Communities of the Converted
Communities of the Converted

Author: Catherine Wanner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-05-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0801461901

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

The Convert
The Convert

Author: Stefan Hertmans

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1524747092

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards In this dazzling work of historical fiction, the Man Booker International–long-listed author of War and Turpentine reconstructs the tragic story of a medieval noblewoman who leaves her home and family for the love of a Jewish boy. In eleventh-century France, Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous Christian family, falls in love with David Todros, a rabbi’s son and yeshiva student. To be together, the couple must flee their city, and Vigdis must renounce her life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father’s knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe with the onset of the First Crusade. What begins as a story of forbidden love evolves into a globe-trotting trek spanning continents, as Vigdis undertakes an epic journey to Cairo and back, enduring the unimaginable in hopes of finding her lost children. Based on two fragments from the Cairo Genizah—a repository of more than three hundred thousand manuscripts and documents stored in the upper chamber of a synagogue in Old Cairo—Stefan Hertmans has pieced together a remarkable work of imagination, re-creating the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers whose steps he retraces almost a millennium later. Blending fact and fiction, and with immense imagination and stylistic ingenuity, Hertmans painstakingly depicts Vigdis’s terrible trials, bringing the Middle Ages to life and illuminating a chaotic world of love and hate.

Converted
Converted

Author: Neil Hoyne

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0593420667

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When the world’s biggest brands want to sharpen their digital marketing strategy, they call Neil Hoyne – Google’s Chief Measurement Strategist and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School. In his first book, he offers a simple, research-backed playbook that anyone can use to find their best customers and develop relationships that last. Under pressure for quick results and facing fierce marketplace competition, too many marketers are boxed into spaghetti-to-the-wall forms of digital marketing that limit the potential of their long hours, countless experiments, and warehouses of data. And in the end, they watch their competition sprint ahead. But what if you built a business around long-term relationships with customers, using data to understand who they are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them? You can. And you’ll leave your competitors, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, to poke around in the scraps. In Converted, you will learn how to: • Understand the full value of each relationship • Engage in an ongoing conversation with your best customers • Ask the right questions so you can anticipate your customers’ needs • Find more great customers A real person is always on the other end of the transaction. Converted shows you how to win their hearts.

Preaching the Converted
Preaching the Converted

Author: Samantha Zacher

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2009-05-16

Total Pages: 1106

ISBN-13: 144269131X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest surviving collections of Old English homilies and poems, compiled in England in the tenth century. Preaching the Converted provides a sustained literary analysis of the book's prose homilies and demonstrates that they employ rhetorical techniques commonly associated with vernacular verse. The study argues that the dazzling textual complexity of these homilies rivals the most accomplished examples of Old English poetry. Highlighting the use of word play, verbal and structural repetition, elaborate catalogues, and figurative language, Samantha Zacher's study of the Vercelli Book fills a gap in the history of English preaching by foregrounding the significance of these prose homilies as an intermediary form. Also analyzing the Latin and vernacular sources behind the Vercelli texts to reveal the theological and formal interests informing the collection as a whole, Preaching the Converted is a rigorous examination of Old English homiletic rhetoric and poetics.

The Convert
The Convert

Author: Deborah Baker

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2011-05-10

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1555970281

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist* A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam's argument with the West. A cache of Maryam's letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends the acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam's adoptive father and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam. As she assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised by Maryam's journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And then there's this: Is the life depicted in Maryam's letters home and in her books an honest reflection of the one she lived? Like many compelling and true tales, The Convert is stranger than fiction. It is a gripping account of a life lived on the radical edge and a profound meditation on the cultural conflicts that frustrate mutual understanding.

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert
The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

Author: Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 9781884527821

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Rosaria, by the standards of many, was living a very good life. She had a tenured position at a large university in a field for which she cared deeply. She owned two homes with her partner, in which they provided hospitality to students and activists that were looking to make a difference in the world. In the community, Rosaria was involved in volunteer work. At the university, she was a respected advisor of students and her department's curriculum. And then, in her late 30s, Rosaria encountered something that turned her world upside down -- the idea that Christianity, a religion that she had regarded as problematic and sometimes downright damaging, might be right about who God was. That idea seemed to fly in the face of the people and causes that she most loved. What follows is a story of what she describes as a train wreck at the hand of the supernatural. These are her secret thoughts about those events, written as only a reflective English professor could."--Back cover.

The Conversion Book
The Conversion Book

Author: Sean C. McVeigh

Publisher: McVeigh Ministries Incorporated

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780984101153

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pope John XXIII said that "Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously." He also said we need to "Discover ways of teaching the faith more effectively." Largely in response to these types of directives from our Catholic Church leaders, Catholic author and guest speaker, Sean McVeigh, has written The Conversion Book: How to Effectively Help Protestants Convert to Catholicism. It provides a unique, modern, and powerful approach to Catholic evangelization. The Conversion Book is intended for adult and young adult Catholics of all levels of religious and evangelization experience. Whether the reader is a seasoned evangelist or someone who has never talked to another person about God before, The Conversion Book is specifically designed to help that person improve his or her ability to effectively share his or her belief in Jesus Christ and the teachings of Jesus' Holy Catholic Church. As each reader discovers very early in this publication, the process of training for effective evangelization begins with an intense focus on one's own prayer life and spiritual discernment. After the individual is spiritually prepared, Sean takes each reader through a very specific and systematic approach to evangelization that is sure to surprise many of the evangelizer's listeners. Ultimately, through using this approach, there will be many Protestants who will realize their need to leave some of their current theological ways of thinking behind in order to more fully embrace the truth that Jesus wants them to know and follow. The author believes there will be a massive exodus of people leaving the Protestant belief system in order to become Catholic once they have had the truth presented to them in an extremely effective and mature way. However, this exodus will only happen if Catholics at large intensify their evangelization efforts while implementing the most effective methods possible in helping Protestants convert. Lastly, this publication is a great resource for Protestants who are interested in learning more about the core differences between the Catholic and Protestant faiths.