{"id":4724,"date":"2019-12-09T14:22:56","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T14:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=4724"},"modified":"2021-03-17T21:18:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T21:18:18","slug":"a-love-letter-to-jesus-freak-a-conversation-with-will-stockton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2019\/12\/09\/a-love-letter-to-jesus-freak-a-conversation-with-will-stockton\/","title":{"rendered":"A Love Letter to Jesus Freak: A Conversation with Will Stockton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Will Stockton<\/a> is a Professor of English at nearby Clemson University where he directs the department\u2019s graduate studies . He\u2019s written about Shakespeare and Milton and is completing an English translation of the Mexican poet Sergio Loo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was familiar with Stockton\u2019s 2017 book, Members of His Body<\/em><\/a>, but when I saw that Stockton had co-written a book on dc Talk\u2019s Jesus Freak<\/em><\/a> for Bloomsbury\u2019s acclaimed 33 1\/3 series<\/a>, I knew I had to read it. After finishing it, I knew I had to talk to him about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our conversation, Stockton discusses the kind of feedback the book has received, the complexities of evangelical Christianity, why writing openly about his sexuality and loss of faith actually left him in a better mood than writing about Shakespeare, and how the music of dc Talk is more than just a guilty pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Sircy: What kind of reception has the book had? Is it doing the work in the world that you want it to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will Stockton:  As with any project, academic or non-academic, most of the feedback you get comes at the beginning. It comes through editorial feedback, from readers\u2019 reports, or through people writing you emails soon after it\u2019s published. And, of course, most of the publicity happens at the beginning too, which is to say, there’s definitely been a tapering off of feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the feedback has been positive. One of the reasons your e-mail intrigued me was because you were the first Christian feedback that I had received. Most of it has been from former Christians or non-Christians. If you look on Amazon<\/a> or Goodreads<\/a>, you see former evangelical and now out gay people saying they identify with it. Others don’t like the book because it doesn’t offer a making-of-Jesus-Freak<\/em> history. And then other people cast the book as a kind of LGBT screed against Jesus Freak<\/em>, which it\u2019s not. So, that feedback comes in three different forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Is it doing the work in the world that I want it to? I have no idea. I really don’t know because there’s not that kind of constantly open feedback. I realized a couple of years ago that I write for myself. I do projects that I want to do. Feedback is great, and interacting with other writers is great. But writing is mostly a solitary venture. Not to sound narcissistic, but first and foremost I do it because I enjoy doing it, if that makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JS:  Well, you figured out a way to do it with somebody else! Was this the biggest project that you\u2019ve tackled with somebody else as a co-writer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WS: The even bigger project was after the Jesus Freak<\/em> book. We followed that up really quickly with a volume of a large number of 33 1\/3 writers who each wrote short essays<\/a>. There’s about sixty essays in that volume, and that was a massive editorial project. I\u2019m not sure I would ever take on something like that again. That was a bigger sort of editorial and time-consuming process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D. Gilson<\/a> is my best friend, and we work really, really well together. We\u2019ve written together before, and he’s somebody who for years I have traded work with. It was a fairly painless process. We worked out earlier how we were going to divide the book up when we outlined it, so we had a road map going in. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JS: How old is the idea for the project?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WS: It is about five years old at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JS: In the \u201cColored People\u201d chapter, D. Gilson is pretty clear about identifying a moment where he started looking at dc Talk\u2019s music critically and thinking about writing about it. He brings the song into a class, and everybody skewers it. Now some time has passed, and he’s able to identify what they were pointing fingers at and offer sort of a generous reading of the song too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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