Violent Conversion

Violent Conversion PDF Author: Linda van de Kamp
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847011527
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Examines Pentecostal conversion as a force of change, revealing new insights into its dominant role in global Christianity today. There has been an extraordinary growth in Pentecostalism in Africa, with Brazilian Pentecostals establishing new transnational Christian connections, initiating widespread changes not only in religious practice but in society. This book describes its rise in Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and the sometimes dramatic impact of Pentecostalism on women. Here large numbers of urban women are taking advantage of the opportunities Pentecostalism offers to overcome restrictions at home, pioneer new life spaces and change their lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet, conversion can also mean a violent rupturing with tradition, with family and with social networks. As the pastors encourage women to cut their ties with the past, including ancestral spirits, they come to see their kin and husbands as imbued with evil powers, and many leave their families. Conquering spheres that used to be forbidden to them, they often live alone as unmarried women, sometimes earning more than men of a similar age. They are also expected to donate huge sums to the churches, often money that they can ill afford, bringing new hardships. Linda van de Kamp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Violent Conversion

Violent Conversion PDF Author: Linda van de Kamp
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847011527
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Examines Pentecostal conversion as a force of change, revealing new insights into its dominant role in global Christianity today. There has been an extraordinary growth in Pentecostalism in Africa, with Brazilian Pentecostals establishing new transnational Christian connections, initiating widespread changes not only in religious practice but in society. This book describes its rise in Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and the sometimes dramatic impact of Pentecostalism on women. Here large numbers of urban women are taking advantage of the opportunities Pentecostalism offers to overcome restrictions at home, pioneer new life spaces and change their lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet, conversion can also mean a violent rupturing with tradition, with family and with social networks. As the pastors encourage women to cut their ties with the past, including ancestral spirits, they come to see their kin and husbands as imbued with evil powers, and many leave their families. Conquering spheres that used to be forbidden to them, they often live alone as unmarried women, sometimes earning more than men of a similar age. They are also expected to donate huge sums to the churches, often money that they can ill afford, bringing new hardships. Linda van de Kamp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Transmitting the Spirit

Transmitting the Spirit PDF Author: Martijn Oosterbaan
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271080647
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Pentecostalism is one of the most rapidly expanding religious-cultural forms in the world. Its rise in popularity is often attributed to its successfully incorporating native cosmologies in new religious frameworks. This volume probes for more complex explanations to this phenomenon in the favelas of Brazil, once one of the most Catholic nations in the world. Based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and drawing from religious studies, anthropology of religion, and media theory, Transmitting the Spirit argues that the Pentecostal movement’s growth is due directly to its ability to connect politics, entertainment, and religion. Examining religious and secular media—music and magazines, political ads and telenovelas—Martijn Oosterbaan shows how Pentecostal leaders progressively appropriate and recategorize cultural forms according to the religion’s cosmologies. His analysis of the interrelationship among evangélicos distributing doctrine, devotees’ reception and interpretation of nonreligious messaging, perceptions of the self and others by favela dwellers, and the slums of urban Brazil as an entity reveals Pentecostalism’s remarkable capacity to engage with the media influences that shape daily life in economically vulnerable urban areas. An eye-opening look at Pentecostalism, media, society, and culture in the turbulent favelas of Brazil, this book sheds new light on both the evolving role of religion in Latin America and the proliferation of religious ideas and practices in the postmodern world.

Costly Grace

Costly Grace PDF Author: Rob Schenck
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062687921
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A leading American evangelical minister—whom public figures long turned to for guidance in faith and politics—recounts his three conversions, from childhood Jewish roots to Christianity, from a pure faith to a highly politicized one, and from the religious right to the simplicity of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Rob Schenck’s extraordinary life has been at the center of the intersection between evangelical Christianity and modern politics. Attacked by partisans on both sides of the aisle, he has been called a "right-wing hate monger," the "ultimate D.C. power-broker," a "traitor" and "turncoat." Now, this influential spiritual adviser to America’s political class chronicles his controversial, sometimes troubling career in this revelatory and often shocking memoir. As a teenager in the 1970s, Schenck converted from Judaism to Christianity and found his calling in public ministry. In the 1980s, he, like his twin brother, became a radical activist leader of the anti-abortion movement. In the wake of his hero Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House, Schenck became a leading figure in the religious right inside the Beltway. Emboldened by his authority and access to the highest reaches of government, Schenck was a zealous warrior, brazenly mixing ministry with Republican political activism—even confronting President Bill Clinton during a midnight Christmas Eve service at Washington’s National Cathedral. But in the past few years Schenck has undergone another conversion—his most meaningful transition yet. Increasingly troubled by the part he played in the corruption of religion by politics, this man of faith has returned to the purity of the gospel. Like Paul on the Road to Damascus, he had an epiphany: revisiting the lessons of love that Jesus imparted, Schenck realized he had strayed from his deepest convictions. Reaffirming his core spiritual beliefs, Schenck today works to liberate the evangelical community from the oppression of the narrowest interpretation of the gospel, and to urge Washington conservatives to move beyond partisan battles and forsake the politics of hate, fear, and violence. As a preacher, he continues to spread the word of the Lord with humility and a deep awareness of his past transgressions. In this moving and inspiring memoir, he reflects on his path to God, his unconscious abandonment of his principles, and his return to the convictions that guide him. Costly Grace is a fascinating and ultimately redemptive account of one man’s life in politics and faith.

Conversion

Conversion PDF Author: Katherine Howe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0147511550
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe. It’s senior year, and St. Joan’s Academy is a pressure cooker. Grades, college applications, boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends keep it together. Until the school’s queen bee suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. The mystery illness spreads to the school's popular clique, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor erupts into full-blown panic. Everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . . Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. "[Howe] has a gift for capturing the teenage mindset that nears the level of John Green."—USA Today "...this creepy, gripping novel is intimately real and layered, shedding light on the challenges teenage girls have faced throughout history."—The New York Times "A chilling guessing game . . . that will leave readers thinking about the power (and powerlessness) of young women in the past and present alike."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert PDF Author: Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781884527821
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
"Rosaria, by the standards of many, was living a very good life. She had a tenured position at a large university in a field for which she cared deeply. She owned two homes with her partner, in which they provided hospitality to students and activists that were looking to make a difference in the world. In the community, Rosaria was involved in volunteer work. At the university, she was a respected advisor of students and her department's curriculum. And then, in her late 30s, Rosaria encountered something that turned her world upside down -- the idea that Christianity, a religion that she had regarded as problematic and sometimes downright damaging, might be right about who God was. That idea seemed to fly in the face of the people and causes that she most loved. What follows is a story of what she describes as a train wreck at the hand of the supernatural. These are her secret thoughts about those events, written as only a reflective English professor could."--Back cover.

A History of Christian Conversion

A History of Christian Conversion PDF Author: David W. Kling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199717591
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 853

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Book Description
Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.

Religious Conversion

Religious Conversion PDF Author: Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317066995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

The Works of John Ruskin

The Works of John Ruskin PDF Author: John Ruskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Book Description


The Works of John Ruskin: Lectures on architecture and painting (Edinburgh, 1853)

The Works of John Ruskin: Lectures on architecture and painting (Edinburgh, 1853) PDF Author: John Ruskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art critics
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
Volume 1-35, works. Volume 36-37, letters. Volume 38 provides an extensive bibliography of Ruskin's writings and a catalogue of his drawings, with corrections to earlier volumes in George Allen's Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. Volume 39, general index.

Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853)

Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) PDF Author: John Ruskin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Book Description