Revealer SoCal: Make sure to catch Mark Dery‘s keynote address to the “Sacred and the Profane” conference at San Diego State University this Thursday, March 20. “In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in ’70s Southern California.” In this lecture, equal parts personal essay and cultural critique, Dery–now a godless leftist–takes us on a Proustian flashback to his days as a teenage fundie–a Jesus Freak caught up in the “born-again” religious fervor that swept Southern California in the ’70s. Excavating the SoCal history of that mutant strain of ad-hoc Christianity that Harold Bloom calls “the American religion,” he’ll deliver a fire-and-brimstone critique of the paleoconservatism, flat-earth fundamentalism, and deep-dyed anti-intellectualism that have made San Diego, throughout much of its intellectual history, not only a theme-park mirage in the Desert of the Real (“America’s Finest City”) but a Mojave of the Mind.

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the “situated knowledges” and “lived experiences” of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes—to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the ‘Jesus People’ movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

Says Dery:

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted “Jesus” Neeley’s infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment…

When: 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where: Scripps Cottage /
English and Comparative Literature /
Arts and Letters 226 /
San Diego State University /
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020