Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is author of Not Your Mother's Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better (Bondfire Books, 2013) and How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023).
He is an assistant professor of Humanities at Regis College whose interests include literary journalism, media studies, ethics, and religion.
His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Religion Dispatches, Killing the Buddha, and more.
“Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.”
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
“Rather than offering a strict moral code to live by, popular culture today provides more of a moral posture.”
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
“In popular culture, detached irony and cynicism have ceded ground to an emphasis on sincerity and authenticity. The “too cool to care” attitude that typifies Generation X has become “cool to care” for Millennials. This New Sincerity has become the vehicle for a resurgence in moral storytelling in popular culture.”
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald