Religious Conversion

This volume provides a sourcebook for the study of American religious conversion narratives. It includes chapters, arranged alphabetically, on 30 significant writers of conversion narratives including early colonial writers, such as Mary Rowlandson, 19th-century women writers, such as Carry Nation, 20th-century social gospel writers, such as Dorothy Day, writers from the age of televangelism, such as Jim Bakker, and writers from outside the mainstream of American culture, such as Frederick Douglass, Eldridge Cleaver, and Piri Thomas. Each entry provides a short biography, discussions of the narrative and the critical response, and a bibliography.

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

First published in 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience initiated the psychological study of religion, paving the way for Freud and Jung as well as for clinical and paranormal branches of psychology. Written with humour and erudition, its theories of conversion, saintliness, ecstasy and mysticism continue to provoke controversy and inquiry. The book remains the best introduction to James's thought, demonstrating his characteristic insistence upon the importance of personal experience and his almost devotional respect for the mysteries of the human mind. Richly illustrated with personal accounts of belief and possession, intoxication and near-death experience, it is of central importance not simply to an understanding of religions, but to modern psychology and psychiatric medicine.The Routledge Centenary Edition, entirely reset from the original 1902 edition, is prefaced with a specially commissioned foreword by the author's grandson, Micky James, and with new introductions from James specialists Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette. It also includes a new and expanded index.

"Because conversion gets to the question of how societal change occurs not merely in individuals but in groups, these essays make a valuable contribution to a topic that has generally been treated only in a narrow context .... The essays on women and conversion make an especially valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of women's role in religion".-- James M. Powell, Syracuse University

Contributors describe the wide range of religious experiences characteristic of the conversion of Europe to Christianity in the Middle Ages. From St. Augustine, the model of personal experience, to the conversion of entire societies -- like the Saxons in the eighth century or the Lithuanians in the thirteenth to the role of women in conversion, they examine one of the most important aspects of the spiritual transformation of Europe during the Middle Ages.

This is a controversial and important new examination of the origins of Christian mission, set against the background of ancient Judaism and the pagan culture of the Roman Empire. The author's conclusions suggest that mission was not inherent to either early Judaism or Christianity, and was only sporadically practiced in antiquity by these religions. Clear, accessible, and at the same time displaying considerable scholarship, this book will provide an important challenge and a stimulus to both theologians and historians. In invites a total reconsideration of the grounds for religious conversion in both Christianity and Judaism.

'An extremely valuable contribution, it makes clear--for the first time--how completely converts dominated the intellectual life of British and American Catholicism....Brisk and lively, eminently readable.' - Philip Gleason, University of Notre Dame

With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, "respectable" community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.