In this evocative ethnography, Omri Elisha examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strateg... more In this evocative ethnography, Omri Elisha examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strategies of American evangelical Christians as they engage socially with local communities. Focusing on two Tennessee megachurches, Moral Ambition reaches beyond political controversies over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and public prayer to highlight the ways that evangelicals at the grassroots of the Christian Right promote faith-based causes intended to improve the state of social welfare. The book shows how these ministries both help churchgoers embody religious virtues and create provocative new opportunities for evangelism on a public scale. Elisha challenges conventional views of U.S. evangelicalism as narrowly individualistic, elucidating instead the inherent contradictions that activists face in their efforts to reconcile religious conservatism with a renewed interest in compassion, poverty, racial justice, and urban revivalism.
How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article ex... more How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article examines how events from the recorded past factor into predictive forecasts among professional astrologers for whom celestial patterns are indicative of shifting and evolving world-historical trends. Drawing on examples from prominent voices in the North American astrology community, across a range of commercial and social media platforms, I outline the parameters of what I call “astrological historicity,” a temporal orientation guided by archetypal principles closely associated with New Age metaphysics and psychodynamic theories of the self. I argue that while such sensibilities reinforce an ethos of therapeutic spirituality, they are not so narrowly individualistic as to preclude social and political considerations. Astrological historicity is at times a vehicle for culturally resonant expressions of historical consciousness, including critical awareness of historical legacies of racial and social injustice that directly link the past to the present and foreseeable future. Furthermore, while astrological accounts of history emulate aspects of modern historicism, including its orientation toward linear temporality and developmental themes, they rely on a nonlinear framework predicated on recurring cycles, correspondences, and synchronicities, bringing a complex heterotemporality to bear on world-historical circumstances. In seeking to understand the moral and political entailments of this area of occult knowledge production, this article aims to shed light on astrology’s cultural appeal not just as popular entertainment, spirituality, or therapy, but as an intellectual and cultural resource for many people searching for ways to express their frustration and disillusionment with reigning political-economic systems and authorities.
This article examines the role of language as a key metaphor and medium of occult sociality among... more This article examines the role of language as a key metaphor and medium of occult sociality among contemporary Western astrologers. I argue that the 'symbolic language' attributed to celestial objects and patterns informs everyday speech acts and reinforces shared commitments to the authority of astrological tradition, in the relative absence of conventional structures of belief and belonging. At the same time, the flexibility and versatility of horoscopic symbols authorize diverse and idiosyncratic adaptations, creating patterns of discord and fragmentation often framed as characteristic of the astrology community. I argue that the tension between notions of metaphysical community and professionalization, on the one hand, and the virtues of epistemological individualism and eclecticism, on the other, is a constitutive tension at the heart of Western metaphysical practice. This approach complicates straightforward models of community as consensus, and at the same time challenges common stereotypes about the atomizing effects of alternative spiritualities.
Praise dance is a Christian movement genre, popular among churchgoing women of color in the Unite... more Praise dance is a Christian movement genre, popular among churchgoing women of color in the United States, characterized by the use of interpretive dances as vehicles of liturgical worship, testimony, and evangelism. Combining spiritual and artistic disciplines, including techniques derived from ballet and modern dance, black female praise dancers embody the gospel and cultivate religious authority in ways that reinforce orthodox norms while elevating creative skills and aesthetic sensibilities normally found outside the purview of religious tradition. Such efforts, and the challenges and opportunities they entail, demonstrate how the movement of cultural forms between secular and religious domains influences ritual innovations and the terms in which they are authorized. They also show how gendered conceptions of embodiment and power may be reimagined.
This afterword offers a brief commentary on the chapters in this volume, addressing key themes wi... more This afterword offers a brief commentary on the chapters in this volume, addressing key themes with regard to the role of the request in religious humanitarianism, while highlighting other, less explicit but no less prevalent themes. Included here is the capacity for acts and processes of asking to generate moral anxieties, miscommunications, and uncertainties, even as they are imagined or fashioned to function as means of disambiguation. Building on the ethnographic case studies, the afterword analyzes the category of the request as a multimodal medium, based in ethical and religious norms of reciprocity and yet suffused with elements of mystery regarding outcomes and affordances that are often difficult for interested parties to anticipate.
This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church ... more This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church in the New York Dance Parade, which they regarded as an opportunity to promote worship as the true purpose of art and engage in spiritual warfare. Their participation was predicated on a distinction between “performance” and “ministry,” privileging the latter. I argue that upholding this distinction in the immersive context of a secular festival required a process of intensive ritualization, involving physical and spiritual preparations and symbolic boundary maintenance. I further argue that anthropological perspectives on such instances of public religion should seek to account for how ritual forms produce and are shaped by the effects of what I call proximation, a condition of “closeness” between categories of activity otherwise regarded as separate and autonomous (e.g., religion and the arts). The concept is a means to explore how religious ministries are influenced by ostensibly external factors and the need to manage them, and by the various opportunities, tensions, and moral associations that arise when ritual strategies evoke comparisons with secular genres and domains. The proximations of religion highlight the ethnographic significance of ideal-typical categories and spheres, including their potential to intersect, which is a byproduct of how they have been differentiated.
This article examines the significance of mediation in the public programming and activism of The... more This article examines the significance of mediation in the public programming and activism of The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), an organization that offers international aid and advocacy to Christians identified as victims of persecution. Focusing on VOM's efforts to rally Westerners, especially evangelical Protestants, I argue that the antipersecution movement urges supporters to share the mantle of martyrdom by engaging in purposeful acts of religious mediation, including the consumption and circulation of martyrological media. I explore a related tendency among evangelicals to valorize non-Western Christians in precarious circumstances as exemplars of self-sacrificing piety, whose suffering represents and inspires conditions of sanctification. Drawing on media analysis and fieldwork, I explore how practices of mediation, as forms of " witness, " invite evangelicals to embody otherwise elusive virtues and modes of agency associated with Christian martyrs, while reflecting ambiguous modern conceptions of the nature of embodied suffering and the relationship between vulnerability and power.
ABSTRACT
This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer... more ABSTRACT This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer,’ a movement organized around prayer networks and public rituals that highlight religious concerns deemed specific to cities and metropolitan regions. Building on research that includes ethnographic fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, and focusing on the discourse and practical strategies of citywide prayer, the article argues that advocates of this movement promote a style of evangelical urbanism in which prayer serves as a key medium for reimagining one’s sense of place, against the disorientation and alienation associated with urban life. Moreover, prayer is presented as a medium for marking time in non-secular terms, as is demonstrated in the use of technologies of religious discipline such as annotated prayer calendars, which invite participants to inhabit multiple coexisting temporalities. It is further suggested that when enacted this evangelical urbanism constitutes a form of urban praxis, enabling projects of emplacement that respond to larger forces that are seen otherwise to limit grass-roots agency. Among the wider implications of this discussion is the observation that evangelical revivals, despite their well-known emphasis on individual salvation and millennialist fervor, are oriented toward and engaged with situated social realities of the ‘here and now,’ including the rhythms of daily life in modern cities.
This article explores the cultural significance of faith among US evangelical Protestants. It is ... more This article explores the cultural significance of faith among US evangelical Protestants. It is argued that evangelical conceptions of faith provide an idiom for expressing religiosity that transcends conventional notions of belief, which alone do not account for the ideals of evangelical subjectivity. Through an analysis of group rituals in a Tennessee megachurch, along with a discussion of the historical roots of evangelical theology and the growing influence of charismatic Christianity, the article highlights an emphasis on radical intersubjectivity that calls upon the faithful to submit to the totalizing authority of divine agency. It is further argued that evangelical conceptions of faith feature a strand of anti-humanism that resonates with the increasingly authoritarian politics of the post-welfare era, which are explored in relation to the growing phenomenon of altruistic faith-based activism.
Based on fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, I analyze the ethical dilemmas of conservative evange... more Based on fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, I analyze the ethical dilemmas of conservative evangelical Protestants engaged in faith-based activism and social outreach, especially dilemmas stemming from the theological paradox of compassion and accountability. Evangelicals who minister to the poor and distressed must reconcile romanticized notions of pure sacrificial giving with an ideology of personal responsibility inherent in their concept of accountability. Socially engaged evangelicals struggle with competing moral ambitions and religious imperatives that derive meaning from an overarching rubric of Christian evangelism, in which gifts of divine grace are seen as creating reciprocal obligations as well as insurmountable debt on the part of recipients. The outreach efforts of suburban churchgoers are further complicated by unequal power dynamics between charitable givers and charity recipients. While exploring the complexities of a vernacular theology through which socially engaged evangelicals wrestle with these issues, I discuss theoretical and political implications of the case study, including the role of activism in shaping religious identities and the resurgence of religious conservatism in U.S. civil society and public culture.
In this evocative ethnography, Omri Elisha examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strateg... more In this evocative ethnography, Omri Elisha examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strategies of American evangelical Christians as they engage socially with local communities. Focusing on two Tennessee megachurches, Moral Ambition reaches beyond political controversies over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and public prayer to highlight the ways that evangelicals at the grassroots of the Christian Right promote faith-based causes intended to improve the state of social welfare. The book shows how these ministries both help churchgoers embody religious virtues and create provocative new opportunities for evangelism on a public scale. Elisha challenges conventional views of U.S. evangelicalism as narrowly individualistic, elucidating instead the inherent contradictions that activists face in their efforts to reconcile religious conservatism with a renewed interest in compassion, poverty, racial justice, and urban revivalism.
How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article ex... more How do invocations of history inform speculative discourses in Western astrology? This article examines how events from the recorded past factor into predictive forecasts among professional astrologers for whom celestial patterns are indicative of shifting and evolving world-historical trends. Drawing on examples from prominent voices in the North American astrology community, across a range of commercial and social media platforms, I outline the parameters of what I call “astrological historicity,” a temporal orientation guided by archetypal principles closely associated with New Age metaphysics and psychodynamic theories of the self. I argue that while such sensibilities reinforce an ethos of therapeutic spirituality, they are not so narrowly individualistic as to preclude social and political considerations. Astrological historicity is at times a vehicle for culturally resonant expressions of historical consciousness, including critical awareness of historical legacies of racial and social injustice that directly link the past to the present and foreseeable future. Furthermore, while astrological accounts of history emulate aspects of modern historicism, including its orientation toward linear temporality and developmental themes, they rely on a nonlinear framework predicated on recurring cycles, correspondences, and synchronicities, bringing a complex heterotemporality to bear on world-historical circumstances. In seeking to understand the moral and political entailments of this area of occult knowledge production, this article aims to shed light on astrology’s cultural appeal not just as popular entertainment, spirituality, or therapy, but as an intellectual and cultural resource for many people searching for ways to express their frustration and disillusionment with reigning political-economic systems and authorities.
This article examines the role of language as a key metaphor and medium of occult sociality among... more This article examines the role of language as a key metaphor and medium of occult sociality among contemporary Western astrologers. I argue that the 'symbolic language' attributed to celestial objects and patterns informs everyday speech acts and reinforces shared commitments to the authority of astrological tradition, in the relative absence of conventional structures of belief and belonging. At the same time, the flexibility and versatility of horoscopic symbols authorize diverse and idiosyncratic adaptations, creating patterns of discord and fragmentation often framed as characteristic of the astrology community. I argue that the tension between notions of metaphysical community and professionalization, on the one hand, and the virtues of epistemological individualism and eclecticism, on the other, is a constitutive tension at the heart of Western metaphysical practice. This approach complicates straightforward models of community as consensus, and at the same time challenges common stereotypes about the atomizing effects of alternative spiritualities.
Praise dance is a Christian movement genre, popular among churchgoing women of color in the Unite... more Praise dance is a Christian movement genre, popular among churchgoing women of color in the United States, characterized by the use of interpretive dances as vehicles of liturgical worship, testimony, and evangelism. Combining spiritual and artistic disciplines, including techniques derived from ballet and modern dance, black female praise dancers embody the gospel and cultivate religious authority in ways that reinforce orthodox norms while elevating creative skills and aesthetic sensibilities normally found outside the purview of religious tradition. Such efforts, and the challenges and opportunities they entail, demonstrate how the movement of cultural forms between secular and religious domains influences ritual innovations and the terms in which they are authorized. They also show how gendered conceptions of embodiment and power may be reimagined.
This afterword offers a brief commentary on the chapters in this volume, addressing key themes wi... more This afterword offers a brief commentary on the chapters in this volume, addressing key themes with regard to the role of the request in religious humanitarianism, while highlighting other, less explicit but no less prevalent themes. Included here is the capacity for acts and processes of asking to generate moral anxieties, miscommunications, and uncertainties, even as they are imagined or fashioned to function as means of disambiguation. Building on the ethnographic case studies, the afterword analyzes the category of the request as a multimodal medium, based in ethical and religious norms of reciprocity and yet suffused with elements of mystery regarding outcomes and affordances that are often difficult for interested parties to anticipate.
This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church ... more This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church in the New York Dance Parade, which they regarded as an opportunity to promote worship as the true purpose of art and engage in spiritual warfare. Their participation was predicated on a distinction between “performance” and “ministry,” privileging the latter. I argue that upholding this distinction in the immersive context of a secular festival required a process of intensive ritualization, involving physical and spiritual preparations and symbolic boundary maintenance. I further argue that anthropological perspectives on such instances of public religion should seek to account for how ritual forms produce and are shaped by the effects of what I call proximation, a condition of “closeness” between categories of activity otherwise regarded as separate and autonomous (e.g., religion and the arts). The concept is a means to explore how religious ministries are influenced by ostensibly external factors and the need to manage them, and by the various opportunities, tensions, and moral associations that arise when ritual strategies evoke comparisons with secular genres and domains. The proximations of religion highlight the ethnographic significance of ideal-typical categories and spheres, including their potential to intersect, which is a byproduct of how they have been differentiated.
This article examines the significance of mediation in the public programming and activism of The... more This article examines the significance of mediation in the public programming and activism of The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), an organization that offers international aid and advocacy to Christians identified as victims of persecution. Focusing on VOM's efforts to rally Westerners, especially evangelical Protestants, I argue that the antipersecution movement urges supporters to share the mantle of martyrdom by engaging in purposeful acts of religious mediation, including the consumption and circulation of martyrological media. I explore a related tendency among evangelicals to valorize non-Western Christians in precarious circumstances as exemplars of self-sacrificing piety, whose suffering represents and inspires conditions of sanctification. Drawing on media analysis and fieldwork, I explore how practices of mediation, as forms of " witness, " invite evangelicals to embody otherwise elusive virtues and modes of agency associated with Christian martyrs, while reflecting ambiguous modern conceptions of the nature of embodied suffering and the relationship between vulnerability and power.
ABSTRACT
This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer... more ABSTRACT This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer,’ a movement organized around prayer networks and public rituals that highlight religious concerns deemed specific to cities and metropolitan regions. Building on research that includes ethnographic fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, and focusing on the discourse and practical strategies of citywide prayer, the article argues that advocates of this movement promote a style of evangelical urbanism in which prayer serves as a key medium for reimagining one’s sense of place, against the disorientation and alienation associated with urban life. Moreover, prayer is presented as a medium for marking time in non-secular terms, as is demonstrated in the use of technologies of religious discipline such as annotated prayer calendars, which invite participants to inhabit multiple coexisting temporalities. It is further suggested that when enacted this evangelical urbanism constitutes a form of urban praxis, enabling projects of emplacement that respond to larger forces that are seen otherwise to limit grass-roots agency. Among the wider implications of this discussion is the observation that evangelical revivals, despite their well-known emphasis on individual salvation and millennialist fervor, are oriented toward and engaged with situated social realities of the ‘here and now,’ including the rhythms of daily life in modern cities.
This article explores the cultural significance of faith among US evangelical Protestants. It is ... more This article explores the cultural significance of faith among US evangelical Protestants. It is argued that evangelical conceptions of faith provide an idiom for expressing religiosity that transcends conventional notions of belief, which alone do not account for the ideals of evangelical subjectivity. Through an analysis of group rituals in a Tennessee megachurch, along with a discussion of the historical roots of evangelical theology and the growing influence of charismatic Christianity, the article highlights an emphasis on radical intersubjectivity that calls upon the faithful to submit to the totalizing authority of divine agency. It is further argued that evangelical conceptions of faith feature a strand of anti-humanism that resonates with the increasingly authoritarian politics of the post-welfare era, which are explored in relation to the growing phenomenon of altruistic faith-based activism.
Based on fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, I analyze the ethical dilemmas of conservative evange... more Based on fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, I analyze the ethical dilemmas of conservative evangelical Protestants engaged in faith-based activism and social outreach, especially dilemmas stemming from the theological paradox of compassion and accountability. Evangelicals who minister to the poor and distressed must reconcile romanticized notions of pure sacrificial giving with an ideology of personal responsibility inherent in their concept of accountability. Socially engaged evangelicals struggle with competing moral ambitions and religious imperatives that derive meaning from an overarching rubric of Christian evangelism, in which gifts of divine grace are seen as creating reciprocal obligations as well as insurmountable debt on the part of recipients. The outreach efforts of suburban churchgoers are further complicated by unequal power dynamics between charitable givers and charity recipients. While exploring the complexities of a vernacular theology through which socially engaged evangelicals wrestle with these issues, I discuss theoretical and political implications of the case study, including the role of activism in shaping religious identities and the resurgence of religious conservatism in U.S. civil society and public culture.
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This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer,’ a movement organized around prayer networks and public rituals that highlight religious concerns deemed specific to cities and metropolitan regions. Building on research that includes ethnographic fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, and focusing on the discourse and practical strategies of citywide prayer, the article argues that advocates of this movement promote a style of evangelical urbanism in which prayer serves as a key medium for reimagining one’s sense of place, against the disorientation and alienation associated with urban life. Moreover, prayer is presented as a medium for marking time in non-secular terms, as is demonstrated in the use of technologies of religious discipline such as annotated prayer calendars, which invite participants to inhabit multiple coexisting temporalities. It is further suggested that when enacted this evangelical urbanism constitutes a form of urban praxis, enabling projects of emplacement that respond to larger forces that are seen otherwise to limit grass-roots agency. Among the wider implications of this discussion is the observation that evangelical revivals, despite their well-known emphasis on individual salvation and millennialist fervor, are oriented toward and engaged with situated social realities of the ‘here and now,’
including the rhythms of daily life in modern cities.
This article explores a recent trend in evangelical revivalism known as ‘citywide prayer,’ a movement organized around prayer networks and public rituals that highlight religious concerns deemed specific to cities and metropolitan regions. Building on research that includes ethnographic fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, and focusing on the discourse and practical strategies of citywide prayer, the article argues that advocates of this movement promote a style of evangelical urbanism in which prayer serves as a key medium for reimagining one’s sense of place, against the disorientation and alienation associated with urban life. Moreover, prayer is presented as a medium for marking time in non-secular terms, as is demonstrated in the use of technologies of religious discipline such as annotated prayer calendars, which invite participants to inhabit multiple coexisting temporalities. It is further suggested that when enacted this evangelical urbanism constitutes a form of urban praxis, enabling projects of emplacement that respond to larger forces that are seen otherwise to limit grass-roots agency. Among the wider implications of this discussion is the observation that evangelical revivals, despite their well-known emphasis on individual salvation and millennialist fervor, are oriented toward and engaged with situated social realities of the ‘here and now,’
including the rhythms of daily life in modern cities.