Lobster in a Bucket

SIP Evolution

Well some of you may recall this seminar class that I took at UTC last semester, The Problem of Community in American Society. The class was taught by evangelical scholar Wilfred McClay and was really interesting. The big project of the class was to write a 20-50 page paper at the end. I wrote this dandy little piece about the nature of academic community as it's evinced by internal conflict over its own authority structure. It was a really interesting paper to write, and from the beginning I was planning on doing some moderate tweaking to it and turning that product into my SIP.

Well after turning out the McClay paper, I must confess that I was dreading returning to that topic. So I came into this semester where I have to take the dreaded History SIP research class not exactly "stoked."

So I had been mulling all this around in my head for about a month when last Sunday at Rock Creek it hit me. I want to write a SIP about design theory and Christian merchandising! Basically what this means is I want to describe the trend of merchandising in Christian book stores as it relates to several factors: the rise of explicitly consumptive evangelical Christianity in the 50s, the individualistic revivals of the Jesus people and co in the 60s, and the changing idea of ministry going starting with the 50s and taking it into the early 80s.

This topic excites me because it deals with a lot of original sources, material artifacts, and economic data. These are all things that I want to work with more in and effort to better equip myself for grad school.