
Professor Theodore Louis Trost
Nominated Fellow, December 2021 - April 2022
Home Institution: University of Alabama
Biography
Theodore Trost is Professor of Religious Studies with a secondary appointment in New College at the University of Alabama. His interdisciplinary research interests include American religious history, ecumenism, religion in popular culture, songwriting, and biblical narrative.
He is the author of Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religious History (Harvard, 2002); editor of The African Diaspora and the Study of Religion (Palgrave, 2007); and coeditor of Teaching African American Religions (Oxford, 2005); The Development of the Church: The Principle of Protestantism and Other Historical Writings of Philip Schaff (Wipf and Stock, 2017); and Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture (Edinburgh, 2020), to which he also contributed the chapter '"Imagine There's No Countries": John Lennon's Politics of Love.' Additional recent writings include the book chapter 'Randy Newman's Satirical Vision and the Myth of America' (2019) and the article 'Theo-political Discourse and Rock 'n' Roll in the Reagan Era' (2018).
Project: Theology as a Political and Commercial Discourse in an Age of Consumerism
This project engages crucial texts in the areas of "public theology" and "political theology" toward a consideration of the ways in which religious rhetoric is employed by popular songsmiths to advance political critique, engender loyalty, and generate communities of common purpose.