Jennifer McKinney's Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church and American evangelicalism, Oxford University Press just came out--a brief list of the small list of books WtH actually recommends on the history of MH so far

Jennifer McKinney's book is called Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and American Evangelicalism

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-christianity-manly-again-9780197655795?cc=us&lang=en&

I've picked it up and will start reading it.  I must confess that, having written as much as I have about Mars Hill since maybe 2008 or so, I am not sure I'm going to see anything new in McKinney's book.  What's more I attended the little school by the canal and got a journalism degree there.  

I must confess I'm not holding my breath thinking there's going to be anything new in this book.  In fact I find the likelihood that it will have anything new to say compared to earlier works to be somewhere close to zero.  

I do want to take a moment to mention it because I'll be reading it and because I've got a list of stuff I've already that is thematically or directly related to Mars Hill Church that i do recommend.  I don't anticipate McKinney's book being a bad book but I'm about to share a list of books or dissertations I've read so far that touch on Mars Hill that will explain, I trust, why I don't anticipate any surprises in the new OUP volume. Books and thoughts on them after the break:

Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus--a solid core thesis that is stronger still if you've read Jacques Ellul on the danger of propaganda reducing Christian doctrines to political ideologies

https://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/celebrities-for-jesus/406890/

Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms and Profits are Hurting the Church

Katelyn Beaty

Brazos Press a division of Baker Group

Copyright (c) 2022 by Katelyn Beaty

ISBN 9781587435188

ISBN 9781493437030

ISBN 9781493437047

 

Celebrities for Jesus is a short read.  I read it in a single day. Beaty’s central thesis is that there are distinctions we should make between “fame” and “celebrity” and that while the former has been around as long as human history the latter is a recent innovation in parasocial relationships. There may be readers who might propose that Jesus was a celebrity but this would be to misunderstand celebrity.  Beaty’s core thesis seems clear and defensible enough but I couldn’t help thinking her delineation of celebrity as the product of the mass media era and broadcast journalism would have been substantially bolstered by reference to two books by Jacques Ellul whose titles might be too obvious. The first would be Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes and the second would be The New Demons.