Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism with Jeffrey Champlin (U Toronto Press, 2025)

What you'll learn

• 1 (01:52) **The Origin Story: A Student’s Question in Palestine** - Jeffrey Champlin explains how a student’s simple question—“Why do romantic writers never go back to religion?”—redirected his entire research trajectory, revealing a deeper concern about the loss of socially energizing connections between religion, literature, and politics.
• 2 (08:25) **Redefining Fundamentalism: A 500-Year Genealogy** - Champlin pushes the origin of fundamentalism back to Luther in 1517 and the Pietist movement, arguing that the term is often misunderstood as a purely 20th-century phenomenon.
• 3 (13:24) **The Core Distinction: Fundamentalist Rebirth vs. Revivalism** - Champlin splits the concept of “born again” into two divergent paths: an exclusionary, literalist fundamentalism and a dynamic, connective revivalism rooted in literature and shared action.
• 4 (18:13) **Why Imagination Matters Over Enlightenment Calculation** - Champlin critiques the West’s tendency to side with secular, calculative reason over religious imagination, arguing that this leaves out the motivational force needed for political and social action.
• 5 (25:05) **The Comparative Method: German Idealism Meets English Materialism** - Champlin explains why pairing German and English Protestant cultures side by side allowed him to see what each tradition alone obscures: the interplay of universal vision and disruptive material reality.
• 6 (29:20) **Rereading Faust and Frankenstein as Rebirth Stories, Not Cautionary Tales** - Champlin argues that these classic works are not simple warnings against playing God, but allegories of the moral and practical difficulties of attempting any kind of rebirth.
• 7 (36:15) **Hannah Arendt’s Natality and Derrida’s Survival: Responding to the Loss of the World** - Champlin brings in these two heavyweight thinkers to address what he calls the “loss of the world” in modernity, a condition of being cut off from tradition and shared meaning.

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