"Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David W. Kling examines the dynamic of individuals, families, and people groups who turn to the Christian faith. Global in reach, this book 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), it is, when examined over two millennia, a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion, and no easily demonstrable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples. It also engages current theories and models to explain conversion and examines recurring themes in the converting process: gender, agency, motivation, testimony, coercion, self-identity, "true" conversion, music, communication, the body, and divine presence. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is, to date, the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies"--
The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. Lincoln Mullen traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice.
This study of the conversion of tribal peoples to Christianity combines case studies with the contributors' theories, challenging anthropologists and sociologists to reassess the varieties of religious experience and the convergent ...
As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large.
This book re-examines the issue of religious conversion, which has been a site of conflict in India for several centuries.
This collection ranges far and wide - from early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany - to investigate the multiple causes and characteristics of ...
Gordon T. Smith contends that a chief cause of spiritual immaturity in the evangelical church is an inadequate theology of conversion.
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.
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...
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 ...
H. Williams to Bickersteth, 26 December 1825, C N/O 93/8; Wright, New Zealand, 1769-1840, p. 151. 27. A. Earle, Narrative ofa Residence in New Zealand (1832), ed. E. H. McCormick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.