What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka oFlyover Country.o She writes of her oexistential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still,o and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture (oHello), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design (oSpecies of Origino), the paradoxes of Christian Rock (oSniffing Glueo), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages (oMidwest Worldo), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity (oGhosts in the Cloudo). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.
