Righting America

A forum for scholarly conversation about Christianity, culture, and politics in the US
Ark Encounter | Righting America

Ignorance is Bliss, or, The Joys of Not Thinking about Those Enduring Eternal Torment

by William Trollinger “The Cry of the Damned Souls in Hell,” produced by Holiness Revival Movement Worldwide A few years ago here at the University of Dayton a very bright evangelical graduate student took my M.A. class on Protestant Christianity. While we...

At Ark Encounter, It’s All About Hell 

by William Trollinger Placard from inside the Ark Encounter. Photo by Susan L. Trollinger. In my last post, I highlighted the ways in which the Noah family featured at the Answers in Genesis (AiG) tourist site, Ark Encounter, bears remarkable similarities to...

The Zone of Interest, Auschwitz, and Ark Encounter

by William Trollinger Still photo from of The Zone of Interest (2023), directed by Jonathan Glazer. Image via bookandfilmglobe.com. The Zone of Interest will be on my mind for a long, long time. This powerfully disturbing film about the Holocaust (perhaps the best I...

Undergraduate Insights on Ark Encounter

Compiled by Susan Trollinger University of Dayton students visit Ark Encounter. Image by Susan Trollinger, 2024. This spring, I taught a class in which we devoted a unit to studying the arguments and visual/material rhetorics of Protestant fundamentalism. We enjoyed...

Tourists on the Road to Salvation

Cover for Steve Burgess’ forthcoming book Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel. Below is an excerpt from Steve Burgess’ forthcoming book, Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel, which will be published by Douglas and McIntyre, and...

“Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark”: Two Reviews

by Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch and Laura Tringali Poster for the movie, Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark. Image via thefilmcatalogue.com. Below are two reviews of Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark, a film which, as one of our reviewers points out, is “essentially a...