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.

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.

German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion

German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion PDF Author: Jonathan Strom
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271080469
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.

Archetypes of Conversion

Archetypes of Conversion PDF Author: Anne Hunsaker Hawkins
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725234084
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This sensitive and imaginative study explores the phenomenon of conversion in three major religious autobiographies: the Confessions of Saint Augustine, Grace Abounding by John Bunyan, and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. These three religious figures could hardly be more different, and yet, as Hawkins shows, their conversion narratives are remarkably similar in patterns of theme, figure, and action. This archetypal approach is particularly appropriate to spiritual autobiography, which is less concerned with "self" than with "soul" and which seeks to relate the individual to a divine reality that is universal and timeless. Hawkins' approach to these texts is sophisticated, yet free of jargon and doctrinaire psychologizing. Here, archetypal analysis becomes not an end in itself, but also a means to investigate the complexity of the individual text. Hawkins' archetypal analysis serves not only to discern continuities, but also to explore cultural, ideological, and psychological variations. Adapting William James's distinction between crisis and lysis conversion, Hawkins shows that the conversion paradigm central to each autobiography determines its religious meaning, its formal structure, and its archetypal emphases. The author approaches the phenomena of conversion with a blend of critical detachment and imaginative sympathy. She is always careful to honor the authenticity of religious experience, and for this reason her commentary succeeds in illuminating it. The result is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to the psychologist and literary critic as well as the student of religion. But these narratives of conversion offer paradigms that apply to any deeply significant change, for they are of interest and concern to all readers seeking to find meaning in their lives. Hawkins makes us feel both the immediacy and the permanence of these texts, for "What is human in them speaks to what is human in us."

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion PDF Author: Lewis R. Rambo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199713545
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.

The Most Reluctant Convert

The Most Reluctant Convert PDF Author: David C. Downing
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666718939
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In his teens, a young man wrote, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them.” After serving in the trenches of WW1, the same young man said, “I never sank so low as to pray.” To a religious friend, he wrote impatiently, “You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” This young man was C. S. Lewis, the “foul-mouthed atheist” who would become one of the most eloquent Christian writers of the twentieth century. David C. Downing offers a unique look at Lewis’s personal journey to faith and the profound influence it had on his life as a writer and eventual follower of Christ. This is the first book to focus on the period from Lewis’s childhood to his early thirties, a tumultuous journey of spiritual and intellectual exploration. It was not despite this journey but precisely because of it that Lewis understood the search for life’s meaning so well.

The Conversion of Missionaries

The Conversion of Missionaries PDF Author: Xi Lian
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271064383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. Some missionaries even found themselves "convert[ed] ... by the Far East." In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad theological and cultural liberalism within American Protestant missions, which he examines in the second half of the book.

Conversion

Conversion PDF Author: Alfred Clair Underwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Conversation
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


When the State Winks

When the State Winks PDF Author: Michal Kravel-Tovi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.

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.

A New Model of Religious Conversion

A New Model of Religious Conversion PDF Author: Ines W. Jindra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900426650X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Based on the analysis of 52 conversion narratives to various religious groups, A New Model of Religious Conversion utilizes case studies for comparison of converts' backgrounds, network influence, and conversion narratives. The author convincingly illustrates a "fit" between the converts' background and the religion they convert to, such as between disorganized family backgrounds and highly structured religions. Conversely, those from highly structured backgrounds often convert to more "open" groups. The book also makes it clear that not all conversions are influenced by networks or align themselves with a social constructivist view of a conversion as an "account." Taking converts' trajectories seriously, the author makes a strong case for the application of biographical sociology to the study of conversion and (American) sociology overall.