Converting Cultures

Converting Cultures PDF Author: Dennis Dennis Charles Washburn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004158227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This volume considers the concept of conversion as a tool for understanding transformations to modernity. It examines conversions to modernity within the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan as a reaction to the pressures of colonialism and imperialism.

Converting Cultures

Converting Cultures PDF Author: Dennis Dennis Charles Washburn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004158227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume considers the concept of conversion as a tool for understanding transformations to modernity. It examines conversions to modernity within the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan as a reaction to the pressures of colonialism and imperialism.

Cultures of Conversions

Cultures of Conversions PDF Author: Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042917538
Category : Conversion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In the terms of Durkheimian sociology, conversion is a fait social. Although they are rarely treated as a cultural phenomenon, conversions can obviously be examined for the norms, values and presuppositions of the cultures in which they take place. Thus conversion can help us to shed light on a particular culture. At the same time, the term evokes a dramatic appeal that suggests a kind of suddenness, although in most cases conversion implies a more gradual process of establishing and defining a new - religious - identity. From 21-24 May, 2003, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'Cultures of Conversion'. The contributions have been edited in two volumes, which pay special attention to the modes of language and idiom in conversion literature, the meaning and sense of religious-ideological discourse, the variety of rhetorical tropes, and the effects of the conversion narrative with allusions to religious or political conventions and idealizations. The present volume offers in-depth studies of conversion that are mainly taken from the history of India, Islam and Judaism, ranging from the Byzantine period to the new Muslimas of the West. The other volume, Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion, in addition to stimulating case studies, contains theoretical contributions on the theory of conversion, with special attention to the rational choice theory and to the history of research into conversion.

The Art of Conversion

The Art of Conversion PDF Author: Cécile Fromont
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618729
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

Converting Christians to the Jesus Ethic

Converting Christians to the Jesus Ethic PDF Author: Russell Pregeant
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666749524
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
Most Christians believe that their views on social and political issues are biblically based. But are they really? Sometimes, Pregeant suggests, an exclusive emphasis on Jesus' death and resurrection crowds out the role of Jesus as teacher and example. This obscures the way in which authentic Christian faith cuts against the grain of many of our contemporary cultural values. The result is that some Christians unknowingly allow those secular values to undermine the potential of the gospel to challenge the injustices in our economic system and other aspects of our lives together. The author therefore invites the reader to an in-depth encounter with Jesus' ethical teachings and related biblical materials as a way of recovering that dimension of Christian discipleship. And the irony is this: some readers might find that even though they think of themselves as countercultural, they are in some ways quite captive to values that are actually counterbiblical. There is, however, a remedy for this--conversion of Christians to the Jesus ethic!

The Continuing Conversion of the Church

The Continuing Conversion of the Church PDF Author: Darrell L. Guder
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802847034
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Western society is now a very different, very difficult mission field. In such a situation, the mission of evangelism cannot succeed with an attitude of "business as usual." This volume builds a theology of evangelism that has its focus on the church itself. Darrell Guder shows that the church's missionary calling requires that the theology and practice of evangelism be fundamentally rethought and redirected, focused on the continuing evangelization of the church so that it can carry out its witness faithfully in today's world. In Part 1 Guder explores how, under the influence of reductionism and individualism, the church has historically moved away from a biblical theology of evangelism. Part 2 presents contemporary challenges to the church's evangelical ministry, especially those challenges that illustrate the church's need for continuing conversion. Part 3 discusses what a truly missional theology would mean for the church, including sweeping changes in its institutional structures and practices. Written for teachers, church leaders, and students of evangelism, this volume is vital reading for everyone engaged in mission work.

Constructing Indian Christianities

Constructing Indian Christianities PDF Author: Chad M. Bauman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317560272
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This volume offers insights into the current ‘public-square’ debates on Indian Christianity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as rigorous analyses, it discusses the myriad histories of Christianity in India, its everyday practice and contestations and the process of its indigenisation. It addresses complex and pertinent themes such as Dalit Indian Christianity, diasporic nationalism and conversion. The work will interest scholars and researchers of religious studies, Dalit and subaltern studies, modern Indian history, and politics.

Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India

Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India PDF Author: Sarbeswar Sahoo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108553559
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book studies the politics of Pentecostal conversion and anti-Christian violence in India. It asks: why has India been experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since the 1990s? Why are the Bhil Adivasis increasingly converting to Pentecostalism? And, what are the implications of conversion for religion within indigenous communities on the one hand and broader issues of secularism, religious freedom and democratic rights on the other? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Bhils of Northern India since 2006, this book asserts that ideological incompatibility and antagonism between Christian missionaries and Hindu nationalists provide only a partial explanation for anti-Christian violence in India. It unravels the complex interactions between different actors/ agents in the production of anti-Christian violence and provides detailed ethnographic narratives on Pentecostal conversion, Hindu nationalist politics and anti-Christian violence in the largest state of India that has hitherto been dominated by upper caste Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology.

The Conversion Experience

The Conversion Experience PDF Author: Donald L. Gelpi
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809137961
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Using reflections, exercises, and suggestions for prayer and group sharing, this practical book explores five forms of conversion, the seven dynamics that structure the process and the significance for conversion of sacramental worship.

Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire

Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire PDF Author: Selim Deringil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their 'denationalization'. The book tells the story of the struggle between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers and a multitude of evangelical organizations, shedding light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two.

Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India

Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India PDF Author: Laura Dudley Jenkins
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250923
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Hinduism is the largest religion in India, encompassing roughly 80 percent of the population, while 14 percent of the population practices Islam and the remaining 6 percent adheres to other religions. The right to "freely profess, practice, and propagate religion" in India's constitution is one of the most comprehensive articulations of the right to religious freedom. Yet from the late colonial era to the present, mass conversions to minority religions have inflamed majority-minority relations in India and complicated the exercise of this right. In Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India, Laura Dudley Jenkins examines three mass conversion movements in India: among Christians in the 1930s, Dalit Buddhists in the 1950s, and Mizo Jews in the 2000s. Critics of these movements claimed mass converts were victims of overzealous proselytizers promising material benefits, but defenders insisted the converts were individuals choosing to convert for spiritual reasons. Jenkins traces the origins of these opposing arguments to the 1930s and 1940s, when emerging human rights frameworks and early social scientific studies of religion posited an ideal convert: an individual making a purely spiritual choice. However, she observes that India's mass conversions did not adhere to this model and therefore sparked scrutiny of mass converts' individual agency and spiritual sincerity. Jenkins demonstrates that the preoccupation with converts' agency and sincerity has resulted in significant challenges to religious freedom. One is the proliferation of legislation limiting induced conversions. Another is the restriction of affirmative action rights of low caste people who choose to practice Islam or Christianity. Last, incendiary rumors are intentionally spread of women being converted to Islam via seduction. Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India illuminates the ways in which these tactics immobilize potential converts, reinforce damaging assumptions about women, lower castes, and religious minorities, and continue to restrict religious freedom in India today.