“The Subversive Prophetic Imagination: How the Arts (and Brueggemann) Can Help Us Navigate the Rise of Christian Nationalism” with Dr. Mary McCampbell

Doors 6:30 pm, Lecture 7:00 pm

In these painful, divisive times, it is helpful to trace the reality of prophetic truth from the God-spoken messages of the Old Testament prophets to the subversive works of artists resisting the “empire.” Dr. McCampbell will use the framework provided in Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination and examples from the arts to illustrate the power of the age-old fight against cultural Christianity. Artists discussed include Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Atwood, Banksy, Yaa Gyasi, Flannery O’Connor, Sho Baraka, and others.

Dr. Mary McCampbell is a literary scholar, cultural critic, professor, and author of Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy (Fortress Press, 2022). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Douglas Coupland’s Literature & Art (Bloomsbury 2026). Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she has taught courses on postmodern theory, popular culture, and the intersection of theology and the arts. Her academic publications include chapters and articles on Jesmyn Ward, Chuck Palahniuk, Sufjan Stevens, Douglas Coupland, C.S. Lewis, and Sho Baraka, among others. Her public-facing writing has appeared in publications such as Image Journal, Christianity Today, The Other Journal, Relevant Magazine, and The Curator. She was the 2014 Writer-in-Residence at the UK branch of L’Abri Fellowship and a 2018 Scholar-in-Residence at Regent Theological College in Vancouver, Canada. She writes weekly at https://marymccampbell.substack.com/.