A History of Christian Conversion
A History of Christian Conversion

Author: David W. Kling

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 0195320921

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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.

The Chance of Salvation
The Chance of Salvation

Author: Lincoln A. Mullen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674975626

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The Chance of Salvation offers a history of conversions in the United States which shows how religious identity came to be a matter of choice. Shortly after the American Revolution, people in the United States increasingly encountered an expanded array of religious options. Evangelical Protestants began an effort to convert Americans, while developing new practices that emphasized conversion as an immediate choice. Their missionary effort extended to Native American nations such as the Cherokee in the Southeast, who received Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and newly freed African Americans likewise created a variety of Christian conversion that was centered on religious hope and eschatological expectation. Mormons, drawing on earlier Protestant practices and beliefs, enthusiastically proselytized for a new tradition that emphasized individual choice and free will. By uncovering the way that religious identity is structured as an obligatory decision, this book explains why Americans change their religions so much, and why the United States is both highly religious in terms of religious affiliation and very secular in the sense that no religion is an unquestioned default.--

The Art of Conversion
The Art of Conversion

Author: Cécile Fromont

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-12-19

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1469618729

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Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion

Author: Lewis R. Rambo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 829

ISBN-13: 0199713545

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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.

Religious Conversion
Religious Conversion

Author: Professor Ira Katznelson

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-09-28

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1472421515

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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.

Christian Slavery
Christian Slavery

Author: Katharine Gerbner

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-02-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0812294904

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Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

Mission and Conversion
Mission and Conversion

Author: Martin Goodman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade outsiders to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new hypothesis about the origins of Christian proselytizing, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. Much of the book focusses on the history of Judaism in late antiquity. Dr Goodman makes a detailed and radical re-evaluation of the evidence for Jewish missionary attitudes in the late Second Temple and Talmudic periods, questioning many commonly held assumptions, in particular the view that Jews proselytized energetically in the first century CE. This leads him on to take issue with the common notion that the early Christian mission to the gentiles imitated or competed with contemporary Jews. Finally, the author puts forward some novel suggestions as to how the Jewish background to Christianity may nonetheless have contributed to the enthusiastic adoption of universal proselytizing by some followers of Jesus in the apostolic age.

Transforming Conversion
Transforming Conversion

Author: Gordon T. Smith

Publisher: Baker Academic

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1441212388

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This volume offers much-needed theological reflection on the phenomenon of conversion and transformation. Gordon Smith provides a robust evaluation that covers the broad range of thinking about conversion across Christian traditions and addresses global contexts. Smith contends that both in the church and in discussions about contemporary mission, the language of conversion inherited from revivalism is inadequate in helping to navigate the questions that shape how we do church, how we approach faith formation, how evangelism is integrated into congregational life, and how we witness to the faith in non-Christian environments. We must rethink the nature of the church in light of how people actually come to faith in Christ. After drawing on ancient and pre-revivalist wisdom on conversion, Smith delineates the contours of conversion and Christian initiation for today's church. He concludes by discussing the art of spiritual autobiography and what it means to be a congregation.

Religious Conversion
Religious Conversion

Author: Sarah Claerhout

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-05-06

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1000571130

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This book re-examines the issue of religious conversion, which has been a site of conflict in India for several centuries. It discusses wide-ranging themes such as conversion, education, and reform in colonial India; the process and practices of conversion in Christian Europe; Gandhi, conversion, and the equality of religions; perspectives from Hindu nationalism, secularism, and religious minorities; religious freedom and the limits of propagating religion; and conversion in constitutional law, commissions, and courts, to chart new directions for research on religion, tradition, and conversion. Tracing developments from the 19th-century colonial era to contemporary times, the book analyses cultural background frameworks and the origins of religious conversion and its conceptualisation in Western Christianity. It further delves into how Indian culture and its traditions have shaped responses to conversion. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of critical humanities, religion, cultural studies, sociology of religion, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology, theology, Indology, history, politics, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and South Asian studies.

The Conversion of Europe (TEXT ONLY)
The Conversion of Europe (TEXT ONLY)

Author: Richard Fletcher

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 1917

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13:

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The story of how Europe was converted to Christianity from 300AD until the barbarian Lithuanians finally capitulated at the astonishingly late date of 1386. It is an epic tale from one of the most gifted historians of today. This remarkable book examines the conversion of Europe to the Christian faith in the period following the collapse of the Roman Empire to approximately 1300 when the hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire was firmly established. One of the book’s great strengths is the degree to which it shows how little was inevitable about this process, how surrounded by uncertainties. What was the origin of the missionary impulse? Who were the activists who engaged in this work – the toilsome, often unrewarding, sometimes dangerous work of evangelisation, and how did they set about putting over this faith? How did a structure of ecclesiastical government come into being? Above all, at what point can one say that an individual or a society has become Christian? Fletcher’s range, lucidity and mastery of his sources brings the answers to these and many other questions as far within our grasp as they probably ever can be. Like Alan Bullock and Simon Schama, Fletcher is a historian with the true gift of a storyteller and a wide general readership ahead of him. Fletcher’s previous book, The Quest for El Cid won both the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History. This book is even better – the most impressive achievement so far of this strikingly gifted historian.