For decades, his mother begged him to record himself reading the Bible, and when he finally did, he read the whole of the New Testament-nearly nineteen hours of the King James Version, released in 2004, by the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson. Cash later recorded an acoustic album in her honor, called “My Mother’s Hymn Book,” filled with the spirituals of his childhood, such as “Softly and Tenderly” and “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” and he swore it was his favorite record. His paternal grandfather was a circuit preacher, but it was Cash’s mother, Carrie, who taught her seven children to love the Lord. He grew up in the church, going to worship every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening, in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal town near the Mississippi River, where, throughout the week, he’d sing hymns in the cotton fields. Gospel music changed Cash’s career, and the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life. “Black is better for church,” Cash said at the time, although later he’d go further, singing, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,” including those “who’ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.”

It was the only color shirt that he and his two bandmates had in common when they were asked to sing gospel songs at an evening service in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnny Cash became the Man in Black by accident. Photograph from Michael Ochs Archives / Getty We especially welcome articles that reconceptualize definitions and theories of radicalism, feature underrepresented radical groups, and introduce new topics and methods of study.“Trains, Jesus, and Murder” makes its way through Johnny Cash’s core religious ideas. The journal is eclectic, without dogma or strict political agenda, and ranges broadly across social and political groups worldwide, whether typically defined as “left” or “right.” We expect contributors to come from a wide range of fields and disciplines, including ethnography, sociology, political science, literature, history, philosophy, critical media studies, literary studies, religious studies, psychology, women’s studies, and critical race studies. With sensitivity and openness to historical and cultural contexts of the term, we loosely define “radical,” as distinguished from “reformers,” to mean groups who seek revolutionary alternatives to hegemonic social and political institutions, and who use violent or non-violent means to resist authority and to bring about change.

The Journal for the Study of Radicalism engages in serious, scholarly exploration of the forms, representations, meanings, and historical influences of radical social movements.

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