We fondly remember our board member and talented writer and educator John Stroup, who was the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Professor Emeritus of Religion at Rice University.
After an academic career spanning decades, John Stroup retired from teaching the history of Christianity at Rice University in December of 2022 and that same year became the Head of Education Initiatives of the Decoding Culture Foundation. He first joined the Rice faculty in 1988 after teaching for seven years at the Yale Divinity School, which was also his doctoral alma mater. His specialization was the intellectual and social history of German Protestantism. More specifically, his work dealt with Euro-Christian-related reactions to change of intensely challenging kinds, comparing earlier Atlanto-European senses of decadence with contemporary American accounts of decline as top-down-enforced dispossession both economic and cultural, looking simultaneously at elite and popular cultural material as well as at experiments in instauration extending to dissident visions of justice.
Dr. Stroup also worked at Yale and at the Max-Planck-Institute for History Goettingen. The main influences on him come from Jaroslav Pelikan and Reinhart Koselleck, and his teaching was very much inspired by Burckhardt and Spengler. He was the author of Escape into the Future: Cultural Pessimism and its Religious Dimension in Contemporary American Popular Culture (2007), co-authored with Glenn Shuck of Williams College.
