Download or read book A New Model of Religious Conversion written by Ines W. Jindra and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Model of Religious Conversion highlights connections between converts' backgrounds and the religions they convert to. It also critiques the prevalent application of network theory and social constructivism to the study of conversion narratives, while making the case for the introduction of biographical sociology to American sociology.
Download or read book Understanding Religious Conversion written by Lewis Ray Rambo and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.
Download or read book Transformative Religious Experience written by Joshua Iyadurai and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a priest of one religion become a preacher of another religion? How could a person embrace a religion suddenly that he or she had up to then opposed? Why would young women risk their reputation and endanger their lives for the sake of newfound faith? How could an alcoholic detest a sip of wine all of a sudden? What drives an atheist to become an ardent worshiper of God? How could an intelligent person relate to God as to an adult human being? Transformative Religious Experience answers these questions with fascinating narratives of conversion. These narratives together show how the transforming effects of conversion permeate the daily lives of converts in a multireligious context. Joshua Iyadurai analyzes psychologically the mystical turning point in the conversion process and finds that the divine-human encounter entails a cognitive restructuring: a new set of beliefs, values, and desires replaces previously held religious beliefs, values, and desires. By drawing insights from the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and theology, Iyadurai develops an interdisciplinary step model from a phenomenological perspective to explain the conversion process that incorporates the religious practices and social-psychological factors while giving a central place to religious experience.
Download or read book Rewired written by Paul N. Markham and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewired begins with the claim that contemporary views of Christian spirituality, particularly in the American evangelical tradition, concentrate too exclusively on the interior and individual nature of spiritual experience. Paul Markham argues that a reexamination of the doctrine of religious conversion is needed within American evangelicalism and finds resources for such a model in the Wesleyan theological tradition and from philosophical and scientific insights into a "nonreductive physicalist" view of human nature. In considering "data" from theology and science, this book represents an integrated work in science and religion.
Download or read book Conversion of a Continent written by Timothy Steigenga and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-27 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A massive religious transformation has unfolded over the past forty years in Latin America and the Caribbean. In a region where the Catholic Church could once claim a near monopoly of adherents, religious pluralism has fundamentally altered the social and religious landscape. Conversion of a Continent brings together twelve original essays that document and explore competing explanations for how and why conversion has occurred. Contributors draw on various insights from social movement theory to religious studies to help outline its impact on national attitudes and activities, gender relations, identity politics, and reverse waves of missions from Latin America aimed at the American immigrant community. Unlike other studies on religious conversion, this volume pays close attention to who converts, under what circumstances, the meaning of conversion to the individual, and how the change affects converts’ beliefs and actions. The thematic focus makes this volume important to students and scholars in both religious studies and Latin American studies.
Download or read book The Art of Conversion written by Cécile Fromont and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Religious Identity and Social Change written by David Radford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Identity and Social Change offers a macro and micro analysis of the dynamics of rapid social and religious change occurring within the Muslim world. Drawing on rich ethnographic and quantitative research in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, David Radford provides theoretical insight into the nature of religious and social change and ethnic identity transformation exploring significant questions concerning why people convert and what happens when they do so. A crisis of identity occurs when religious conversion takes place, especially from one major religious tradition (Islam) to another (Christianity); and where religious identity is intimately connected to ethnic and national identity. Radford argues for the importance of recognising the socially constructed nature of identity involving the dynamic interplay between human agency, culture and social networks. Kyrgyz Christians have been active agents in bringing religious and identity transformation building upon the contextual parameters in which they are situated.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion written by Lewis R. Rambo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Conversion Careers written by James T. Richardson and published by SAGE Publications, Incorporated. This book was released on 1978-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The material in this publication originally appeared as a special issue of American behavioral scientist (Volume 20, Number 6, July/August 1977)." Includes bibliographical references.
Download or read book Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England written by Abigail Shinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.
Download or read book Conversion To Islam written by Ali Kose and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1996. Religious conversion is an immensely complex phenomenon. The term comprises such diverse experiences as increased devotion within the same religious structure, a shift from no religious commitment to a devout religious life, or a change from one religion to another. This study focuses on the conversion experiences of 70 native British converts to Islam. It addresses the following questions - why do people become Muslims, what are the backgrounds of the converts, what are the patterns of conversion to Islam, and how far are existing conversion theories applicable to the group under study. The full range of social and psychological forces at work in the conversion experience are examined with reference to the converts, whose whole life history - childhood, adolescent experiences and the conversion process itself - were examined in detail. Chapter 1 deals with the history and present situation of both life-long Muslims and converts living in Britain. Chapter 2 focuses on childhood and adolescent experiences reviewing the psychological and sociological theories of conversion and attempts to find out how far these theories are applicable to the converts to Islam. Chapter 3 examines the backgrounds of the converts regarding religion. It then analyzes the immediate antecedents of the conversion as well as the conversion process, focussing on version motifs. A conversion process model is also developed in this chapter. Chapter 4 looks at the post-conversion period to find out what changes the converts underwent. It also examines the relationship between converts, their parents and society at large. Chapter 5 reveals the findings on conversion through Sufism. Comparisons between conversion through Sufism and through new religious movements in the West are also made. This study should be an important addition to the study of religious conversion, as conversion to Islam either from outside or within Islam is widely neglected in the literature.
Download or read book Doomsday Cult written by John Lofland and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conversion to Christianity written by Robert W. Hefner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most striking developments in the history of modern civilizations has been the conversion of tribal peoples to more expansively organized "world" religions. There is little scholarly consensus as to why these religions have endured and why conversion to them has been so widespread. These essays explore the phenomenon of Christian conversion from this world-building perspective. Combining rich case studies with original theoretical insights, this work challenges sociologists, anthropologists and historians of religion to reassess the varieties of religious experience and the convergent processes involved in religious change.
Download or read book German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion written by Jonathan Strom and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Conversion and Narrative written by Ryan Szpiech and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Download or read book The Dynamics of Religious Conversion written by Virgil Bailey Gillespie and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christian Moderns written by Webb Keane and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
