Seeing Right
Evangelicals and the Aesthetics of Virtue and Vice
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
Evangelical identity in the United States has become increasingly contested over the past several years as many try to fathom adherents' motives. Seeing Right suggests that it is through the exploration of aesthetic texts that we can better understand. With a focus on highlighting Evangelical virtues and vices, Seeing Right analyzes the aesthetics fundamental to Evangelical identity and moral formation. Aesthetic texts and practices represent a fundamental source of Evangelical moral formation, providing a narrative that shapes imaginations and dispositions. Jason Fallin traces the process of formation as it grows out of Evangelical interactions with the aesthetic texts produced by Operation Christmas Child, the radio stations of K-Love, and Christian cinema. He then discovers the relationship between Evangelicals' engagement with these aesthetic texts and the practices they animate. Moral formation is key for all Christianity, thus through these processes at work in Evangelical culture, Seeing Right offers insight both into Evangelical development and into the processes that fund one's own formation.
Endorsements (4)
“Praise for Seeing Right Smart, accessible, and richly textured, Seeing Right rightly places aesthetics at the heart of Evangelical spiritual and cultural formation. An essential contribution to the study of American Evangelicalism.”
“Jason Fallin provides both a helpful diagnosis and a possible prescription for the root cause of this seeming contradiction. For good and for ill, Evangelicals understand and interpret their world not in terms of ethical philosophy, or politics, or even theology, but primarily on aesthetic grounds. Fallin rightly points out that, to overlook the aesthetic dimensions of the Evangelical vision is not only to mis-diagnose its problematic tendencies and entertain unworkable alternatives. It is also to fail, ourselves, to see the world rightly.”
“Operation Christmas Child, K-Love, and Evangelical filmmaking, Fallin powerfully illustrates how the Evangelical aesthetic shapes moral imagination in ways that neither contribute to the formation of virtue nor resonate with the common good.”
“aesthetic experience: the cultivation of common sentiment through material culture and formative practice. For anyone who has listened to K-Love or filled shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child, Fallin’s book is a fascinating exploration of how evangelicals are oriented to sense and survey the world. Fallin is incisive but not reductive, discerning but not dismissive. He invites all Christians to consider how we are shaped to love what we love and how we are shaped to show it.”
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