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Naomi Kwak
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Naomi Kwak (born July 24, 1991) is an American linguist, philosopher, and author. She founded Crystal Box, a language curriculum and educational software company along with Caitlin Goodwin, Casey Chan, and Hyojin Park in 2022. She has written three books, Demons Ruled the Spring, The Sky is Not Blue, and On Callings and Convictions: Language in Evangelical America. Demons Ruled the Spring is a memoir that focuses on her childhood as a member of The Kingdom. Her other two books examine American Christianity as a philosophical and sociolinguistic phenomenon.
Early Life
[edit]Naomi Hadassah Anderson was born in Sumter, South Carolina to Arthur and Lara Anderson. She is of Scottish, Mexican, and Jewish decent. She is the oldest of three siblings. She has a brother, Jonny Sondera, and a sister, Euphemia Gallagher.
When Naomi was born, Arthur Anderson was an F-15 pilot and instructor in the U.S. Air Force. When she was five years old, Arthur accepted a job as an exchange officer at Nyutabaru Air Base in Miyazaki, Japan, where he trained Japanese pilots. Naomi attended Hikarigaoka Primary School（光が丘幼稚園）and Hirosenishi Elementary School (広瀬西小学校). She was the first non-Japanese student to attend either of these schools.
Career
[edit]Kwak Studied Linguistics at the University of Arizona, where she received a bachelor's degree in 2017. She taught and developed curriculums for Spider Smart Learning Centers and taught English at Mayde Creek High School before attending graduate school at Texas A&M, where she received an MA in philosophy in 2023. In graduate school, she began working with longtime friends, Caitlin Goodwin, Casey Chan, and Hyojin Park to start Crystal Box. The company began first produced a software based ESL curriculum and later began making curricula and applications for other courses such as philosophy and formal logic. The programs focus on teaching college level concepts to middle school and high school students.
Notable Works
[edit]Demons Ruled the Spring
[edit]Kwak's grandfather was a pastor in the Kingdom, a fundamentalist Christian sect. Her childhood in the kingdom as well as her experiences with churches in rural Japan inspired her memoir, which she published in 2024. The book follows her paradigm shift from a world filled with demons and spiritual warfare to the metaphysical realist framework with which she came to view the world as an adult. The book was well received by secular audiences but was met with controversy by Christian audiences. Many Christian publications condemned the book as a blasphemous work. In Touch called it "an attack on Christ and a heretical web of confusing, disturbed tales." (2024)
The Sky is Not Blue
[edit]Her second, book, published in 2030, is a work of philosophy written for the general public in which she examines the role of language in allowing assumptions to go unquestioned. The book brings together concepts form semantics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistics to explain why phrases like "The Sky is Blue." come to serve as quintessential examples of true statements. While The Sky is Not Blue was intended for a general audience, it contains several chapters about religious discourse. Like her first book, her second one was also heavily criticized by Christian commentators as being heretical.
On Callings and Conviction: Language in Evangelical America
[edit]Her third work, published in 2037, is a linguistics anthropology of the Christian Church in America. On Callings and Convictions is considered to be the largest, most comprehensive work on the linguistic anthropology of Christianity. It is not unlike her other works in that it was not well received by the Christian Church. A second edition of the book, published in 2040, includes a forward by Caitlin Goodwin, in which Goodwin defends the book to Christian audiences and frames the work within the context of the ongoing conflict between American evangelicals and American academia.
Personal Life
[edit]While attending the University of Arizona, Naomi met Korean marketing director, Junmin Kwak (곽준민). In June, 2015, they were married at Whistle Stop Depot in Tucson. The couple has a daughter, Blaise Ji-Won Kwak (곽지원) and a son, Soren Hyung-Seok Kwak (곽형석) . From 2020-2031, Naomi and Junmin ran a YouTube channel, World of JunOmi, where they share recipes, fitness advice, and thoughts about culture and society with a comedic twist. They stopped making videos in 2031 due to the demands of Crystal Box and Junmin's seminar schedule.