Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190923464
- eISBN:
- 9780190923495
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190923464.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity, World Religions
This book examines the dynamic between charisma and organization in the history of the True Jesus Church, China’s first major native church, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The True ...
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This book examines the dynamic between charisma and organization in the history of the True Jesus Church, China’s first major native church, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The True Jesus Church is one of the earliest Chinese expressions of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, now the dominant mode of twenty-first-century Chinese Christianity. The book argues that the charismatic mode of Christianity is not merely a reflection of native religious traditions or conditions of socioeconomic deprivation, but a powerful tool for organizing and sustaining community. The book’s chapters explore the relationship between charismatic experience and collective action from a variety of different angles, including transnational communications and transportation technology, the context for charismatic religious experience, women’s agency in patriarchal religious traditions, Christian churches during the Maoist era, clandestine culture, civil society groups, and the relationship between religion and the state from imperial times to the present. Although existing scholarship on global influences within modern Chinese history has tended to focus on elites such as political leaders or well-known intellectuals, this history illuminates global networks of interaction and exchange at the grassroots. Throughout the turbulent modern era, women and men of the True Jesus Church faced situations and made choices that highlight shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. Their various collective responses to the concerns of their day highlight the significance of charismatic religious community as a resource for empowerment and agency.Less
This book examines the dynamic between charisma and organization in the history of the True Jesus Church, China’s first major native church, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The True Jesus Church is one of the earliest Chinese expressions of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, now the dominant mode of twenty-first-century Chinese Christianity. The book argues that the charismatic mode of Christianity is not merely a reflection of native religious traditions or conditions of socioeconomic deprivation, but a powerful tool for organizing and sustaining community. The book’s chapters explore the relationship between charismatic experience and collective action from a variety of different angles, including transnational communications and transportation technology, the context for charismatic religious experience, women’s agency in patriarchal religious traditions, Christian churches during the Maoist era, clandestine culture, civil society groups, and the relationship between religion and the state from imperial times to the present. Although existing scholarship on global influences within modern Chinese history has tended to focus on elites such as political leaders or well-known intellectuals, this history illuminates global networks of interaction and exchange at the grassroots. Throughout the turbulent modern era, women and men of the True Jesus Church faced situations and made choices that highlight shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. Their various collective responses to the concerns of their day highlight the significance of charismatic religious community as a resource for empowerment and agency.
Oliver Freiberger
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- February 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199965007
- eISBN:
- 9780190929107
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199965007.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies, World Religions
This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible ...
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This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible theoretical approach and a methodological framework. Analyzing the ways in which comparison is used in the study of religion, the book identifies the primary goals of this method and argues that it is constitutive for religious studies as an academic discipline. Revisiting various critiques of comparison—decontextualization and essentialization charges, postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques, and the perspectives of recent naturalistic approaches—the book incorporates insights gained from such debates into an approach that is based upon thorough epistemological analysis of comparison and that takes the scholar’s situatedness and agency seriously. Few scholars have reflected deeply upon how comparison works in practice. The book argues, and tries to demonstrate, that such reflections are useful both for producing and for evaluating comparative studies. It proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of comparison that is meant to prove relevant both for theoretical reflections and for the pragmatics of comparative work. In addition, it suggests a comparative approach—discourse comparison—that helps to confront the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. Arguing that the comparative method is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion, this book makes a case for comparison. It seeks to enrich the considerations of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about methodology, and encourage scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.Less
This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible theoretical approach and a methodological framework. Analyzing the ways in which comparison is used in the study of religion, the book identifies the primary goals of this method and argues that it is constitutive for religious studies as an academic discipline. Revisiting various critiques of comparison—decontextualization and essentialization charges, postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques, and the perspectives of recent naturalistic approaches—the book incorporates insights gained from such debates into an approach that is based upon thorough epistemological analysis of comparison and that takes the scholar’s situatedness and agency seriously. Few scholars have reflected deeply upon how comparison works in practice. The book argues, and tries to demonstrate, that such reflections are useful both for producing and for evaluating comparative studies. It proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of comparison that is meant to prove relevant both for theoretical reflections and for the pragmatics of comparative work. In addition, it suggests a comparative approach—discourse comparison—that helps to confront the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. Arguing that the comparative method is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion, this book makes a case for comparison. It seeks to enrich the considerations of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about methodology, and encourage scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190914042
- eISBN:
- 9780190919863
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190914042.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions, Religion and Society
The book The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra is based on an annotated translation of the Marathi book Subhedārāchā Putra written in ...
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The book The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra is based on an annotated translation of the Marathi book Subhedārāchā Putra written in 1895 by Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar. This book explores the experience of Christian conversion among Brahmins from the earliest Anglican missions of the Bombay Presidency (Church Missionary Society) established in the nineteenth century. Investigating how Brahmin converts counterbalanced social and family ostracism and accusations of procolonialism by retaining upper-caste and Marathi identity, this book demonstrates how retaining multiple identities facilitated Christian participation in the early nationalist and reformist intellectual movements of Maharashtra. Further, Brahmin Christians contributed to the burgeoning vernacular literary market as authentic rationalists and modernists, who countered atheism and challenged Hindu social-religious reform as inadequate. Not only did early vernacular Christian literature contribute to the precipitation of knowledge on ‘religion’ in colonial Maharashtra, as sets of dichotomized ideas and identities, but converts also transcended these dichotomized binaries by staging ‘conversion’ as a discursive activity straddling emergent religious, ethnic, and caste differences. Discussing whether nineteenth-century Marathi upper-caste converts constituted an ethnic community, the book explores how interstitial identity between multiple and ascribed ethnicities in colonial Maharashtra produced Brahmin Christians as a political minority whose demographic strength dwindled with the independence of India. Their presence today, elicited only within the history of vernacular literature from nineteenth-century Maharashtra, reveals how converts sought to integrate themselves with both Marathi and Christian society by rearticulating Christian devotion within Indic frameworks of Bhakti.Less
The book The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra is based on an annotated translation of the Marathi book Subhedārāchā Putra written in 1895 by Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar. This book explores the experience of Christian conversion among Brahmins from the earliest Anglican missions of the Bombay Presidency (Church Missionary Society) established in the nineteenth century. Investigating how Brahmin converts counterbalanced social and family ostracism and accusations of procolonialism by retaining upper-caste and Marathi identity, this book demonstrates how retaining multiple identities facilitated Christian participation in the early nationalist and reformist intellectual movements of Maharashtra. Further, Brahmin Christians contributed to the burgeoning vernacular literary market as authentic rationalists and modernists, who countered atheism and challenged Hindu social-religious reform as inadequate. Not only did early vernacular Christian literature contribute to the precipitation of knowledge on ‘religion’ in colonial Maharashtra, as sets of dichotomized ideas and identities, but converts also transcended these dichotomized binaries by staging ‘conversion’ as a discursive activity straddling emergent religious, ethnic, and caste differences. Discussing whether nineteenth-century Marathi upper-caste converts constituted an ethnic community, the book explores how interstitial identity between multiple and ascribed ethnicities in colonial Maharashtra produced Brahmin Christians as a political minority whose demographic strength dwindled with the independence of India. Their presence today, elicited only within the history of vernacular literature from nineteenth-century Maharashtra, reveals how converts sought to integrate themselves with both Marathi and Christian society by rearticulating Christian devotion within Indic frameworks of Bhakti.
David A. Hoekema
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- February 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190923150
- eISBN:
- 9780190923181
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190923150.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society, World Religions
From the 1980s until the late 2000s the northern region of Uganda in East Africa endured a reign of terror imposed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its founder Joseph Kony. The LRA movement’s ...
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From the 1980s until the late 2000s the northern region of Uganda in East Africa endured a reign of terror imposed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its founder Joseph Kony. The LRA movement’s brutal tactics—abducting boys for training as soldiers, kidnapping girls as officers’ sexual partners, raping and maiming and killing innocent villagers—captured the world’s attention through Western visitors’ social media campaigns. Far less visible was the creation of a new organization to combat its destructive effects by leaders of the Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim communities in the Acholi region. Overcoming centuries of mistrust, they came together to relieve the suffering the LRA inflicted, to bring government and rebels to the negotiating table, and to assist in post-conflict recovery. This study describes the courageous work of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative and its contributions to resolving one of the most horrific conflicts in recent history and helping families and communities recover from a quarter century of civil war. Drawing on published accounts of East African history, journalistic reports of the conflict and its aftermath, and extensive personal interviews in Uganda with organization leaders and LRA survivors, the author sets the background for Kony’s rebellion and draws lessons from the work of ARLPI that shed new light on how religion relates to politics, how conflict can be resolved, and how a community can reclaim its future through locally initiated initiatives against overwhelming obstacles.Less
From the 1980s until the late 2000s the northern region of Uganda in East Africa endured a reign of terror imposed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its founder Joseph Kony. The LRA movement’s brutal tactics—abducting boys for training as soldiers, kidnapping girls as officers’ sexual partners, raping and maiming and killing innocent villagers—captured the world’s attention through Western visitors’ social media campaigns. Far less visible was the creation of a new organization to combat its destructive effects by leaders of the Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim communities in the Acholi region. Overcoming centuries of mistrust, they came together to relieve the suffering the LRA inflicted, to bring government and rebels to the negotiating table, and to assist in post-conflict recovery. This study describes the courageous work of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative and its contributions to resolving one of the most horrific conflicts in recent history and helping families and communities recover from a quarter century of civil war. Drawing on published accounts of East African history, journalistic reports of the conflict and its aftermath, and extensive personal interviews in Uganda with organization leaders and LRA survivors, the author sets the background for Kony’s rebellion and draws lessons from the work of ARLPI that shed new light on how religion relates to politics, how conflict can be resolved, and how a community can reclaim its future through locally initiated initiatives against overwhelming obstacles.
Accounting for Oneself
Adjusting to a World in Motion
Advancing the Human Right to Health
Aid and Development
The AIDS Generation
Aliens and Strangers?
The Alternatives to War
Altruism in Humans
American Arcadia
