Understanding Religious Conversion

Understanding Religious Conversion

Author: Lewis Ray Rambo

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780300065152

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Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.


Understanding Religious Conversion

Understanding Religious Conversion

Author: Lewis Ray Rambo

Publisher:

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780300052831

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Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.


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.


Transformative Religious Experience

Transformative Religious Experience

Author: Joshua Iyadurai

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-04-30

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1498270190

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What makes a priest of one religion become a preacher of another religion? How could a person embrace a religion suddenly that he or she had up to then opposed? Why would young women risk their reputation and endanger their lives for the sake of newfound faith? How could an alcoholic detest a sip of wine all of a sudden? What drives an atheist to become an ardent worshiper of God? How could an intelligent person relate to God as to an adult human being? Transformative Religious Experience answers these questions with fascinating narratives of conversion. These narratives together show how the transforming effects of conversion permeate the daily lives of converts in a multireligious context. Joshua Iyadurai analyzes psychologically the mystical turning point in the conversion process and finds that the divine-human encounter entails a cognitive restructuring: a new set of beliefs, values, and desires replaces previously held religious beliefs, values, and desires. By drawing insights from the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and theology, Iyadurai develops an interdisciplinary step model from a phenomenological perspective to explain the conversion process that incorporates the religious practices and social-psychological factors while giving a central place to religious experience.


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.


Understanding Religious Conversion

Understanding Religious Conversion

Author: Dong Young Kim

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2012-07-20

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1610976177

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Understanding Religious Conversion begins with emphasis on the value of respecting religious/theological interpretations of conversion while coordinating social scientific studies of how personal, social, and cultural issues are relevant to the human transformational process. It encourages us to bring together the perspectives of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies into critical and mutually-informing conversation for establishing a richer and more accurate perception of the complex phenomenon of religious conversion. The case of St. Augustine's conversion experience superbly illustrates the complicated and multidimensional process of religious change. By critically extending the contributions of the literature within Lewis Rambo's interdisciplinary framework, Dong Young Kim presents a more integrated picture of how personal, social, cultural, and religious/theological components interact with one another in the process of Augustine's conversion. In doing so, he has struggled with how to relocate more effectively and practically the conversion narrative of Augustine within the context of pastoral care and ministry (and the field of the academy)--in order to facilitate a better understanding of the conversion stories of the church members as well as to enhance the experiences of religious conversion within the Christian community.


Religious Identity and Social Change

Religious Identity and Social Change

Author: David Radford

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1317691725

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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.


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.--


Religious Conversion

Religious Conversion

Author: Christopher Lamb

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 1999-10-01

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0826437133

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Conversion has been an important issue for most of the universal religions - those usually associated with a founder, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism - which have a mission to spread their message. Other religions have been less concerned with conversion except in so far as it has been a negative force for them to confront. This study explores how conversion has been understood by different religions during different eras, and includes a survey of the textual, legal, ritual, historic and experiential dimensions of the phenomenon of conversion.