Departmental News
Maddux Receives GRB Award
Assistant professor Kristy Maddux recently was awarded a summer grant from the General Research Board (GRB) to support her research on the relationships between religion and citizenship as manifested in popular culture texts.
The GRB award will assist Maddux in the completion of her book entitled Civic Faith: Christian Media and the Construction of Civic Engagement.
This project analyzes the depictions of civic engagement in contemporary Christian-themed mass media, including the films The Passion of the Christand Amazing Grace, the novels Left Behind and The da Vinci Code, and the television show, 7th Heaven. It shows how each text offers a unique model of civic engagement for contemporary Christians, a significant contribution to a political era that has come to recognize Christians as an important political demographic. Moreover, the project argues that these constructions of civic participation are always dependent on particular cultural ideologies of gender and acceptable gender behavior.
