May 12, 2009 – Dr. Richard “Chip” Callahan‘s recent book, “Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust,” is this week’s Book of the Week in Books & Culture: A Christian Review, a Christianity Today publication. Callahan is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at University of Missouri. With a primary interest in religion in America, Callahan’s research explores the sphere of work and labor, including how occupational cultures, settings and relations of exchange both inform and are informed by religion.

His latest book uses oral histories, folklore, folksongs and vernacular spirituality to tell the history of how early 20th-century coal miners and their families lived their religion in eastern Kentucky’s coal fields. It is published by University of Indiana Press.