Aliens & Strangers?
The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals
Aliens & Strangers?
The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals
This item is currently unavailable.
Enter your email address below and we will email you when the item comes into stock.
Hardback
£107.50
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198724469
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 18/06/2015
Width: 16.3 cm
Height: 23.9 cm
In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. 'St John's' is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle - a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John's see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of members of St John's are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers' both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.
1. Modernity, Faith, and the City ; 2. Dividing the Subject: Embodiment, Interrelationality, and Ethical Subjectivity ; 3. Speaking Subjects: Difference, Indifference, and Moral Fragmentation ; 4. The Listening 'I' ; 5. What does God want? Coherence, Love, and the Personality of God ; 6. Of Time, the Body and the City: Belief, Absence, and Incompleteness ; Conclusion: The Conflict and Tragedy of Culture ; Bibliography
This is an outstanding book. Well-written, accessible and thought-provoking, it needs to be read not only by students and scholars of contemporary evangelical Christianity but by all those interested in contemporary (un)settlements of religion and the city. * Paul-FranAois Tremlett, Culture and Religion * Both ethnographically rich and theoretically rigorous, this is an important book that speaks to multiple concerns and disciplines. * Jon Bialecki, Theology * Aliens and Strangers? compels us to reconsider positions we may have held, and to reconcile competing narratives of what it means to be religious in a secular and cosmopolitan environment. In essence, Strhan invites us to struggle along with her and her participants to make sense of religious life. * Katie Gaddini, The British Journal of Sociology * Aliens and strangers? is a book significantly and creatively engaged with work in the anthropology of Christianity focused on materiality, language, embodiment, values, and morality. But its profound reckoning with the Simmelian themes of fragmentation and the quest for coherence is genuinely novel within that literature, and the ring of ethnographic truth these themes achieve in this study of St Johnas recommends them strongly as topics for further
investigation. * Joel Robbins, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute * This is a fantastic book. Anna Strhan brings us, through her wonderful ethnography, into the heart of a Christian congregation in the belly of the City of London. Her observations of the ways in which these Christians navigate work and faith, Church and culture, are deeply revealing of the fault lines and fissures in secular modernity. But what really sweeps the reader away is her theoretical sophistication, her ability to bring the sociological theory, the
anthropology of Christianity, and urban studies into a distinctive configuration. Strhan is a major new voice in the sociology of religion. Aliens and Strangers? Lucky us. We'll be reading it for a long time to come * Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics * If you read only one book about evangelicalism, make it this one. No other scholar has accessed the ways this movement provides specific epistemological resources to survive in everyday modernity. Strhan does this, developing a richly human portrait of the ways certain evangelical metaphors, social relations, and interpretive systems offer usable hermeneutic tools for people trying to reckon with the contradictions of capitalist desire and the inevitability of
physical, material, and emotional suffering. This is a book that doesn't apply theory to individual lives, but instead discerns how individuals theoretically reason between many competing concepts of self and society. Anna Strhan is an impeccable ethnographer, but even more: in this book, she shines as an
incomparable humanist * Kathryn Lofton, Yale University * This is a wonderful book that leads us into some unexpected places. The everyday lives of conservative evangelicals in London are portrayed with immense subtlety. We learn about faith but also doubt, triumph but also shame, religious subjectivity alongside metropolitan sensibility. By the end, we have to reconsider what we thought we knew about religious coherence-and about conservatism itself * Simon Coleman, University of Toronto *
