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 829 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 Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India written by Laura Dudley Jenkins and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-05-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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 After Conversion written by Mercedes Garca-arenal and published by Catholic Christendom. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the religious and ideological consequences of mass conversion in Iberia - where Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted or expelled at the end of the XVth century and beginning of the XVIth- and most specially with the relationship between origins and faith. It also deals with the consequences of coercion on intellectual debates and on the production of knowledge and addresses questions such as dissimulation, dissidence, religious doubt and unbelief.

Download or read book When the State Winks written by Michal Kravel-Tovi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Religious and Philosophical Conversion in the Ancient Mediterranean Traditions written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores conversion experience in the ancient Mediterranean with attention to early Judaism, early Christianity, and philosophy in the Roman empire from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Download or read book Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age written by Nimrod Hurvitz and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.

Download or read book Conversion at Corinth written by Stephen J. Chester and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-10-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul's conversion and its impact on his theology has been studied extensively. Yet little has been done to relate this to Paul's attitude towards the conversion of others, or to perspectives on conversion held by converts in the churches Paul founded. Soteriology is often considered in isolation from the practical issues of how conversion was expected to take place and the nature of its expected consequences. This book addresses these issues, taking account of recent developments in conversion studies in the social sciences and other disciplines. Stephen Chester first reviews these developments and assesses the potential value of sociologist Anthony Gidden's general social theory of structuration. He then utilizes this to explore Paul's perspectives on conversion in relation to both Gentile and Jewish converts. He also explores the Corinthians' perspectives on conversion in the context of Graeco-Roman religious and social life. Here emerges a fascinating account of perspectives on conversion in the crucial formative years of early Christianity.

Download or read book The Case Against Conversion Therapy written by Douglas C Haldeman and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the history and effects of so-called conversion "therapy" on LGBT people.

Download or read book Women Embracing Islam written by Karin van Nieuwkerk and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Westerners view Islam as a religion that restricts and subordinates women in both private and public life. Yet a surprising number of women in Western Europe and America are converting to Islam. What attracts these women to a belief system that is markedly different from both Western Christianity and Western secularism? What benefits do they gain by converting, and what are the costs? How do Western women converts live their new Islamic faith, and how does their conversion affect their families and communities? How do women converts transmit Islamic values to their children? These are some of the questions that Women Embracing Islam seeks to answer. In this vanguard study of gender and conversion to Islam, leading historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and theologians investigate why non-Muslim women in the United States, several European countries, and South Africa are converting to Islam. Drawing on extensive interviews with female converts, the authors explore the life experiences that lead Western women to adopt Islam, as well as the appeal that various forms of Islam, as well as the Nation of Islam, have for women. The authors find that while no single set of factors can explain why Western women are embracing Islamic faith traditions, some common motivations emerge. These include an attraction to Islam's high regard for family and community, its strict moral and ethical standards, and the rationality and spirituality of its theology, as well as a disillusionment with Christianity and with the unrestrained sexuality of so much of Western culture.

Download or read book Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature written by Serina Patterson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.

Download or read book Outside the Fold written by Gauri Viswanathan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. Through the figure of the convert, Viswanathan addresses the vexing question of the role of belief and minority discourse in modern society. She establishes new points of contact between the convert as religious dissenter and as colonial subject. This convergence provides a transcultural perspective not otherwise visible in literary and historical texts. It allows for radically new readings of significant figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Pandita Ramabai, Annie Besant, and B. R. Ambedkar, as well as close studies of court cases, census reports, and popular English fiction. These varying texts illuminate the means by which discourses of religious identity are produced, contained, or opposed by the languages of law, reason, and classificatory knowledge. Outside the Fold is a challenging, provocative contribution to the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies.

Download or read book The Crisis of Conversion written by J. August Higgins and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts to identify a central problem within the North American evangelical imagination around the issue of religious experience and its relationship to the basic hermeneutical stance of biblical and theological interpretation. The relatively recent emergence of the academic discipline of Christian spirituality offers a new set of methodological insights that may help to mediate the theological impasse between more conservative and progressive perspectives concerning the appropriate role of human experience for evangelical thought and practice. Specifically, we will explore the experience of religious conversion that lies at the center of evangelical spirituality in critical dialogue with the challenges and opportunities brought about by recent philosophical discourse and the postmodern turn, variously understood.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion L Z written by David Adams Leeming and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-26 with total page 1023 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating psychology and religion, this unique encyclopedia offers a rich contribution to the development of human self-understanding. It provides an intellectually rigorous collection of psychological interpretations of the stories, rituals, motifs, symbols, doctrines, dogmas, and experiences of the world’s religious traditions. Easy-to-read, the encyclopedia draws from forty different religions, including modern world religions and older religious movements. It is of particular interest to researchers and professionals in psychology and religion.

Download or read book Beginning Well written by Gordon T. Smith and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2001-08-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon T. Smith contends that a chief cause of spiritual immaturity in the evangelical church is an inadequate theology of conversion. Surveying Scripture, spiritual autobiographies and a broad range of theologies of conversion, he seeks to foster in the Christian community a dynamic language of conversion that leads to spiritual transformation and mature Christian living.

Download or read book Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System written by Andrew Skotnicki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cincinnati Penal Congress of 1870 ushered in the era of "progressive" penology: the use of statistical and social scientific methodologies, commitment to psychiatric and therapeutic interventions, and a new innovation--the reformatory--as the locus for the application of these initiatives. The prisoner was now seen as a specimen to be analyzed, treated, and properly socialized into the triumphal current of American social and economic life. The Progressive rehabilitative initiatives succumbed in the 1970s to withering criticism from the proponents of equally futile strategies for addressing "the crime problem": retribution, deterrence, and selective incapacitation. The early Christian community developed a methodology for correcting human error that featured the unprecedented belief that a period of time spent in a given penitential locale, with the aid and encouragement of the community, was sufficient in and of itself to heal the alienation and self-loathing caused by sin and to lead an individual to full reincorporation into the community. The "correctional" practice was based upon the conviction that cooperative sociability--or conversion--is possible, regardless of the specific offense, without any need to inflict suffering, or to use the act of punishment as a warning to potential offenders, or to undertake programmatic interventions into the lives of the incarcerated for the purpose of rehabilitating them. Andrew Skotnicki contends that the modern practice of criminal detention is a protracted exercise in needless violence predicated upon two foundational errors. The first is an inability to see the imprisoned as human beings fully capable of responding to an affirmative accompaniment rather than maltreatment and invasive forms of therapy. The second is a pervasive dualism that constructs a barrier between detainees and those empowered to supervise, rehabilitate, and punish them. In this book, Skotnicki argues that the criminal justice system can only be rehabilitated by eliminating punishment and policies based upon deterrence, rehabilitation, and the incapacitation of the urban poor and returning to the original justification for the practice of confinement: conversion.

Download or read book Turning to Jesus written by Scot McKnight and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scot McKnight's careful study of Jesus' relationship with his followers reveals that elements of all three contemporary models of conversion--the personal decision, the sociological, and the liturgical--are present within the Gospel accounts. But because the Gospel narratives themselves are insufficiently explicit to support only one contemporary model of conversion, McKnight suggests that an enhanced reading of the Gospels should engender an appreciation for each of the models in the church today.