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Go Tell It on the Mountain sheds light on James Baldwin’s response to his Pentecostal religious inheritance. Baldwin writes protagonist John Grimes’s experience of “salvation” as an act of his own break with his past and the inauguration of a new vocation as authorial witness of his times. This break is premised on the experience of kairos, a form of time that was derived from Baldwin’s experience of Pentecostalism. Through John Grimes’s experience, Baldwin represents a break with the past that begins with the kairotic moment and progresses through the beginnings of self-love and the possibility of freedom enabled by this love. This essay contributes a new perspective on discussions of Baldwin’s representation of time and his relationship to Christianity.
This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades, offering an historical overview of Christianity's engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox ‘hesitation’ about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism. The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the ‘liberal-democracy paradox’. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths which proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political order, and which are also rooted in the ideas of compromise, negotiation and bargaining.
The impact of global Pentecostalism on democratisation is almost as hotly debated as the influence of the Christian Right on the American polity, and in some analyses the two movements are seen as connected. Initial studies tended to assume that Pentecostals were politically conservative and quiescent, inclined to other-worldly values that simply accepted the political order in the countries where they lived and worshipped. Several writers pointed to the support that Pentecostal leaders offered to General Pinochet in Chile, or to the
During the past fifteen years, many thousands of people have passed through the Irish asylum system, especially migrants from Africa. Public debates in Ireland, in common with other EU Member States, have been framed by ‘integration’ discourse. However, not enough is known about lived experiences of integration, especially among former asylum seekers and their families. This book builds on several years of in-depth ethnographic research to provide a striking portrait of the integration experiences of African migrants in Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin. The book draws on contemporary anthropological theory to explore labour integration, civic and political participation, religion, education and youth identity. The stories of several key research participants are threaded through the book. The book draws out the rich voices of African migrants who struggle in their everyday lives to overcome racism and exclusion and, yet, are producing new cultural formations and generating reasons for societal hope. Set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and the ever-present hand of neo-liberal policies, this book is about everyday struggles and new visions for the future.
new kinds of leadership roles by drawing together the structure of the Indigenous Fijian vanua , on the one hand, and transnational Pentecostalism and business, on the other, in order to suggest that successful Pentecostal professionals would surpass the power of Indigenous chiefs. More generally, Bailey’s insights proved useful in addressing
– different ways of Being-in-the-world (Fischer 1999). This chapter represents an effort to make sense of events such as this Jesus Walk and the everyday lives of the participants. We are concerned to show what is at stake for those involved. In obvious ways, our opening vignette describes Pentecostal worshippers engaging in a religious ritual. Much, therefore, must be said about Pentecostalism before appreciating its local articulations, from its central tenets and practices to its rapid rise and spread across the globe. However, this religious event cannot be bracketed
seen the rise of a particular kind of Protestantism, known as Pentecostalism. Historically, Protestantism has been a broad and multi-faceted phenomenon. It includes the modern descendants of the original Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists, the reformists who in the sixteenth century shook Western Christianity apart by rejecting not only the supremacy of the Pope, but all the centralised structures and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. And then Protestantism produced the Methodists, Baptists and other so-called ‘non-conformists’ of the late eighteenth and
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
The conclusion argues that today Brazil’s urban peripheries have two dichotomous public façades: on the one hand, they are the cause of ‘urban violence’ that calls for more repression; on the other hand, they are the focus of the ‘national development’ project which would turn poor people into middle-class individuals. The idea of urban violence, as commonly perceived, has displaced the focus of the contemporary social question from ‘the worker’ to the ‘marginal people’. As a side effect, tensions between ‘crime’ and ‘state’ regimes have grown and their relationship has found a common basis in monetised markets. Money seems to mediate the relationship between forms of life which, from other perspectives – legal or moral – would be in radical alterity. Consumption emerges as a form of common life and mercantile expansion, above all, connecting legal and illegal markets and fostering urban violence that otherwise would have been under control, had those territories seen economic development. Religion, and especially Pentecostalism, emerges as a plausible source of mediation between the regimes.
Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD). These polemical attacks, which provoked violence against people of other faiths, especially Afro-Brazilians, were opposed by non-violent protests, when Afro-Brazilians were joined during grassroots ecumenical marches by Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Buddhists and Baha’is. What van Wyk makes plain is that the Pentecostalism imported from Brazil is extreme, devoted not to Christian peace but to religious intolerance, opposition to reconciliation, and an unforgiving divisiveness – it is the extreme in which members are as strangers