Religious Conversion and Personal Identity PDF Download

Author: Virgil Bailey Gillespie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469664887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate. Public Confessions reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an "authentic" identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics. Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells.

Author: Massimo Leone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134402465
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

Author: David Radford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317691725
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

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.

Author: Srdjan Sremac
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030406822
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The central theme of this book is the nexus between the self, the social, and the sacred in conversion and recovery. The contributions explore the complex interactions that occur between the person, the sacred, and various recovery situations, which can include prisons, substance abuse recovery settings and domestic violence shelters. With an interdisciplinary approach to the study of conversion, the collection provides an opportunity for a better understanding of lived religion, guilt, shame, hope, forgiveness, narrative identity reconstruction, religious coping, religious conversion and spiritual transformation. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of lived religion, religious conversion, recovery, homelessness, and substance dependence.

Author: Professor Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472421515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

Author: David Adams Leeming
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 038771801X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1023

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Book Description
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.

Author: Lieke Stelling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477038
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A cross-religious exploration of conversion on the early modern English stage offering fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known plays.

Author: Chana Ullman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489909303
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book is about the dramatic experience of religious conver sion. The phenomenon of religious conversion lies at the crossroad of several disciplines. As the title of this book indicates, my own interest in religious conversion is not sociological, historical, nor anthropolog ical. My primary interest is not even in the domain of the psychology of religion. That is, this book is not a comprehensive review of the social psychological factors that shape religious beliefs in general and religious conversions in particular. Rather, my primary interest is in the experience of conversion as an instance of a meaningful, sudden change in the course of individu al lives. Religious conversion is examined in this book prinwrily from the point of view of the psychology of the self. My aim is to elucidate the experience of religious conversion as a change in the self and to raise suggestions for the study of the self that derive from the data on religious conversion. This interest dictated the scope as well as the methods of the present investigation. Namely, I have chosen to study individuals who have indeed changed visibly as a result of their conversion. My inquiry was based on self-report, assuming the importance of the person's own point of view. Finally, my inquiry was semi-clinical, vii viii PREFACE based on the assumption of an underlying structure to the varieties of conversion experiences.