Edward T. Linenthal

My graduate student years at UC Santa Barbara started me on an interesting professional path, one that I never envisioned while working on a dissertation examining the warrior as a religious figure in America. I went directly from Santa Barbara to the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where I spent 25 years in the department of religious studies. I never cared much, however, for disciplinary boundaries, nor for the academic jargon that each discipline seems to prize too much. I was interested in investigating and writing for a larger public about the less examined, that which did not, at first glance, seem “religious.” So, for example, in 1987-88 I was a Sloan Research Fellow in the Arms Control and Defense Policy Program at MIT, where I did the research for my book SYMBOLIC DEFENSE: THE CULTURAL SIGIFICANCE OF THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE, which examined how supporters and opponents of the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system mobilized powerful American myths and symbols t