Actively Ignoring and Unknown Ignorance of Fascism in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

Category: fascism

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been on my to be read list for a while now, and recently, I finally pulled it down from the shelf and read it. From the opening sentence, when Offred tells us, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium,” to Professor James Darcy Pieixoto’s keynote speech at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, I remained whooly invested in … Read More Actively Ignoring and Unknown Ignorance of Fascism in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

October 14, 2025 + christian fascism, christian nationalism, christianity, fascism, Gerald L K Smith, James Luther Adams, lillian e smith, religion, strange fruit

“Flashes of lightning to quicken our steps”: Lillian E. Smith and Christian Fascism

by Matthew Teutsch

I have been sitting on this essay for a couple of years. It is an essay that Emma Williams and I co-wrote in my Lillian E. Smith and Christian Nationalism course two years ago. During that class, we wrote “Christian Nationalism Hurts the Children It Clams to Protect” in Religion Dispatches, and this essay arose, partly, out of that article. Initially, we wanted to submit this essay … Read More “Flashes of lightning to quicken our steps”: Lillian E. Smith and Christian Fascism

September 25, 2025 + Annette Clapsaddle, Charlie Chaplin, cherokee, Even As We Breathe, fascism, movie, The Great Dictator, world war ii

Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Speaking Against Fascism

by Matthew Teutsch

Over the past year, I have tried, at various times, to watch Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) because I kept seeing Chaplin’s famous speech from the end of the film. Every time I started the film, I couldn’t get past the first half hour, where Chaplin’s Jewish barber survives World War I and rescues Commander Schultz. I didn’t finish the movie until I reread Annette … Read More Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Speaking Against Fascism

April 3, 2025 + Devarjaye "D.J" Daniel, fascism, lillian e smith, martin luther king, jr, politics, The Right Way is Not a Moderate Way

“The critical moment is on us. Now is the time to deal with it.”: We Cannot be Moderate

by Matthew Teutsch

As I was scrolling through social media a couple of weeks ago, a meme popped up that really caught my attention, and I have been thinking about it ever since. The meme shows Devarjaye “D.J.” Daniel, a 13-year-old from Texas who received a brain cancer diagnosis in 2018. Doctors gave him five months to live, and he has lived for seven years since that … Read More “The critical moment is on us. Now is the time to deal with it.”: We Cannot be Moderate

March 4, 2025 + fascism, history, Pedagogy, syllabus, world war i, world war ii

Fascism in Literature Syllabus

by Matthew Teutsch

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about constructing a fascism in literature syllabus. Right now, I keep going back and forth on whether or not to focus specifically on American literature or to expand it and make it a world literature course. For this post, I am doing the latter because I feel that reading novels about fascism in a broader context … Read More Fascism in Literature Syllabus

Interminable Rambling

Actively Ignoring and Unknown Ignorance of Fascism in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

Category: fascism