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A Diagram for Fire
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.
Machines for Making Gods
The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation t...
Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda
Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Ugandasheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda's largest religious communities, it maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. It shows how churches' responses to the war were enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet churches' embeddedness in structures of historical violence made their attempts to nurture peace liable to compound conflict. At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, 'confusion', which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates 'confusion' as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence.
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Bec...
The Stranger at the Feast
Introduction : prohibition and a ritual regime -- A history of mediation -- Fasting, bodies, and the calendar -- Proliferations of mediators -- Blood, silver, and coffee -- Spirits in the marketplace -- Concrete, bones, and feasts -- Echoes of the host -- The media landscape -- The knowledge of the world -- Conclusion
The New Heretics
Charts the development of progressive Christianity’s engagement with modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism Christians who have doubts about the existence of God? Who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus? Who reject the accuracy of the Bible? The New Heretics explores the development of progressive Christianity, a movement of Christians who do not reject their identity as Christians, but who believe Christianity must be updated for today’s times and take into consideration modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in North America, Rebekka King focuses on testimonies of deconversion, collective read...
Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City
This ethnography compares how members of majority white and African American Pentecostal churches in Buffalo, New York receive and understand divinely inspired insights.
Mediating Catholicism
This book focuses on the ethnographic study of Catholicism and media. Chapters demonstrate how people engage with the Catholic media-scape, and analyse the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie Catholic media and mediatization. Case studies examine Catholic practices in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa, providing a truly comparative, de-centred representation of global Catholicism. Illustrating the vibrancy and heterogeneity of Catholicism world-wide, the book also examines how media work to sustain larger global Catholic imaginaries.
The Social Life of Scriptures
What do Christians do with the Bible? How do theyùindividually and collectivelyùinteract with the sacred texts? Why does this engagement shift so drastically among and between social, historical, religious, and institutional contexts? Such questions are addressed in a most enlightening, engaging, and original way in The Social Life of Scriptures. Contributors offer a collection of closely analyzed and carefully conducted ethnographic and historical case studies, covering a range of geographic, theological, and cultural territory, including: American evangelicals and charismatics; Jamaican Rastafarians; evangelical and Catholic Mayans; Northern Irish charismatics; Nigerian Anglicans; and Chinese evangelicals in the United States. The Social Life of Scriptures is the first book to present an eclectic, cross-cultural, and comparative investigation of Bible use. Moreover, it models an important movement to outline a framework for how scriptures are implicated in organizing social structures and meanings, with specific foci on gender, ethnicity, agency, and power.
Areruya and Indigenous Prophetism in Northern Amazonia
Based on four years of ethnographic research, this book discusses the influence of Christianity on Areruya, an indigenous religious movement practiced by the Ingariko in Northern Amazonia. Tracing the role of 19th-century missionaries in the region, the book shows how shamans started to announce the coming of a cataclysm, associated with the promise of indigenous salvation in Christian paradise and the acquisition of the colonizers' goods. It also cites how the ancient mythological elaboration of salvation after death in Areruya was reinforced through both an appropriation of some aspects of Christianity, and concomitantly, the development of a very violent form of shamanism, which epitomizes the evilness ascribed to the human condition on earth. This book is valuable as a reflection on cultural transformations, revealing how Areruya is not only a shamanic appropriation of Christianity, but also an indigenous and ritualized interpretation of colonization, whereby exogenous elements are corporally translated.
