Jamie is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She earned her PhD from Duke University. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America examines relic veneration, corpse inspection, and the art of mourning in the early United States. She also studies Bible and relic practices in the American Civil War Era. Jamie is a past fellow at The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; The Library Company of Philadelphia; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
In this conversation, I talk with Jamie about the role of Protestant relics and patriotic symbols and the ways Bibles became contested objects during the Civil War. Jamie also reflects on how secularism and evangelicalism have influenced the material expression of Christianity, and how art continues to function as a site for spiritual experience today. Together, we consider the tensions in modern American Christianity, where material and intellectual understandings of faith often coexist in paradoxical ways.