Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism

الغلاف الأمامي
University of California Press, 02‏/07‏/2007 - 277 من الصفحات
Evangelical Protestantism has arguably become the fastest-growing religion in South America, if not the world. For converts, it emphasizes self-discipline and provides a network of communal support, which together have helped many overcome substance abuse, avoid crime and violence, and resolve relationship problems. But can people simply decide to believe in a religion because of the benefits it reportedly delivers? Based on extensive fieldwork among Pentecostal men in Caracas, Venezuela, this rich urban ethnography seeks an explanation for the explosion of Evangelical Protestantism, unraveling the cultural and personal dynamics of Evangelical conversion to show how and why these men make the choice to convert, and how they come to have faith in a new system of beliefs and practices.

من داخل الكتاب

الصفحات المحددة

المحتوى

Part II Imaginative Rationality
45
Part III Relational Imagination
153
Epilogue
223
Appendix A Status of Evangelical Respondents after Five Years
225
Appendix B Methods and Methodology
228
Appendix C Quantitative Analysis of Networks and Conversion
237
Glossary of Spanish Terms
243
References
245
Index
259
حقوق النشر

طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

مقاطع مشهورة

الصفحة 197 - Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
الصفحة 100 - The Dualism of Human Nature." Our intelligence, like our activity, presents two very different forms: on the one hand, are sensations and sensory tendencies; on the other, conceptual thought and moral activity. Each of these two parts of ourselves represents a separate pole of our being, and these two poles are not only distinct from one another but are opposed to one another. Our sensory appetites are necessarily egoistic: they have our individuality and it alone as their object. When we satisfy...
الصفحة 102 - Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.
الصفحة 101 - states that are essentially by-products" (Sour Grapes 43). Elster explains that "Some mental and social states . . . can only come about as the by-product of actions undertaken for other ends. They can never, that is, be brought about intelligently or intentionally, because the very attempt to do so precludes the state one is trying to bring about
الصفحة 106 - LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.
الصفحة 180 - He defined agency as the stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world.
الصفحة 100 - Our thought, like our actions, takes two very different forms: on the one hand, there are sensations and sensory tendencies; on the other, conceptual thought and moral activity. Each of these two parts of ourselves represents a separate pole of our existence, and these two poles are not only distinct from one-another but are opposed to one-another.
الصفحة 152 - Men have functioned as subjects in the mode of governing; women have been anchored in the local and particular phase of the bifurcated world. It has been a condition of a man's being able to enter and become absorbed in the conceptual mode, and to forget the dependence of his being in that mode upon his bodily existence, that he does not have to focus his activities and interests upon his bodily existence. Full participation in the abstract mode of action requires liberation from attending to needs...
الصفحة 119 - Thus, what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident, namely that religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order (expressed through either or both rite and doctrine), that it has generic functions/features, and that it must not be confused with any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history. From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge,...
الصفحة 119 - From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized.

نبذة عن المؤلف (2007)

David Smilde is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. He is co-author, with Margarita López Maya and Keta Stephany, of Protesta y cultura en Venezuela: Los Marcos de acción colectiva en 1999.

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