The James Vardaman Chair Presents "Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made" ft. Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez

The James Vardaman Chair presents "Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made" featuring Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who will be presenting her newest publication. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, September 14th at 5:30 pm at the Hurd's Fudge Family Auditorium.

Live Laugh Love explores a world intimately familiar to millions of American women: Christian bookstores and radio, Hallmark movies, multilevel marketing companies, and contemporary lifestyle brands. 

Combining sweeping cultural history with intimate storytelling, Du Mez explains how theological exclusion led women to build their own brand of Christianity, rich in cultural influence if thin in formal doctrine. Ultimately, Live Laugh Love explains how a powerful yet elusive vision of womanhood has shaped lives, families, and politics for more than a century now―and how it has brought us to our reactionary moment.

And Liveright is now using this as well: "A smart, endlessly interesting exercise in connecting cultural dots to learn how we got here." ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University, as well as a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS and the BBC, among other outlets. Kristin holds the William Spoelhof Teacher-Scholar-in-Residence Chair at Calvin University, where she also served as Department Chair. She is a Distinguished Associate at the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto) and served as a Fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion from 2024 to 2025.