorce mothers, ministry, drug ministries. All these things that we would now put under this, you know, fancy big word of neoliberalism, they were already doing it, which is sort of intimate change. How do you make a person function better than they're given day? And I literally watched as a lot, and I began to understand that a lot of the kids we were trying to help through the secular youth group were being siphoned off by these churches that were seemingly more effective by any kind of measure. And of course, those measures become the grounds of a lot of faith-based funding and the Bush administration. And we'll just skip that for a little bit. But right now, let's just say this is me in the '90s in this church, my mind was blown. And I think, because it also countered the liberal view I had of the Black Church, which I associate with a civil rights movement, again, a sort of large-scale structural change and not knowing about the ways in which the church was so intimately involved, and this particular branch, but intimately involved in the lives of its parishioners. And so I became totally riveted, and I happened to be fortunate enough to be in a school that had other programs that were good-sized public policy, and in particular, it had Chicago had both a Divinity School, obviously, forced as very well-known, but also this and very small major. So small that I was the only major of the year I graduated, held religion in the humanities, for which there was, at the time, one faculty member-- a man named Jonathan Smith, who was a scholar of religion, extraordinary, but I did not know any of that. I just knew I wanted to study religion now in somehow combination with public policy. And I took that quarter. I was able to enroll in a class with him on ritual studies. I was able to enroll in a class of the Divinity School on the introduction to the New Testament. A book I had never cracked. Like, if you were to say to me, what is the New Testament? I would have said, it is in the Bible. And that would have been the limit of my ability to speak. And I took a class on early American religion with a scholar named Catherine Brenka, who was a relatively new faculty member of the Divinity School. And then I continued to take this post-pollucy crack to come that was a part of my major. And I have to say that that quarter, which was my sophomore year, dorkly, that was a very transformative time, and everything just moved for me. All my interests moved from a kind of, I would say, an anthropology of the immediate political now, sociological now, into this study and interest in the genealogy of the present. How did we get to the place now? And then what would be the best propositions for change in the future? And I was just like-- I was a pagan trash. I was so joyful. I was just that was gorging on taking these classes that seemed to me to unlock questions that I thought were the limit of public policy and its analysis. And public policy here, I would just say, to stand in for a political change. Where does politics stop? And true, what I would say, I was a logical difference began. And I found that in the study of religion. And I did because I was just really, really lucky to be near people who had made that also their project. And so that's where it began to think differently. And then I had to report home to my parents and my family. But I'd gone to study religion as many of us. And maybe you've also experienced Christmas. The first one was a shock. And then the sense of-- I would say, years, an ongoing act of explication. Because to study religion seemed to collude with that religion itself. It seemed to be such a problem in the history of the world, particularly in the histories that were important to people I grew up with. So anyway, it's just comic that for a lot of people, being an academic as seen as a very leftist thing to do. But in my world, it's seen as the most conservative-- you know, I just know it's very thing to do. So I think it's good. It's good that people on the outside question. It makes you keep you honest. Yeah, that's great. That's a really interesting story. After talking to lots of authors, it's amazing all the different paths that people take. And really the event of randomness, the following, this surprise events that you never expect. That's great. So this is a very unique book. How did the story for this book come about? Well, I think I have randomness. I love that word. I just love the evocation of that word. It makes me feel so safe. I don't know why. I think, right, random. It's OK. We can trip there. I think the one hand I was always very nervous about-- I would say I could retain from my childhood a lot of nervousness about when other people tell you what is great or what is classic or what is good. I think what is Marxism if not a concept naming of the fraudulent. So it's best. I mean, Marxism has a failed notion all kinds of ways. But as a description of the world, it's basically saying the things you think are maybe given to you in a way that's really upsetting, disturbing, and maybe creating a false consciousness. And I think I went to Chicago, and there was this great book's curriculum, which I really loved on the one hand. It was totally awesome for people to speak and give up since saying, now you've read these books. You really know something. Now, the fact that I didn't really feel if I'd come to that kind of enlightenment through them didn't really matter. I just was interested in the feeling that it superimposed at you. And this is a lot of education, right? Like you had a kid a list, and then I think they know something about the world. And at the time that I was taking a lot of courses that were sort of what we call this great book's curriculum with classes like titles, human-being, and citizen, or self-culture and society. And as I was taking those classes, I was also living in a dorm. And there was kind of common television room and we would watch late at night, kind of a lousy TV, everything from the golden girls, friends, reruns, to like real world Seattle. And being the kinds of, again, like very large glasses, acne written, overall wearing kids, we would sit in front of these kinds of programs and apply our reading of Hobbes, of Marx, and lock to these texts. And this was real sport and fun. And there would be kind of a hierarchy would emerge, or who could say the coolest thing relative to the dynamic of the golden girls and a rigour, right? So anyway, that was kind of what I'm full of. And in Chicago, Oprah Winfrey, her show repeated at night. So it was at 4 p.m., the standard hour for open at 11 p.m. and repeated. And so I would find myself really sailing in that hour. That would be an hour, I would really be in my home, my wheelhouse. And I often found that for some people would really fade away. It was definitely a case that when that show came on, you'd see a lot of the guys would leave the room. It would not really-- but for me, I found it riveting. There was something in that show. And again, I was a child. I mean, I was person raised without popular culture. So one of the rules of the house, and my parents' house, is that we only could watch PBS. And I was assigned a lot of books to read. I had not-- I consumed a very small, only pop culture I got was from a local radio station in Milwaukee, 94 WKPI, where I got top 40 radio. But otherwise, it was a very formalized environment. So this was really to me, to Latin, as first of all, to have a TV on period. And then secondly, to be watching something that would be seen by any, and even a less strict parent, kind of be absurdly over a win-free show, where you have just the decadence of human suffering on display. But I found it, and again, probably predictably, really riveting. And I started to watch. And when I was in college, I wrote one paper about her show in a class that Smith did, and thinking about the ritual of the makeover, early on, thinking about that. And then-- but then I really got into history. And it was just an interest I had, sort of, I would say, now I'm going into just in popular culture. And what popular culture did for people, the feeling that it gave me late at night, what it gave other people. And then-- so I went to graduate school, really planning to write about African-American religion, where broadly I went to study at North Carolina with a woman named Laurie Maxx, a wonderful scholar of American religious history, with interest in many fields. But one of them happened to be-- African-American religions and I went there really think I'd be working in 19th century materials with her and indeed from the beginning she and my other advisors including Tom Tweed and Grant went to her we're all very encouraging of writing a historical project but the way you really can get your bonus few days in this field and I agreed with this was to know intimately the archival construction of the three so I did that but meanwhile one of the cool things that being a grad school at UNC is you have to teach a ton and so like from the first semester you were involved in the pedagogy of undergraduates and keeping in mind again like keeping on the naive girl now moves from the Midwest and the kind of left-dismid west and then moves to the south and it was also amazing encounter with both a different version of an American life period but also American religious life and to go into the classroom and be teaching in classes like Bart Airman's you know introduction in the New Testament class to be doing that kind of work with an undergraduate body that is so predominantly evangelical amazing I highly recommend it that is like an education in the study of religion right there and meanwhile I would find in those classes that that you know as we all do we all struggle in teaching to connect to our students and popular culture is of course one of the many ways you could do that but I just consistently found that Oprah was a way it seems to me there was no subject in the study of religion of period like I'm talking anything you know you're taking your own materials and Islam or China I mean give me a subject I could take it back to the yo and so I found that if it mattered if I was teaching a class on like history of Christianity or world religions or introduction to Islam it didn't because we were just tossing all these classes of the graduates who's there Oprah just became a way for me to talk I'm in deep up culture in general and but meanwhile I worked on the project with dissertation about ideas of the modern in like 19th century and I kept doing work in scholarly work in other areas but I just found in Oprah a repository that seemed unlimited and then when I moved on from graduate school I would just say a series of things came around in my life go personally and politically where it seemed to me just incredibly important that our work answer as exigent questions as possible I would say probably the easiest thing to indicate is that you know I I had the dissertation I was disappointed by a frustrated by it I was excited I was excited about studying American religious history I remained incredibly passionate participants in that field but I also felt like there was something about our contemporary moment that I felt neither sociologists, political scientists and religiousists were not rightly acknowledging which is to be a real shift in the way religious behavior is articulated and and so I felt and especially I would say when Obama was in the process of being nominated I mean I had been thinking for some time that I would write a book about Oprah but then that happened and I thought it's not a matter of time like I honestly didn't know what I finished writing about but I just thought we're living in a now that needs that needs an explanation so I was Obama's nomination the publication of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age which is a man of book for not for the faint of heart but actually a pretty redundant one let's you dig into it and I really I respect Taylor enormously is an amazing mind I profoundly disagree with that book and really did not like a lot of the things he says an amazing mind I disagree with I wanted to write against it and meanwhile also being in the world of teaching and on the market and talking and just wanting you know I guess I think maybe the most again and I even enthusiastic and idealistic part of me but I wanted to write a book I could teach and then I could get people excited about the thing that got me excited about really the studies and I think you could do that with history I just was not an apt enough historian to feel like I could do that with this story of yet that at the project I was working on and so I thought I would start with a project that I knew that I could walk in the middle of it I could walk in the middle and say are you excited about thinking this way because I am really excited and does it kind of blow your mind and look at a bomb like he doesn't come from nowhere he's in a miracle he's actually kind of predictable and predictable in good ways in bad ways anyway so so that's why I ended up working at book which at the time when I was start working out a lot of people people I really respect encouraged me not to do because they just said you know popular culture is kind of dangerous you know dangerous rail to set your hands upon and but I just I don't know I just I felt that they had to be done I don't know I had to get it out of my body so well you did it you did a really good job I don't it doesn't feel like a book about popular culture at all which is which is definitely interesting so connect the dots here you you say that it's early on in the introduction say Oprah Winfrey's empire offers a description of religion in modern society so how does how can we start to examine this how does how does Oprah open the sub for us yeah so I would say um for me the question of looking at the religious now is unthinkable without taking up everything in our now so I think that that was the first step that I had read a lot of really truly obviously wonderful um religious histories that had spoken and here I want to mark the beginning and anxiety about presentism which is sort of seeping throughout the academy like that our scholarship needs to be very conscious of not you know imputing to the past something that we are very recently experiencing so but at the same time it seemed to me that the histories that I was reading in the study of religion rightfully I suppose with this we managed focused I thought rather myopic understanding of what religion was if they thought about it at all and you know this law too Christian how many people don't really think about what that word means they just kind of think okay I see Lutherans that's religion or I see someone putting their hands together and talking about God that's religion so step one for me is like what is religion what are we looking for and step two is um when we're looking for it what do we think its relationship is to everything else we're looking at and I think you know when I look at the contemporary the contemporary context I I felt and here obviously this is also a projection of my own childhood but um but I felt too when I spoke even the students who I worked with and what were passionately religious and came from really obviously denominational plimes I was so struck by you can't identify them purely through some sectarian vantage it would be inconceivable to name um you know any of my students be they reformed Jews or Lutherans through that category that category if anything the now seems so resistant to that like I'm I'm not just that thing I want to be multiple I want to be abundant in my multiplicity now that one word that could be Sheila ism you know Robert Bella identifying the desire for a person to be kind of the compass of their own morality but I was also trying to reach I wouldn't even further than Sheila's because I wasn't just speaking about a moral compass it was also about the ways that people occupy them now in ways that are I think very ritual are very ordered around um certain ideas of community and it's not merely kind of pure solipses although that's certainly an accusation that's made but it's also a kind of conscientious um participation in the social world in ways that are so different than when you're looking at let's say Antibela reform movements and how they organize themselves so when I talk about over being you know um an articulation of the religious now I wanted to talk about the ways that people sought endless individuation I am a very special me and no one else is like me at the same time people continue to participate in and find fascinating certain forms of both community but also being identified by corporate bodies so you know the easiest example of this is Facebook I use it all the time it's just it's it's both unfortunate and brilliant and it's perfection here because you know Facebook is on the one hand the the endless individuation of us right like you can divide this up design your your page however you like you have you know um and you get to connect you make your own special networks at the same time it is Facebook organizing you and that's where all the articles come out saying you know that they're looking at your information they make decisions about public and private you really have to work with them their structures they're kind of difficult to figure out their privacy settings so I wanted to talk about that way of living in a now which both obviously invokes the evokes sectarian life that is what we look like when we're in churches synagogues and an obvious religious movement but also kind of the way our broader consciousness is determined by something that's more of a matrix between self and multiple kinds of authority um so Oprah for me was both great because she's so easy in a way like couldn't have anything more easy than Oprah she's so she was regularly on she's so nice she gives you gifts you know she talks about problems in a relatively simple way but in that that total simplicity I also saw what I thought was for the bedrock uh of the way that we now think even though many people in the dean as I give talks I often ask people if people have seen Oprah Winfrey episode and I'd say it's usually only like one out of five who have so it is the case I want to choose a minority object it's not for everybody but in her and also the fact that she becomes such a majority figure so we use her often as like an icon of America black America of success of greatness of of a kind of deification of celebrity but she's minority not every but I would say everybody have I would argue there's no one in modern America who doesn't have some experience of the kinds of things that Oprah creates yeah and this uh you you bring this idea of kind of consumer culture as being very from this idea of being part of a corporate um so in in the case of Oprah why does Oprah promote consumption and what does uh in her perspective what does consumption do for uh I don't know what to call them but I guess the participant yeah I mean you know I think the thing that I had to think about a lot is that there's um yeah on the one hand I was so fortunate because Oprah talks about everything there's very few nouns onto the son that I'm that entered her vocabulary on the other hand she would literally take the adverse view of everything that I do so on the question of consumption I'm gonna first say what she would say And then I'll say what I would say. I would always be fair to that. Oprah, the way in which I've consumption is the act of creativity. It's an articulation of-- it's just another mode through which the individual can find their particular expression. And there's to her absolutely nothing worrisome about consumer culture itself. There is no consumer culture. There's only the self. So there are worrisome things that people do. They gain credit card debt. They spend rather than relate. They just have many, many shows about addictive shopping and about problematic finances and G.S. kind of gurus, like Suzy Arvman who come on and help women in those contexts. But for her consumption is a neutral category. And obviously, my own position on that is-- it's useful and neutral insofar as labels a practice. But I don't see it ultimately as neutral in that for me. Oprah, however, she may problematize if I say, oh, sometimes you girls go too far with the way that you spend. There's no question that Oprah that's spending is a clear good in the articulation of the self. And that means spending everything from designing a foyer to picking out the right books for your own self-education. And I think that what I want to point out there is that that's something that we all largely agree with. We live in a society for which to talk about the problems of consumption is something that will always be an article about popular journals. But most people agree with Oprah that it's reasonable to just go spend money as a part of your own self-articulation. But as we know, as historians, that's a, a pretty recent idea. So consumer practice and consumerism is a way of understanding yourself as a pretty new idea. But secondly, it's also one that carries with it a lot of problematic relationships to the origin of goods, but also to the idea of the self that is the consumer. And I think that's the space where I welcome both theologians, ethicists, other kinds of thinkers' answer. I just really wanted to describe that Oprah's world, our world, is a world where buying is the solution to everything. There's just nothing that you come to be a political activism or family maintenance or relational struggle or beauty issues. Doesn't matter. Give me an issue. The first way, if you Google it, that's going to come to, is going to be about somehow, you know, expending cash to do it and buying either a service or a good. And I wanted to think through that as being so it's such a kind of a wrap idea. We can't get around it. And as something that we have-- anyone who talks about the religious now has got to take that into account. And I want to emphasize here that I am very conscious of the way in which there are always critiques. And we saw an Occupy Wall Street and the involvement of religious people in Occupy Wall Street. This is not denied that there are people out there saying, gosh, maybe we've gotten ourselves into trouble here. Because I want to acknowledge that at the same time that I want to point to the way that there is, even within that, as we all know, you cannot argue your way out of consumer culture at this point. You could never-- to limit consumer spending would be the most impossible thing any political leader could ask us to do. And I want to think about that as just a presumption of how we engage. Another very important part of kind of what Oprah represents is the splitter, this dichotomy between religion versus spirituality. I'm wondering if you could give both her perspective and then your perspective on this about how would she define these terms for her? What is the purpose of spirituality versus the purpose of religion? How do these interact within people's lives? Yeah, that was, again, one of the first things that drew me to her because when I was watching her show almost at first, that was in the '90s. And that's when she was switching to this change her life television where she was really incorporating a lot more, talk about spirituality in her show, due to a lot of personal circumstances in her own life. But also, as I try to talk about the book, she's mapping on the larger patterns of change in the broader popular culture, where I would say spirituality entered the American mainstream popular culture in a very new way in the '90s. But for Oprah, spirituality is a category, again, and I think it's very familiar to those of us who study it, which is it is a space of freedom in her mind. It is a space where people can connect to what she would say their best self through an acknowledgement of both disempowerment and empowerment. So spirituality is kind of a vague categorization for our freedom to find our relationship to the cosmos. And that relationship, that really is just something bigger than our self, as she says over and over again, is and should be as unpoliced as possible through that. It should be a space where you acquire an exploration of multiplicity. Now, religion for her is the antithesis that is a structured relationship to that. I mean, it's not exactly that. The antithesis, it's just a structured version of the same thing. So religions tell you, oh, we know this is her version. We know what your best life looks like. We know what your relationship with a higher power should be. Here's what it is. Here's how to practice it through it. So for Oprah, the first is freedom. And the second is oppression. And she experiences-- and she particularly thought through a kind of light motif for a particular black church, male authority. She sees religion as a lot of, I would say, kind of post-colonial subjects do, as the hand of power kind of manipulates the more spiritually cognizant that is her and other people were oppressed from really fully expressing themselves. So she hates religion, loves spirituality. That said, she's been involved as people know in a variety of religious conflicts. She did briefly attend Jeremiah Wright's church. But that fell away pretty much by the late '80s. And she became very much her own her own hide and leader. I then would-- I just want to mark first that to me, she's very typical in her critique of religion and her support of spirituality. When you look at contemporary, both new age movements, but also any kind of non-denominated religious lives, evangelicals say a lot of the same things that Oprah does. So even people you wouldn't think of as being kind of on the spectrum of the new age share with Oprah this kind of anxiety about what, in olden days, you might have called ritualism, or the kind of popism of a certain form of religious authority. And you can see too in Oprah this kind of ghost and vestiges of anti-catalysis, anti-Islam, and anti-certain forms of Buddhism. All of these are-- any time that we see this inspector of, well, that kind of religion is really bad. You know, there's like a history of bigotry that falls behind it, and here, Oprah becomes the ideal Protestant subject, endlessly revelating, endlessly coming to the realization of her immediate now. The difference for her is that she's also incorporating all other kinds of religious stuff. She's picking up any book on the book, "Store Shelter" that appeals to her from, step about yoga, different-- they talk about the book. There's all these different sorts of new age leaders, the pastiche of the now, the processness of the city. And so I want to marker both as very prototypical of a kind of basic position we all have of wanting to be free of ideas of structure. But then the thing I also want to look at is the structures that then guide her idea of freedom. And in that, I think, obviously, those people who are interested in studying religions for which there are more structures would find her critique somewhat itself kind of crude. And I think about Thaba Mamou's work about Islam, and her anxiety of this sort of liberal view towards any kind of rule is an inhibition. Any kind of rule is an oppression. And Oprah is definitely someone who articulates that kind of liberalism. And therefore, in her descriptions of religion, I would say, becomes someone who is very much in the history of new religions, because any kind of proposal in your religion, you almost always make a full sweeping skill attack on everyone who's trying to do the same thing that you are and saying, no, I'm the real. I'm the real. I'm spear at the rest of them are religion. So I kind of want to mark her as being prototypical, indicative of a lot of patterns in the study of religion. But also, I would say the problematic way for me, in which language of spirituality is so deeply tied to the history of capital and capital is on, and seems to collude pretty well unsurprisingly with notions of the marketplace. Yeah. I want to kind of follow up on this, because so earlier you mentioned that Oprah's guru is in. I'm wondering-- she brings in a lot of these characters that really represent a wide spectrum of thoughts and ideas that echo each other, but they're not really based on the same idea. So how would you say she's able to navigate both kind of being this individualized spirit, as she calls herself, but also then, what is the role of these gurus, like Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, and all these people she surrounds herself with? What role do they play in the oprification, I guess? Oh, yeah. I'm going to put it. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's kind of two images I love. I mean, for people who haven't seen the show, but maybe know, I want to give two images. What I want to just-- maybe these are even more far-flung from people who are listening. Their image. One is, give the figure of Harvey Weinstein, who's ahead of Muramack Studios. It's this independent movie studio. And I'm going to throw the image of him and the here, and I'm going to throw the image of Bill Gates in the air. So two very different kinds of figure. Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, and Harvey Weinstein have a head of movie studio. Both of those men are-- I would argue kind of brilliant at their work for different reasons. But one of the key ways, when you kind of read stuff about them, because one of the things I did in researching Oprah in particular is I read a lot of work about, I wanted to read a lot of stuff about corporate leaders, kind of business. The way MBAs are trained now to think of themselves as leaders, because Oprah had taught us on leadership, and they're with Western, and I kind of wanted to think through, kind of business people talk about this. The thing that we would call kind of charismatic authority, or kind of the preacher type, and then secondly, I read a lot about, kind of create, create a kind of artist, and how artists understand the idea of other people. And what we find when you look at something like Bill Gates or Harvey Weinstein, is that their genius is twofold. One of their geniuses is that they have some basic skill, an eye for a very particular particular thing. And in the case of Bill Gates, obviously, this is technological ability. Harvey Weinstein is sort of a legendary film critic. He does a ton of about movies. He just is gifted from a young age, just like consume them and knew a lot about them. But that is not enough. Like any kind of, that's just being a nerd. What makes you a great corporation, a good leader of a corporation, is your ability to incorporate, and to absorb, and I would say, people have enough humility to recognize the possibility of someone else to brighten your star. And to know that the more you incorporate, the more that you're elaborating, you're not diminished, you're elaborated. And obviously, that's a careful dance. And as you and I know, like many a sectarian split has happened because, you know, a given preacher didn't realize how much more popular someone else's vision of the religion would be. But when it comes to corporate structuring, the best corporations are very good at not becoming a monomaniacal, but at including competing forms of thought that you can recognize as similar. So what Oprah did really brilliantly is that she, every time she encountered a consultant that worked for her and made sense of something for her, she said, "Ah, not only did she really, this is people always talk about coverage of their say, "Oh, she thinks that what works for her works for you, that's true." But what she also knew is that what is going to work for her, she has to also get some semblance of control over. Because her product is herself and her transformation. And if somebody else can take over and name her transformation, that becomes a competitive to her. So she met Dr. Phil in Emerylla, Texas when she was undergoing a lawsuit for having said that she'd never eat beef again and beefed your spell. And so a group of cattle ensued her and she met up with Dr. Phil and he really, he's up from recommended him as a kind of counselor for her to talk to as she was dealing with this very difficult time. And she, it was really great because she not only met him and he gave her and she never had gone to therapy before and she really liked him. But she could tell he had an ability and you know, I'd say the kind of the Craven reading. And there's a lot of kind of Craven readers of Oprah out there would say, she didn't want him to go on the road saying, "I work with Oprah and therefore be coming bigger than Oprah." That's a Craven reading. I would say it's always a combination of those. She met him, thought he was awesome and said, "I think I'm going to incorporate you into what I do." Because you and I, we share the same values. So with Oprah, it's always the corporate, it's Harvey Weinstein meeting Lars von Trier and saying, "You and I have the same values." And if you can put Google image, Lars von Trier and Harvey Weinstein, those are two very different kinds of people. But if you can say the power of a corporation to say, there's really no difference at all. Like we have the same vision. You don't know it maybe, but we do. Now, as a scholar of religion, we're always endlessly trying to track diversity and recognize celebrate diversity. But the thing I always want to emphasize about Oprah and I would say, particularly the kinds of religion that's surviving in now are those that actually render diversity, say, under a kind of corporate auspice. So Oprah invites all of these kind of different kinds of people, all these different views about how to take care of yourself, make your best life. But she says to her audience, "See, we're all really the same." We all get the O, and that O seal approval means it's safe for you to use. And I would say that that's where, you know, if you track a lot of Oprah blogs, some of them will note that some of her, you know, ministers or sort of ministries are people who really, if you've followed the mom lots of things, might actually be dissenting from her. So if he takes Susie or Mom, for example, this financial advisor, there's a lot that Susie or Mom talks about that. That doesn't really fully coordinate with the Oprah vision of consumption. But they coordinate enough, and more importantly, it mattered to Susie enough to collude with that, that corporate force, that they kind of, you know, rubbed over their differences and just faced forward together. And I think Oprah's genius has been in recognizing not merely that what's good for her is good for the world, but that her brand and herself is promoted through evading difference through appropriation. Yeah, you do this very well in the book too. tying everything together very well, a lot of dialogues that you wouldn't normally think of in the same conversation, but you do it very well. So thank you. I want to return you, you do have a chapter on this idea of the makeover as a social right. And, you know, from earlier speaking with you, it sounds like this is something you've kind of been mulling over for a long time. So I'm wondering if you could kind of, you know, delineate this for us. How does this makeover echo a religious right? It's really, you know, Christian, you want some of these things. I want to say the reason that I chose Oprah, Oprah, it was almost like candy from a baby. It's so easy. And then you see, I just feel like, you know, and I think students who are working on dissertations, it's like they're often staring you right in the face, but you often want to make things harder than they need to be. And I think often scholars do that. We're like working, working, and what I ended up seeing with Oprah as I was watching the show every day and recording it. And after I was like, oh, no, it really is. It's the state. It happens the same way every time. And the shock of that, the shock of the way the TV is successful in part. So the first thing to say is that television itself and a couple people have written on the office, television itself is just one massive ritual. I mean, it doesn't matter anything that anybody who's listening has watched, they can say, you know, it doesn't have it's Grey's Anatomy or in the biggest loser or even a PBS documentary. I mean, they all have formats of expectation. And, you know, Henry Jenkins, who's a great theorist of media at MIT, he's written a lot about this and just the kind of expectations that we have in any given consumption of media. So the question for the scholar religion is we have to find also something that's been transacted. So it can't just be, I know that in a given Grey's Anatomy episode, a song is going to soar us for people's struggle through the romantic and medical difficulties. It also has to be that in that process that something has been exchanged. And I think what's so great about the Oprah show is unlike just a kind of melodrama where you're given a single narrative, a kind of allegory of exchange. In the Oprah show, it's actually happening on the show itself, where until people haven't seen the show or experienced any of Oprah's products, she is great at collecting sad story and then trying to intercede in those sad stories with kind of small bits of difference. So, you know, let's say there'll be an episode about, you know, teachers who give it all at school. And so maybe people attend to the bunch of letters because people were constantly writing Oprah about people that they loved and admired. And Oprah would do a show where she said, "Treat teachers get makeovers." And so she would bring in a teacher and the sort of, the ritual would be that there'd be some kind of montage about the excellence of that person, their family life, maybe a little bit, how much they'd give to children and kind of stark images of material lack in the process. Like, maybe they spend their own money on markers, so the students have markers, so they don't have any chalk in their class, and so they do a bake sale for chalk. And you kind of get the sense of, oh, they're just, they'd be even more amazing if they just had a little bit more material good. And so Oprah enters in and not only gives recognition to their little lives in the plot's big experience, but also then makes their lives really big by connecting it to this larger community of teachers who struggle. And the answer that Oprah has is that opraification becomes both the testimony itself. I confess my difficulty. And then Oprah gives back the gift of twofold. One, serial things, the yelchok or books or, you know, a vacation, but also the recognition of Oprah's self that your suffering is seen. And then it's tied to a broader set of values that Oprah reiterates about women, about giving back to the world, about right community. And so setting up these women is kind of ideal subjects. Now what this then nits to two is this is, so that's kind of the episode that people are probably most familiar with. You go to Oprah, you get a car. But what I also link the two is there's very few Oprah episodes where you don't see some form of makeover because even in shows that are just interviews, interviews with celebrities with laypeople, even in shows where she's just talking about like the worst day of your life. She is also in those episodes doing a makeover and a transaction. So there's one very kind of episode I didn't write about in the book, but it's incredibly painful one. A woman in Virginia loses her daughter when she's 18 years old. She is a young beauty queen who is seen as being sort of delight the light of her mother's life. She is one morning found dead and naked by a river. Obviously brutally killed in some way. It's very vague in the show. She has just one earring stud earring left in her ear. These are the details that are told in the montage. Then you see this woman who's now brought to say to the mother and she's sitting there with Dr. Philan Oprah and she's been grieving for 10 years the death of this daughter. And the audience is listening as Dr. Phil now begins to interrogate this woman and saying, "You know, would your daughter want you to grieve this way? Wouldn't your daughter be ashamed of you? Why would you not want to become better for her?" And as a viewer, you're kind of offended because he's been so aggressive to this woman who literally maintains a shrine of his daughter from. Is that changed? A single thing that you see her stroking her daughter's beauty gowns in the montage. And now you see Philan just up in her face. I mean, very aggressive. And the woman's crying and saying, "Oh no, she'd be very ashamed of me." And And at one point, Dr. Phil says, do you not know that the length that you grieve is not relevant to the love that you have for your daughter, that there's no equation, that the length of your grief does not measure the love of your daughter. And this is a revelation for the woman, she says, I don't know, I didn't know that. You got a commercial break, come back, and the woman now kind of write it, has used Kleenex says to the audience, you know, I was going to go home today. I'd set the goal of plumbing to Oprah this year. And I had said to myself that would come tell Oprah my story, and I would go home and commit suicide. Now I'm not going to, because now I know that I need to stop grieving in order to continue to love my daughter. So the audience has now experienced the full tumult of a terrible story. They have watched a woman confess really awful details from that story. We've seen an intercession from a kind of authority who says, here's another way to live. She has revelation. The audience experiences a very familiar, this has happened many times before, where the right thing has been said, the transformation has taken place. No goods have exchanged hands. There's no good in this episode, no products. But you feel kind of relief to the world is right at it. You can get over terrible suffering, you can survive. And it's all the exchange of both the repetition of it. You've seen this many times before, but it's also a kind of regifting. You know, again, that person will not go home empty handed. They'll go home with some kind of axiom or idea. And I think that that's something that should be so familiar, even if you've never seen Oprah show, you've seen shows that do things like this. We've seen ways in which the dark side of human nature is exposed in really kind of grotesque ways. Why do we have to hear such a bit details of a woman's death, a young woman's death, in order to feel better ourselves? Well, that's just how it's done, we all say to ourselves. But I kind of want to point out that way. And it doesn't matter if it's a ESPN class exactly a mentoring, which always has the same bits in it, or behind the music on BH1. All of the kind of the same bits and tropes of revelation and collapse, collapse and revelation. And over here just makes it into this very grand ritual. And I, in the book, talk about its relationship, it's kind of wander patterns in evangelical ritualization. And other things like that. But the main thing I just want to point out is that in all of those in that process, you notice that we've never really talked about why that young woman was murdered. Or what is, how do we think about death? What is the nature of grief? The larger abstract questions of this terrible tragedy are not brought up. What is brought up is substance, survival, relief, and the self-salved for another couple days, or at least until the next episode. I'm wondering if you could talk about the role of Oprah, the italicized Oprah. As being-- she's a minority in many ways, both her race or gender, how has she been able to become uniquely accessible or uniquely universal? And you talk about her in this chapter on preaching. You set the stage with this scene after 9/11. And she is the representative-- how is it that Oprah can be the representative for America? Yeah. I think it's-- [INAUDIBLE] There's a way, which is, as that question Christian, love to hear everyone else in the world give their answer to that. But the big side of the big side of the big side of the big side, I love to hear what other-- I thought about this project being ethnography. I decided against that very staunchly for several reasons. But I really wanted to just arrest my eyes to her, to what she made. But I think in the chapter, I really try to posit a couple things about what I think she represents. And I try to use evidence from both her own corpus, but also from various critical responses to her. But I also want to say that I think this is a kind of uncomfortable subject. I talk how it Oprah represents. It can be offered for people, because one of the first things that I want to say is that the fact of her being an African-American woman is so incredibly important to her success in this historical moment. And I try to relate that book to a couple of different strands of history. One is a kind of post civil rights exhaustion, and the sense is by I think a broader white public that they don't want to be told what they've done wrong anymore. Now they just want to feel good about the world, and the quality that the '60s brought. They don't want to think about what we've called the fact of segregation. They just want to celebrate their juror's segregation being over and enter into the light of a new post-racial world. Now the academics and mamas are all whincing at that post-racial world. And the segregation-- OK, well, but meanwhile, Oprah, I think, represents those-- A, I kind of hope. C, we're done with all those bad problems, but also B, a much older, a much more archaic familiarity between, I'd say, a white, middle-class public and African-American service people, and the way in which the African-American woman in particular has represented nurturance and love and spiritual care throughout American history. And here is an icon, the image of Mami is one that comes to people's minds. Obviously, Oprah is no Mami. She owns everything that she surveys. She is the capitalist. She is in charge. But there is a way in which I think she serves very much a kind of spiritual purity that one-- that we have historically described to Black women because of the particular advantage of suffering that they've had. Now, at the same time, Oprah herself denies all the time being described merely as Black and/or woman. She wants those categories. She has brought a lot about them. She's made movies about them. But she is also wary. She is, I would say, very much a kind of-- what I would call-- herself a kind of a post-regum kind of racial actor. She really does want identity to not only be determinative as she says, not as anyone else says. She's herself said she's, again, things like affirmative action, for example. So I would say that she represents also another kind of long mythology, which is the kind of racial alger up by your bootstraps. The fantasy of anyone can make it. And this is her own endless invocations of walking on a dirt road in Mississippi and segregated Mississippi. And then now she's this incredibly wealthy woman and sort of represents success in many ways. I take third-- so first, is it kind of a longstanding racial imagery. Second is one oriental radical idea of American capital of success. But third, I would just say, is that we live in an age-- and then the kind of lemon more was so powerful to me, because those of you might not remember it. She was at the head. They had at the Yankee Stadium, they brought all these religious leaders, so people who represented specific denominations and sex. But then she was the overarching leader of that. For me, that was just a perfect metonym for the religious now. But whatever the particularity people may act about, I go this church, that church, this-- then the end opera is actually the ultimate religious leader, because she incorporates all of them into herself. And I relate that to an image that we have in the mind of 1893 in the world's fair. And then now we have, instead of a kind of obviously Protestant pastor, which is what happened in 1892, we have Oprah, who's the celebrity pastor. And here I think celebrity becomes all so important. And then we live in an era where you're really not going to be successful in public life unless you've developed in Cultivated or of celebrity. And I think we see that in our politicians. I think we see-- I think-- I feel like I would love to call the Romney Campaign. If Romney would only write an incredibly confessional memoir, if he'd written one a year ago, he'd have a much better running chance. We actually talked about everything from his marriage to being in the struggle of his own Mormon path, which is actually fascinating, and his family's own genealogical relationship to Mormon. It's fascinating. But he doesn't do that. It's one of the many reasons why he doesn't quite get, I think, the contemporary media situation, where if you cannot learn how to turn your story into a commodity and make yourself, therefore, into a kind of circulating commodity, you're not going to be successful. And Oprah, here when she's standing at the Yankee Stadium as the leader of that prayer, she wasn't just representing-- because she has no relationship to New York City or to the 9/11 bombing. She was in Chicago. What does she have to do with it? Well, it's just to do with this, that she represents simultaneously the American sense of hope for the future, because we're always going to survive economically spiritually, because we have this sort of internal and less ambition to move forward. But also a sense that there is no rivets between us, that we can be incorporated into holes. That whatever our own diversity is, the mass number of diverse spaces, there is a kind of ideal American hole. And that could be any number of races, religions, and grief, and Oprah is-- just like one could say that any given time, Julia Roberts or Charlize Theron may stand in for the beautiful face. Oprah stands in for an America, like the American, the best that America has to offer. And in that is obviously the strongest trend of spirituality, but is also this racial and gendered and political past? This is a good segue to the epilogue, which-- you're doing a lot more in the book here, but I don't want to take your poll after noon. But in the epilogue, you basically outline the steps of oprification. And you explain this in relation to Obama and how you talk about the oprification of Obama. So what are these steps we take? And how did Obama do this? Yeah, I appreciate you doing this. Funny. When I was first working on this book, I was writing this book when I was-- Fortunately, I was really, really lucky to get this great fellowship at Princeton. And I wrote that year. And that was the year that was 2008, 2009. So I wrote this thing that I wrote to them for this blog, The Imminent Frame. And they were trying to get responses to Obama's being elected in January. I written. I was sitting on the subway in New York, we always do a bunch of things in New York one day, and I was just sitting there, I literally stayed on a train line through the end, and the Bronx are back riding these notes, because I wanted to write something for this blob that it expressed. I mean, I think like a lot of people, I took some pleasure in Obama's election, but I also, I would say, maybe more than some people felt a lot of anxiety and just sort of disturbance about what had brought him to that office. You know, I can say, I can say personally, that is, he is truly a great man, he's a very thoughtful human being, but because I had some ability to say that about him as a person, I also wanted to say, but what have we have done to him, what he has done to himself, is a process, and the process by which he's too strong, like our chanting ideal, is to me somewhat worrisome. So I started writing these notes, and I went to my friend's house in Brooklyn for the night, and I read this to him, I was so excited, I was like, oh, come on, and I finished reading it, and he looked at me, you are such a killjoy. You are so hysterical. What are you doing? This is the happiest day in American history. And I think it's because, you know, for me, the opification of Obama is about the strategies by which we produce agents of change, which I want to note to me is not the same thing as producing change. And so to me, it mattered to go through the different ways that I saw Obama being so ideal, and I mean, I do everything kind of, from more joking things, like, you know, you have to have a name with an O and it, because you know, it's good for chanting, "Oh, Bob, I'm an opren, but also you need to have a dog." And the kind of ways in which, you know, like you too. So I kind of went to the joking things that they were connected by both "Opren of Bob," but also the more, to say the more substantial things about having a story of suffering that you yourself were never victim to, but we're always constantly willing to trot out as your access to victims, to a kind of religious ecumenism that was Christian at its center, certainly Christian, but variable and couldn't incorporate anything. To being able, I think, a passage, so one of the things I write about is how, you know, you are interested in, you know, you support the gay causes, but you may ultimately not stand up for gay politics. And I sort of take the point that you have to kind of be the middle that makes the mass, and how does one become the middle, given that we're all our own peculiar people. How do you become appropriate for the masses? And what I try to identify in that is how Obama made a very peculiar and strange person that he is in the someone totally palatable and universal. And on one hand, I say that, I do think that that's fairly, you know, from what natural to him, but I think the part of it that is indicative of what's strange is, one is I think that he came to office, and I think we all can say, whether whatever your politics are, that the politics of campaigning are so different than the strategies of legislation, and we see the struggles that Obama has had to actually be an agent of change, and I want to make an argument that the ways that we make ourselves so normative and middle may actually make it harder to be the leaders of difference. And I say this with all respect, to him and to all intimate Romney, and to anyone who attempts to be right now the middle of America. I think that the claiming of the middle actually restricts your ability to be, I would use language of truly revolutionary, queer, different, dissenting, and I think maybe the best icon of this is Michelle Obama herself, who is a wonderful, fascinating, tough-minded woman, and has been made and has chosen to be made in the public eye, is basically a series of j-crew outfits advocating weight loss for American teenagers and youth, and trying to help military moms. Both are reasonable causes, but they are unsurprisingly very domestic, very embodied causes, for a woman who is a fiercest intelligence, and I promise you can speak on any political issue with incredible ability and dexterity, but has been largely rendered a fashion play, and that transformation, what makes her palatable, is to me a very fascinating subject and a site for both, I think, interest, because maybe this is the way certain kinds of change can come about, but also I think occasional disappointment and despair. Katherine, if you don't mind, I'd like to leave the book for a moment, and the reason is because you've also done this wonderful project frequencies, which seems related, because I feel like the Oprah Book could have been one of the entries on this website. I'm wondering if you could just describe what frequencies is for those who don't know, and maybe how that project came about, and what your purposes or aims, or what you were hoping to achieve with that. Yeah. You know, it's funny, again, the mark that the kind of certain ideas can be. I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in this series of events at the Social Science Research Council, which is an amazing nonprofit agency that basically supports, exactly what it title suggests, but it tends to support working with social sciences, which I am not a social scientist, but at the time, a wonderful scholar of American rules named Courtney Bender, another great scholar of American rules, and Omaric Roberts, were leading a group on spirituality and political change, and they invited me and a couple other people to come and meet and talk about just the state of thinking about the relationship between politics and spirituality. At those meetings, I guess they were wonderful, but I think a couple of us in those meetings felt like, we're not really making a change here, we're not really doing, we should be doing more with this. We had a grant that Courtney and Omar had won from the four foundations, and the reason that we felt this frustration was nothing in the conversations. It was just our own sense that through this conversation we realized, spirituality is just this word that we all use, and we don't really know what it means, but we do know what it means, right? I know what I see it, and I know what people are doing when they're invoking it, and we just kind of decided to, by self and a colleague, John Lardis-Modern, and Franklin and Marshall decided to, we started shooting around, what would be a way that you could kind of give a definition of spirituality? And we both kind of locked out to this idea of a curiosity cabinet, or trying to think about the ways in which spirituality is always labeled, first and foremost, as it individuated, so that people could do whatever they want and market a spiritual. But we also thought, but we know he and I, and other people, we know that there's actually pretty a lot of consistency in the way, people, even though they claim it's like endlessly diverse and weird and different, there's also some consistencies, and so we added this word genealogy, so we said it was going to be frequencies, a genealogy of spirituality. And the idea was to sort of try to pick up on frequencies, that is, pick up on ways that people talk about spirituality in the world, and talk about it really specifically, while at the same time trying to maybe note, and this was going to be the second phase of the project, the ways in which they're patterned in their relationship, that was the word genealogy, the ways in which you'd consistently see, you know, patterns. And so we ended up, it became this whole thing, it was this beautiful website I have to say. I think the pleasure I take in it, so we now have 100 entries, we post 100 entries over 100 days, of a variety of things from like the Hamids hair to John Cage. The entries are amazing, and they're very diverse. We asked friends of ours and scholars, people that we just knew were interested in the category of spirituality. We just prompted them right about spirituality, and the only expectation we had, you had to be really specific, and it had to be an object or a thing or an idea. So one of the entries, which got a ton of hits, was called Disappearance, and it's a piece by Roger Friedland about women's pubic hair, and he takes up kind of thinking through why it is that women remove pubic hair now, and it's brilliantly linked to the study of spirituality. So it was that kind of wild diversity, thinking through different particularities, and the ways in which the language of spirituality, it became attached to it. And we were able to afford, because of this great, I think it was a great web designer who did a cool job, and so the idea had been that we post these things, and then we'd start doing a kind of genealogy that has started noticing what were the shared invocations? So the number of entries that, for example, mentioned William James, is crazy, like a lot of them talk about William James, which is maybe unsurprising, but at the same time what we wanted to maybe do is try to figure out, okay, so at the end of all this, what is spirituality? What is its mechanics? What's its meaning? And that second phase has only just begun. The first phase was to gathering these entries, and noticing, and I'd say the thing that was the most fascinating test, as we got them, Christian, is how many people took it as an opportunity to express spiritual feeling. And I will say again, that was very surprising to me. It was less surprising to John. You can just see the consistency of my stories, is my total, I think, poly-ion opposition of the world, because I just didn't know, I kind of thought people would submit more, like, encyclopedia entries, you know, like, here's this category. Here's the people that wrote beautiful things, where they really, I would say, confessed spiritual relationships to things. Now that was not what I expected at all, but it was amazing, and I think it really does testify to, to a very consistent way, in which spiritual, even by scholars and geeks, you know, that really is a category that evokes for people a powerful feeling. So, right now we're in a phase where people are responding to that, two frequencies on the eminent frame, so we've asked a bunch of scholars to post responses to it. And that's been really great and interesting too, and, like, some great criticism, some great support, just a lot of, because I think the site itself has elicited all the same kinds of responses that spirituality does. Even as it was meant to be a sort of, like, medical thing, it also becomes, interestingly, an artifact of spirituality. Yeah, and this is great. I don't know if you've seen this article by Michael Altman yet, but he talks about the aesthetics of the website itself. And, you know, you mentioned yourself, and it really is true. The website is just beautiful, and at the end of his response to it, he says, "It just looks like spirituality." And I think, I think, I think it's true, there's something about the aesthetics of the website that almost makes it a part of this thing we call spirituality. Yeah, you know, I totally agree with you. I read that piece by Altman and I so agree with him right away. I was like, why? I don't know. It just shows something about my own unconscious that I just, I didn't pick up on that for some time. And then I was like, right, we have created this highly modernistic aesthetic that in its sort of attempts at purification really do match that way in which spirituality is always attempting to find some higher ground away from the fray. And indeed, and I think in, I want to point out that to me that's, I loved Altman's persona. I loved that kind of thing and that's made to me the great pleasure of this work, which is, you know, you make these things, you push them in the world and, you know, for example, I, one of the things that I took a lot of pleasure from is that a woman wrote me saying that she was teaching my book in a class of feminist theology, which again is something I would never have thought about. But then she said, you know, your book in my class got really negative responses. People were really angry about Oprah. They think she's really the deaf-nell to theology. I mean, and to me that's great. I would never have imagined that that could be, but of course, that's what you do if you can try to render an object strongly enough that then it could be something that gets punched around a lot and used in that way. And I think that's what frequencies is because of it. It's an object that has, you know, it's structure is really lovely. That was just really a great collaboration with this designer, but also the entries were so high, a lot of integrity too. And because of that, precisely because of their integrity, they're now available to be under a lot of scrutiny. And all this piece is great. We just, there's a post on the frequency, I'm going to pray right now, but I wrote some of a cutch-in, it's kind of a famous, you know, critic of the study of religion. He just tears at the part. He just says, what are these people doing? This is the end. But he just, because he, he goes the next stage of all of it and says, yeah, it's spiritual. What are you doing? You're in religious studies. To me, that's the grounds of great, great debate. I love that. That makes me just really happy. So, but again, it's the kind of thing that when we were doing it, we were just sort of like close to the grindstone with it. And we just want to gather a lot of weird stuff in a space. And I think our kind of metaconscience was dimmer than we probably should have been in its production. But. Well, thank you. I think it was a great project. And then it, you know, obviously has sparked a lot of conversation, which, that's the important part, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Catherine, you know, we've taken a lot of time. I don't want to spend too much more. But if you, if you don't mind, we'd love to hear about what you're working on now, what kind of things you have planned for the future or maybe what other surprises and randomness you've stumbled upon. Thanks. Yeah. I'm kind of right now in the three projects I'd say. One, I'm working on a book-aligned study of a fundamentalist preacher from the early twentieth century, who was really involved with the formation of this pamphlet series called the Fundamentals, which is where we get that word, Fundamentalism. And he was kicked out of the ministry, the Presbyterian Church, because he was accused of Sodomay. And so it's kind of a Ted Hagrid case, I heard years earlier. And I'm using it as a way to talk about the relationship between religion and sexuality. So this is my kind of homage to more historical work and a return to that. And it's really great. It's amazing. It's really rich story, very sad story, but a really rich one. The second thing I'm working on is that piece. It's kind of like run away from me. It's gotten so big, but it is intended for an edited volume that my colleague Sally Prommie is working on. On sensory cultures of religion, and I'm writing for that a study of the history of the office cubicle. And it's history, which is a really interesting one. And especially as the audience around us one company called the Herman Miller Company, which is a furniture company, which people listen to, and PR maybe they've heard about like, Aaron Cher. It's a very fancy modernist furniture company, but it also is one of the companies we ascribe with the origin of the office cubicle. And so I'm writing about that because the innovation of the office cubicle is perhaps unsurprisingly and predictably given my interest really associated to both the literal, denominational history of Southwestern Michigan and the Dutch reform church that's so predominant there. But also the person who designed the cubicle had a lot of really spiritual ambition for it. And thought it was far from being the spiritless cage. And thought it was going to be like the center of new, kind of new, monastic enlightenment. And as we know, it didn't turn out so well for Dilbert and everyone else. But anyway, so it's a really weird story. And then third, my kind of long run, and we'll probably never have a bite die writing this book, because I'm ready to have a history, a religious history of American happiness and kind of thinking about how the idea of happiness is just so big right now in psychology and say just psychology philosophy. I remember you looked at books in the happiness. And I want to think about that category as a part of American religious history and the relationship between religious freedom and concepts of happiness. And that's like epic. And I right now teach at Yale currently, and there's a man who preceded me in my position named Cindy Allstrom who wrote this man book, "Hall of the Religious History of the American People." And he spent much of his career working on it. It's like kind of comfort me. It's like my Allstrom. But I'll work on it forever. I don't know if it'll ever come to an end. But if you ever come across maybe my happiest Christian, I take it. I'm just, I'm gathering all materials. I won't talk. I won't talk recommendations. Okay. Great. Well, yeah, we definitely look forward to all that. Hopefully, when those arrive, you would join us again. So. I'd love to. This has been so much fun. Christian, thank you. Yeah. Thanks again, Catherine. It's been wonderful talking to you. And, yeah, again, her new book is called Oprah, The Gospel of an Icon. Thanks. Thanks for listening today. Now I was Catherine Lofton from Yale University about her new book, Oprah, The Gospel of an Icon, which came out from University of California Press in 2000.