Welcome to my website. I’m a scholar, a writer, and a teacher who ponders the body in American religious life. My work focuses on religious efforts to discipline bodies. I’m interested in how religious values and practices shape which bodies are treated with kindness and care and which with abjection and disgust. I’m also fascinated by how bodies themselves incorporate or resist religious efforts to contain them and all their corporeal ways.

My new book, Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America, looks at two Christian efforts to discipline wayward desires and tame unruly bodies: Christian weight loss programs and “ex-gay” ministries.

I am currently a post-doctoral scholar at the Religion, Politics and Globalization Program at the University of California, Berkeley.