Shaking the World for Jesus : Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture

Rating:
Summary: Good but flawed study
Review: Heather Hendershot does a wonderful job of reviewing Christian conservative media culture and some of what propels it. Her survey of Christian entertainment feels plausible enough that her conclusions are not unreasonable. However, I found her discussion of Evengelical attitudes toward sex incomplete and biased. The chapter, Holy Homosexuals, while interesting hardly belonged with the rest of the book. The other chapter dealing with sexuality only surveyed Focus on the Family publications. It ignored denominational publications - there must be some. I am still not convinced Focus on the Family is representative. These chapters felt like Evengelical books reviewing the beliefs of other religions: here are their beliefs and why they are wrong. Unfourtunately, the editor didn't strongly recommend removing or rewriting these chapters. It would have improved the insight and power of this book. Still, I enjoyed the book, and recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Good but flawed study
Review: Heather Hendershot does a wonderful job of reviewing Christian conservative media culture and some of what propels it. Her survey of Christian entertainment feels plausible enough that her conclusions are not unreasonable. However, I found her discussion of Evengelical attitudes toward sex incomplete and biased. The chapter, Holy Homosexuals, while interesting hardly belonged with the rest of the book. The other chapter dealing with sexuality only surveyed Focus on the Family publications. It ignored denominational publications - there must be some. I am still not convinced Focus on the Family is representative. These chapters felt like Evengelical books reviewing the beliefs of other religions: here are their beliefs and why they are wrong. Unfourtunately, the editor didn't strongly recommend removing or rewriting these chapters. It would have improved the insight and power of this book. Still, I enjoyed the book, and recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Academic Can't Shake It
Review: This book gets off to a pretty interesting start as Hendershot defines the world of evangelicals, who are much more numerous and integrated than fundamentalists, and describes their use of media to spread the word, either to each other or "non-born-agains." Unfortunately, this initially informative discourse soon becomes lost under extremely typical and unrewarding academic methods, in a book that claims to have interest for the general reader but has merely been constructed by a professor for the approval of a few other professors. (I can say this as an academic myself, coming from the same discipline as Hendershot.) All of the worst academic tendencies are here - excessive introductions and summaries, anemic cultural observations, name-dropping other obscure academics under a guise of corroborating evidence, disjointed chapters that likely originated as separate research projects, grand conclusions based on limited specific examples, and the obligatory application of obtuse theory (especially outdated feminism and cultural studies) to real-world phenomena.

The low point of the book is a suspiciously reference-deficient passage in chapter 3 in which Hendershot constructs the supposed inner thoughts of Christian teenage girls who have eating disorders, after personally interviewing not a single person in that demographic. This and the following chapter, dealing with gender and sexuality respectively, are loaded with preconceived notions that are propped up after the fact by a supposedly detached application of moribund and leaden bodies of theory, that would merely impress the limited number of other people who also write about those theories (a problem of epidemic proportions in academic writing). The final academic blunder here is the inability, or unwillingness, of a professor to write outside of the stiff but accepted structure - a few hundred pages of specific examples wrapped up in an obligatory conclusion that is merely yet another summary. This research by Hendershot takes an interesting topic and spends a lot of her time and yours summarizing the obvious but providing little of cultural or political value to the interested layperson. [~doomsdayer520~]