Cultural Conversions

The essays in this volume study cultural conversions that arose from missionary activities in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries effected changes that often went beyond what they had intended, sometimes backfiring against the missions. These changes entailed wrenching political struggles to redefine families, communities, and lines of authority. This volume’s contributors examine the meanings of "conversion" for individuals and communities in light of loyalties and cultural traditions, and consider how conversion, as a process, was often ambiguous. The history of Christian missions emerges from these pages as an integral part of world history that has stretched beyond professing Christians to affect the lives of peoples who have consciously rejected or remained largely unaware of missionary appeals.

In the terms of Durkheimian sociology, conversion is a fait social. Although they are rarely treated as a cultural phenomenon, conversions can obviously be examined for the norms, values and presuppositions of the cultures in which they take place. Thus conversion can help us to shed light on a particular culture. At the same time, the term evokes a dramatic appeal that suggests a kind of suddenness, although in most cases conversion implies a more gradual process of establishing and defining a new - religious - identity. From 21-24 May, 2003, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'Cultures of Conversion'. The contributions have been edited in two volumes, which pay special attention to the modes of language and idiom in conversion literature, the meaning and sense of religious-ideological discourse, the variety of rhetorical tropes, and the effects of the conversion narrative with allusions to religious or political conventions and idealizations. The present volume offers in-depth studies of conversion that are mainly taken from the history of India, Islam and Judaism, ranging from the Byzantine period to the new Muslimas of the West. The other volume, Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion, in addition to stimulating case studies, contains theoretical contributions on the theory of conversion, with special attention to the rational choice theory and to the history of research into conversion.

This volume concerns the cultural interactions during the Zhou period of China (c.a. 1000-350 BCE) between the Suizao corridor (near the present-day Yangtze River region) and its contemporaries within or outside the Zhou realm. It mainly, but not exclusively, concentrates on bronze ritual vessels from the Suizao corridor.

This four-volume work provides a detailed, multicultural survey of established as well as "new" American religions and investigates the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, politics, regionalism, ethics, and popular culture. This revised and expanded edition of Religion and American Cultures: Tradition, Diversity, and Popular Expression presents more than 140 essays that address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. The entries cover virtually every religion in modern-day America as well as the role of religion in various aspects of U.S. culture. Readers will discover that Americans aren't largely Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish anymore, and that the number of popular religious identities is far greater than many would imagine. And although most Americans believe in a higher power, the fastest growing identity in the United States is the "nones"—those Americans who elect "none" when asked about their religious identity—thereby demonstrating how many individuals see their spirituality as something not easily defined or categorized. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices, covering the range of different religions among Anglo-Americans and Euro-Americans as well as spirituality among Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, addressing topics such as film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, and new religious expressions. The new third volume expands the range of topics covered with in-depth essays on additional topics such as interfaith families, religion in prisons, belief in the paranormal, and religion after September 11, 2001. The fourth volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents.

Approaching us in sovereign freedom, God comes alive to us, we come alive to God, and all creation comes alive as a sign pointing to God. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives and discloses himself in this immediate way as our ultimate context and host, within the provisional medium of creation. This life-giving gospel is met by blindness, however, among those who live today in a collapsing Western culture. This is because their imaginative world is shaped by habitual assumptions and practices that lie--largely unacknowledged--deep within that culture, and that preclude openness to the gospel. Moreover, Western Christians themselves widely share these assumptions, betraying the gospel into cultural captivity. God calls for the conversion of Western culture to the living gospel. Crucially this must include, as Lesslie Newbigin recognized, a repentance from modern Western assumptions about knowledge. Part One explores seeking, knowing, and serving God, as providing a true paradigm for understanding all human enquiry, knowledge, and action. Part Two examines ten resulting "hot spots" where conversion from prevailing cultural assumptions is vital for authentic mission to Western culture.

The subsequent achievement of selfhood is then based on the interplay of individual and community identities. Connor suggests that the distinctiveness of African-American women's experiences and writings can transcend their immediate communities and be brought to bear on women's experiences in general, making their individual stories more accessible and meaningful to the whole of humankind.

This open access book investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine via cultural lenses from an entangled perspective. The 17 chapters reflect diverse research interests, from case studies of individual archives to chapters that question the concept of cultural diplomacy more generally. They illustrate the diversity of scholarship that enables a broad-based view of how cultural diplomacy functioned during the interwar period, but also the ways in which its meanings have changed. The book considers British Mandate Palestine as an internationalised node within a transnational framework to understand how the complexity of cultural interactions and agencies engaged to produce new modes of modernity. Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her research considers the European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in Palestine. She is the PI of the research project (2017-2022), 'CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948)' (project funded by The Netherlands National Research Agency, NWO). She is the co-editor of the series 'Languages and Culture in History' with W. Frijhoff, Amsterdam University Press. She is part of the College of Experts: ESF European Science Foundation (2018-2021). Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian.He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the NWO funded project 'CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948)' at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

While globalization undermines ideas of the nation-state in the Mediterranean, conversions reveal how religion can unsettle existing political and social relations. Through studies of conversions across the region this book examines the challenges that conversions represent for national, legal and policy ways of dealing with religious minorities.