Thanks for stopping by: I appreciate your curiosity about who I am. I've written about many different topics over the years, but all of my work reflects my own passionate curiosity about a single issue.
I'm interested in the language ordinary people use to talk about ethical issues. We inherit this language. It has a backstory. And I'm fascinated by that backstory. I think that knowing a little bit about our own cultural history can help any of us to become more conscious of the cultural pressures we are facing today. That can help us to make better decisions about the urgent problems we face as parents, or in our work-life balance, or as citizens in a nation whose democratic traditions are increasingly at risk.
Consider this: We all know that everyone is "culturally situated." We know that everyone's thinking is shaped by cultural context. It's easy enough to see the influence of cultural context on thinkers a thousand years ago, or even a century ago. But it's a lot harder to recognize how all those same pressures influence our own thinking. Each of my books sets out to explore some aspect of those pressures—especially the pressures that wake us up at three in the morning. There are ethical issues that have no easy-and-obvious resolution. Because there are no easy answers, these issues put remarkable pressure on language. It's hard to find the right words to use to ask the right questions about tough issues. Money. Sex. Relationships. Children. Success. Religion.
Religion? Good heavens, there's an issue. Religion. After 9/11, I realized I had to write about Christian fundamentalism, which I saw as an even more dangerous threat than parallel developments within Islam.
When it's hard to find words for what's haunting us, we turn to metaphor. We may not be aware of doing so, because metaphor is intrinsic to language. It's everywhere. And so it can be invisible. But as a literary critic, I'm trained to spot it. These buried metaphors tend to have the most colorful backstory of all.
PRESS BIO: Catherine M. Wallace PhD is a literary critic, cultural historian, and Christian humanist. Her seven-volume "Confronting Fundamentalism" series traces how Christian's politically powerful cultural symbolism has been hijacked and weaponized by a dangerous alliance among religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, and economic reactionaries seeking their own self-interest. Issue by issue, Dr. Wallace's little books will help critical thinkers—religious and secular alike—to construct a religiously-neutral common ground on which to defend widely-shared moral values and American democratic ideals. Her TEDx talk and first chapter of each book can be found at CatherineMWallace.com. Email her at cate@catherinemwallace.com