Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal(Contemporary Anthropology of Religion)

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary charges of anthropology as a discipline: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. In contrast to the portrayal of the distant cultural 'other' in ethnographic studies of tribal societies, this book shows that people who might be regarded by some as 'religious eccentrics' are quite comprehensible in terms of contemporary culture, while at the same time people who might be anyone's neighbors in fact inhabit a profoundly distinct world of experience. This new work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, sociology, studies of religion and ritual, cultural phenomenology, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American Studies.

Table of Contents:
PART ONE: MEANING AND MOVEMENT Building the Kingdom Religion in the Postmodern Condition PART TWO: HABITUS AND PRACTICE A Communitarian Ideal Ritualization and Radicalization INTERLUDE Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Charisma PART THREE: METAPHOR AND PERFORMANCE Ritual Language: Speaking the Kingdom Prophetic Utterance and Sacred Reality EPILOGUE Creativity, Constraint, and the Sacred

About the Author :
THOMAS J. CSORDAS Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994) and Body/Meaning/Healing (2002), and editor of Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (2004) and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009).

Review :
'A timely, well-written contribution to our understanding of a number of important phenomena in the contemporary world, this is also a contribution to debates over concepts and methods in anthropological and related scholarship.' - Erika Bourguignon, Ohio State University, USA 'Csordas is so familiar with the [Roman Catholic Charismatic] movement that he is to a large extent able to overcome the typical problem of the ethnographer - the assertion that his or her research may not be generalizable beyond the local situation.' - Peter Stromberg, University of Tulsa, USA 'This study of the Catholic charismatic renewal succeeds in the difficult feat of speaking both to specialists in a cluster of scholarly disciplines and to the general reader.' - R. W. Rousseau, University of Scranton, USA