The Feeling of Forgetting

Reviews / Votes

"A masterful analysis. . . . This is a truly innovative interdisciplinary review of scholarship in the fields of history, religious studies, psychology, literary studies, and sociology to understand the processes of memory and forgetting as communal strategies for grappling with trauma." * Choice * "Corrigan's study ranges widely across a dizzying array of disciplines and subfields, including the study of emotion in both the humanities and the sciences, religious studies, trauma studies, memory studies, social neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, history, and more . . . Corrigan brings the reader to the perhaps surprising conclusion that affect, not ideology, is the driving force in white Christian nationalism." * Church History * "A paradigm-shifting book, moving scholars away from viewing white Christian ideologies as the root of religioracial violence, and toward something more ingrained, and thus even more difficult to surface and contend with: the affectual results of Christian forgetting on victims and perpetrators of violence in American history. . . . 'Race, Religion, and Nation' [is] a chapter that will soon become canon in courses on race and religion in America." * Journal of American History * "[Corrigan's] analysis reveals how emotional repression intertwines with political radicalism, offering fresh insight into the psychological mechanisms behind white Christian nationalism. Corrigan's methodological strengths lie in his interdisciplinary approach, deftly integrating social neuroscience, anthropology, and religious studies. His nuanced exploration of collective memory and emotion creates a compelling framework for understanding racial and religious dynamics. . . . essential for academic audiences seeking to untangle the emotional and historical complexities of modern white Christian nationalism." * Religious Studies Review * "With unabashed frankness and unrelenting truth-telling, Corrigan offers much-needed clarity to the ongoing attempts to account for enduring racism and religious hatred that too often portray the coexistence of Christianity and racism as an unfortunate contradiction or oversimplify the relationship between ideology and violence. A game-changing study." -- Sylvester Johnson, Virginia Tech "Corrigan draws on a lifetime of research and writing about religion, race, and violence to offer insights where others have shrugged with befuddlement. White racial anxiety, he argues, is a feeling produced by the unsuccessful labor of forgetting the violence inherent to chattel slavery and Native dispossession. The result is a charged meditation on religious whiteness in the United States." -- Jennifer Graber, University of Texas at Austin "Corrigan offers a nuanced look at America's sorry history of racism, violence, and trauma from the colonial era to January 6 and beyond, taking on American Christianity's proclivity for forgetting our society's traumatic past. This is a wise and important book with the potential to reshape our national discourse." -- Randall Balmer, Dartmouth College "Through a sweeping critical review of interdisciplinary work on emotions, trauma, memory, and history, Corrigan carefully assembles a way to understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma among both victims and perpetrators of collective violence. A remarkable and courageous book." -- William M. Reddy, Duke University