Dear Anthony,

Thanks for your excellent proposal! Consider it accepted. I believe it will fit in well in the area.

Please send a title, as well as your contact information and any A/V needs you have. I'll send you more information in the coming weeks.

Thank for the proposal!

David Schimpf, Marian University
Area Chair, Religion and Popular Culture, MPCA



Just before the end of Growing Pains, Kirk Cameron found Jesus, and in that finding of Jesus he has made a large body of work about what it means to be a Christian, over a wide variety of medium: the net, television, straight to video releases, and movies bought and paid for by Hollywood. Through a careful, anecdotal study of five texts: The Way of the Master encounters in West Hollywood, the film Fireproof, the last season of Growing Pains, the first Left Behind movie, and the straight to video movie The Miracle of the Cards, and auxiliary commentaries to these texts (blog entries, television appearances, magazine articles, internet forums, and the like), to discuss the rise of the evangelical right in the last 20 years.

Through these intertextual means, I hope to use Cameron as an example of how American Evangelical Protestants have historically used populist texts and technological innovation for their own means, and how this adaptation has mutated in an age of social networking, the free distribution of information, and an increasingly lack of trust in what is called the main stream media.

There is an intertwining between technology, the dissemination of media, and the protestant culture of the book. Using current research on copyright, book culture, ephemeral print, and digital media I want to use Cameron as a test case to discuss what it means to be a logophillic Christian in the midst of a post-literate age.