Synopses & Reviews
Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is a global phenomenon that comprises a quarter of the world's two billion Christians and is growing rapidly. This volume reveals that the primary appeal of pentecostalism worldwide is as a religion of healing. Contrary to popular stereotypes of flamboyant, fraudulent, anti-medical "faith healing" televangelists who preach a materialistic, "health and wealth" gospel, handle serpents, or sensationally "exorcize" demons, this book offers a more nuanced portrait. The collected essays illumine local variations, hybridities, and tensions in practices on six continents, and depict the extent of human suffering and powerlessness experienced by people everywhere and the attractiveness to many of a global religious movement that promises material relief by invoking spiritual resources.
This is the first book of its kind. Achieving the twin goals of thick description and comparative analysis of global practices is best achieved by bringing area experts into conversation. This volume's distinguished, international team of contributors includes sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, theologians, and religious studies scholars from North America, Europe, and Africa. Read together, these essays set the agenda for a new program of scholarly inquiry into some of the largest forces of change at work in the world today-globalization, pentecostalism, and healing-each of which is extremely powerful in itself and which together are reshaping our world in vastly significant ways.
Review
"There can now be no doubt that Pentecostal-Charismatic healing will continue to flower all over the world. It is something no thoughtful person can afford to ignore. We need careful, accurate, empathic, and unprejudiced studies of this reality in all its multitudinous expressions, including healing. And this volume provides the gold standard against which all future efforts will have to be judged."-- Harvey G. Cox, Jr., Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
Synopsis
Divine healing is the essential marker of the global phenomenon of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. But although we know that healing is central in these movements, we know surprisingly little about how divine healing beliefs and practices reflect the interplay of local and global patterns of cultural development. The essays in this collection seek to discover what is the same and what is different about such beliefs and practices in diverse contexts, trace formal and informal lines of cultural influence across geographic and national boundaries, and ask how healing both reflects and contributes to larger processes of globalization. The collection will not only flesh out a picture of how and why spiritual healing is practiced in diverse cultural contexts and how healing practices reflect and shape the transnational spread of Christianity; it will also provide insight into the nature of globalization. The authors will attend to a wide range of issues, including the theological rationales for divine healing; the symbolic objects and ritual enactments employed; the cultural controversies surrounding these practices; the relationship between Christian healing and local or indigenous healing traditions; whether an emphasis on financial prosperity is always present; and the extent to which Pentecostal and charismatic churches are networked and the role of healing in such networks. All the essays are new to this volume.
About the Author
Candy Gunther Brown received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000. She is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, and the author of
The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880. Table of Contents
Contributors
Foreword, by Harvey Cox
Introduction: Pentecostalism and the Globalization of Illness and Healing, by Candy Gunther Brown
Part I. Europe and North America
1. The Global Character of Nineteenth-Century Divine Healing, by Heather D. Curtis
2. Why Health and Wealth?: Dimensions of Prosperity among Swedish Charismatics, by Simon Coleman
3. Material Salvation: Healing, Deliverance, and "Breakthrough" in African Migrant Churches in Germany, by Claudia Währisch-Oblau
4. Blessed Bodies: Healing within the African American Faith Movement, by Catherine Bowler
5. Jesus as the Great Physician: Pentecostal Native North Americans within the Assemblies of God and New Understandings of Pentecostal Healing, by Angela Tarango
Part II. Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Borderlands
6. Latino Pentecostal Healing in the North American Borderlands, by Gastón Espinosa
7. Santidad, Salvación, Sanidad, Liberación: The Word of Faith Movement among Twenty-First Century Latina/o Pentecostals, by Arlene Sánchez Walsh
8. Exorcising the Demons of Deprivation: Divine Healing and Conversion in Brazilian Pentecostalism, by R. Andrew Chesnut
9. The Salve of Divine Healing: Essential Rituals for Survival among Working-Class Pentecostals in Bogotá, Colombia, by Rebecca Pierce Bomann
10. Learning from the Master: Carlos Annacondia and the Standardization of Pentecostal Practices in and beyond Argentina, by Matthew Marostica
Part III. Africa and Asia
11. New Wine in an Old Wine Bottle?: Charismatic Healing in the Mainline Churches in Ghana, by Cephas N. Omenyo
12. Healing in African Pentecostalism: The "Victorious Living" of David Oyedepo, by Paul Gifford
13. Re-enchanted: Divine Healing in Korean Protestantism, by Sean C. Kim
14. Miracle Healing and Exorcism in South Indian Pentecostalism, by Michael Bergunder
15. Divine Healing and the Growth of Practical Christianity in China, by Gotthard Oblau
Part IV. Global Crossings
16. Catholic Charismatic Healing in Global Perspective: The Cases of India, Brazil, and Nigeria, by Thomas J. Csordas
17. Global Awakenings: Divine Healing Networks and Global Community in North America, Brazil, Mozambique, and Beyond, by Candy Gunther Brown
Afterword, by Candy Gunther Brown
Index