Author: Lewis R. Rambo Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199713545 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 829
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.
Author: David W. Kling Publisher: ISBN: 0195320921 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 853
Book Description
In this first in-depth and wide-ranging history of Christian conversion, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach and engaging recent methods and theories in conversion studies, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Although conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming), when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest.
Author: David C. Downing Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1666718939 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 192
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.
Author: Erin Elizabeth Dufault-Hunter Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739167839 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
The Transformative Power of Faith examines how and why some people, particularly those coming out of highly self-destructive, violent, and antisocial backgrounds who appear beyond repair, experience profound personal transformation through conversion to strong faith. Illustrated by stories of converts who came out of serious drug addiction, gangs, and poverty through adherence to a demanding faith, Erin Dufault-Hunter argues for a narrative approach to conversion. This holistic theoretical perspective offers an alternative epistemological stance to reductionistic models sometimes perpetuated among social scientists and religious ethicists alike. In this study, the narrative lens gives vision of the religious "Other" a depth and complexity too often lacking. Such an approach allows a deeper understanding of the dynamics of personal transformation in ways that make sense of psychological and social factors without ignoring so-called "spiritual" ones.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004501770 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 489
Book Description
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.
Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199236712 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.
Author: Lewis Ray Rambo Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300065152 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
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.
Author: Ryan Szpiech Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812207610 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
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.
Author: Lewis R. Rambo
Author: D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Author: David W. Kling
Author: Andrew Buckser
Author: David C. Downing
Author: Erin Elizabeth Dufault-Hunter
Author: 
Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Author: Lewis Ray Rambo
Author: Ryan Szpiech