Between the 1870s-90s, considerable attention was paid to Jews and Judaism by English critics and writers. Argues that the consideration of Jews by English writers was often in the context of their efforts to describe and improve the English character. Observes that alongside English antisemitism there existed English attitudes which were in effect protective of the Jews. These included the Evangelical Revival's desire to both protect and convert the Jew, the English self-definition as both tolerant and believing in God (in contrast with intolerant Spain of the Inquisition and godless France of the Revolution), and the view expressed in George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" which was affirmative of Judaism and the quest for a Jewish national homeland.
A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe. It’s senior year, and St. Joan’s Academy is a pressure cooker. Grades, college applications, boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends keep it together. Until the school’s queen bee suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. The mystery illness spreads to the school's popular clique, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor erupts into full-blown panic. Everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . . Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. "[Howe] has a gift for capturing the teenage mindset that nears the level of John Green."—USA Today "...this creepy, gripping novel is intimately real and layered, shedding light on the challenges teenage girls have faced throughout history."—The New York Times "A chilling guessing game . . . that will leave readers thinking about the power (and powerlessness) of young women in the past and present alike."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries. Exploring their reasons and the repercussions they faced, Kselman demonstrates how this expanded sense of liberty informs our secular age.
August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.
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.
This comprehensive handbook is a one-stop engineering reference. Covering data converter fundamentals, techniques, applications, and beginning with the basic theoretical elements necessary for a complete understanding of data converters, this reference covers all the latest advances in the field. This text describes in depth the theory behind and the practical design of data conversion circuits as well as describing the different architectures used in A/D and D/A converters. Details are provided on the design of high-speed ADCs, high accuracy DACs and ADCs, and sample-and-hold amplifiers. Also, this reference covers voltage sources and current reference, noise-shaping coding, and sigma-delta converters, and much more. The book's 900-plus pages are packed with design information and application circuits, including guidelines on selecting the most suitable converters for particular applications. You'll find the very latest information on:·Data converter fundamentals, such as key specifications, noise, sampling, and testing·Architectures and processes, including SAR, flash, pipelined, folding, and more·Practical hardware design techniques for mixed-signal systems, such as driving ADCs, buffering DAC outputs, sampling clocks, layout, interfacing, support circuits, and tools.·Data converter applications dealing with precision measurement, data acquisition, audio, display, DDS, software radio and many more. The accompanying CD-ROM provides software tools for testing and analyzing data converters as well as a searchable pdf version of the text.* Brings together a huge amount of information impossible to locate elsewhere.* Many recent advances in converter technology simply aren't covered in any other book.* A must-have design reference for any electronics design engineer or technician.
This book tackles the third major challenge and the second most difficult step in the ROI methodology: converting data to monetary values. When a particular project or program is connected to a business measure, the next logical question is: what is the monetary value of that impact? For ROI analysis, it is at this critical point where the monetary benefits are developed to compare to the costs of the program to calculate the ROI. Includes: the importance of converting data to monetary value; preliminary issues; standard values: the standard values: where to find them; using internal experts, using external databases; linking with other measures; using estimates; when to abandon conversion efforts and leave data as intangible, analyzing the intangibles; and reporting the intangibles.
This book by the acclaimed spiritual writer Fr. Haggerty offers penetrating observations into the phenomenon of Christian conversion. Arranged as a collection of concise, meditative reflections on various topics associated with conversion, it takes up many issues that are not often linked in spirituality to the crucial moment of a soul's return to God in conversion. The repercussions of sin, the proper understanding of mercy, the importance of a more radical response to the will of God, are naturally given attention. But, more unusually, the reflections in this book also treat other issues that ensue in the immediate aftermath of a conversion that can make the difference between a mediocre life with God and a truly holy life. The focus in certain chapters on love for the poor, on simplicity of lifestyle, on devotion to the Eucharist, as special graces that awaken in the immediate period after a conversion, is not commonly noted. The treatment of a "second conversion" in life is likewise a provoking contribution to enhance our desire to cross a decisive threshold of greater depth in our relations with God. The prospect of embracing a deep passion for God in our lives is the thematic undercurrent within the pages of this work.
Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.
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.
