A Case Study in Christian Conversion

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In this article, the author tries to bring the practical theological conversion research into dialogue with the theory of social constructionism, which shifts attention from the intrapsychic experience of converts to the more contextual-communal understanding of conversion phenomena. The article proposes that a social constructionist perspective, particularly as it has apprehended the importance of narrative, is able to describe and interpret the processes of conversion experience. The author argues that the interaction between social sciences and theological empirical research creates a place for a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of conversion in which all researchers are invited and engaged in new contributions. Key words: Social constructionism, narration, practical-empirical theology, conversion, context, language.

Religião & Sociedade, 2010

By maintaining that it is not for the anthropologist to disempower native discourses, whatever the propositions of the latter may be, this work aims to take into account diverging statements concerning the processes of religious conversion. Different instances of conversion are not mobilized to be explained by the models presented, but to reveal both the presuppositions and the applicability of these models. In this way, and drawing support from ethnographic examples, the work looks to resituate certain questions about what a conversion is and how it occurs. Lastly, it analyses how the movements of conversion contemplated involve a challenge to the notions of acculturation or social change.

2020

This thematic issue aims to return to the phenomena of religious conversions as polymorphic social practices, and questions the various religious practices, temporalities and mobilities that result from them. The question of conversion has great historical depth, and gives rise to a diversity of interpretations and approaches, both epistemological and methodological (Buckser and Glazier 2003). Despite the abundant literature, however, conversion dynamics are generally understood in the social sciences in relation either to their spiritual dimension (Redford 1843; Brandt 2009) or their functionalist – or even utilitarian – dimension, covering the field of the “rationality of religious conversion” (Decobert 2000).Moreover, the notion of "conversion" is more often analysed on the basis of its narrative, its "biographical illustrations" (Le Pape 2010), and therefore described in the form of a standardised and standardising narrative (Mary and Piault 1998; Fabre 1998), “rupture” (Meyer 1999) or "radical change" (Robbins 2007) in the life of the convert. In African societies, social, economic and political characteristics – "the functionalist paradigm", in short (Willaime 1999: 22) – are generally mobilised as the preferred explanatory variables for explaining the conversions of individuals, pushing the researcher not only to move away from religious ideologies (Christian or Islamic in particular), but also to make the personal, or even intimate, dimension a secondary variable (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In the case of conversions to Pentecostalism, for example, crises of meaning, dictatorships, poverty or insecurity – "anomie", in in a word (Durkheim 1975 [1897]) – appear as the first-choice explanatory narratives for individual or mass conversions, which are actually two phenomenologically different phenomena (Mahieddin 2015). Voici le lien de l'appel en français https://polaf.hypotheses.org/5154 et en anglais https://polaf.hypotheses.org/5160

Theodor Dunkelgrün, Paweł Maciejko (eds.), Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present, 2020

Perichoresis, 2018

Conversion is a critical part of Evangelical theology and missiology. It has been defined as a crisis experience or a decision at a specific point in time. However, there is always an aspect of development, a process, involved. Increasingly, the phenomenon of conversion of those from non-Christian backgrounds, for example from other world religions, indicates that how they become followers of Christ is often characterised by a gradual journey, sometimes accompanied by visions and dreams. This paper looks at the phenomenon of conversion through a historical and missiological lens to explain and understand the dynamics of the conversion .

Pastoral Psychology, 2016

This article provides an introduction to the essays in this issue on the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, edited by Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian. After briefly discussing the origins of these essays in a session sponsored by the Religious Conversions Group at the 2015 American Academy of Religion annual meeting, as well as some of the broad historical trends and problems in the study of conversion(s), the essay provides a summary of each author's contributions and suggests that one particular topic— healing—deserves more attention in the study of conversion than it has heretofore enjoyed.

Entangled Religions, 2024

Religious conversion is a phenomenon that has intrigued scholars, theologians, and sociologists for centuries. As the conscious choice of a particular form of religion over another, it is fundamentally a form of religious contact. Religious conversion may be approached psychologically, sociologically, and conceptually. The contributions of this special issue show all three approaches and cover a wide array of geographical, socio-cultural, and religious contexts.

L. Meddi, The Spirituality of Conversion, in «The Person and the Challenges», 6 (2016) 2, 225–257 This quotation from the Book of Wisdom clearly emphasizes some aspects of the theme of this reflection. It lies within the bounds of the great religious reforms that occurred between the sixth and second centuries BC between the Indus Valley and Egypt, passing through the mystic reforms in Greece. Pastoral ministry and catechesis are called upon to collaborate with Wisdom so that the message enters the heart to form true believers.

Affect and Emotion in Multi-Religious Secular Societies (Edited By Christian von Scheve, Anna Lea Berg, Meike Haken, Nur Yasemin Ural), 2019

Indicating a symbolic transformation of subjectivity, conversion stories function as cultural techniques reproducing the belief in a ‘secular/religious divide’. In as much as the conversional experience is depicted as an immersive event of transcendence, affects serve as signifiers for the factuality of this experience authenticating the belief in a substantial difference of identity. But, which emotions characterize one’s being secular and how do people construe the emotionality of the religious subject? Focusing on the way religious converts affectively seal a division between secular and religious life, the article aims to study the cultural taxonomy of ‘the religious’ and the ‘the secular’ as an arrangement of feelings. In order to do so, I draw on field research in a Christian evangelical movement. The case study serves as a paradigm for contemporary modes of reviving religious beliefs in face of a secularized age reflecting a reformation of traditional notions of religiosity and secularity. Analyzing the language of embodied affects used in the conversion reports, I show that in the name of religion consciousness, agency, and being in control of one’s feelings reappear as politicized objects in the symbolic fight over the ‘religious/secular divide’.