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Is it possible to disengage from street gangs in communities and districts where gang organizations rule? We argue that disengagement is possible when this process does not alter the social order that allows street gangs to continue controlling and establishing the rules that govern economic activities and relationships in the barrios they control. We explore the process of gang disengagement under criminal governance in El Salvador, a country plagued by the powerful MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs. We conducted a survey with nearly 1,200 people with a history of gang membership and 25 in-depth interviews with former gang members. We find that disengagement through religious conversion allows the gang to continue exerting power over the deserters, while at the same time enforcing religious commitment to the congregation. The religious community provides the normative framework that reassures the gang that its former associates will not act against it, consolidating its local authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas H. Marshall's insights on citizenship in 1950 have long been a foundation for most contemporary debates on citizenship, and social citizenship has emerged as a new device that revolutionized the methodologies for making people equal in an unequal world.[9] The Marshallian approach to citizenship also invited criticism, mainly because of its unitary concept of citizenship in Western industrial states. Although a plethora of definitions of citizenship revolve around the questions of what citizenship is, where it takes place, and who a citizen is, citizenship can generally be defined as a collection of rights and obligations that give individuals a formal legal identity.[11] The fundamental aspect of citizenship is legal membership in a political community, and the eventual form of the political community is a state. The nexus between religious conversion and citizenship remains understudied in the sociology of religion, partly because religious conversion is considered a divine personal experience, whereas citizenship is seen as a secular state matter. For example, Ahmet Kuru classified forty-six Muslim-majority states into three categories: Islamic states, states with an established religion (Islam), and secular states.[1] Eleven countries in the first category, such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei, have clearly defined themselves as Islamic states. [Extracted from the article]

Maya Mikdashi challenges the notion of the Middle East as exceptional and instead views Lebanon as a site of intensification. In her book "Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon," Mikdashi explores how sex and sect intersect and are performed through the legal bureaucratic system in Lebanon. She argues that studying the Lebanese sectarian system is crucial for understanding secular power and sheds light on the additional obstacles women face when navigating the intricacies of Lebanese personal status law. Mikdashi also uncovers the "banality of religion" by focusing on the bureaucratic aspects and legal controversies of religious conversion. Overall, she presents sextarianism as a contingent and changeable practice. [Extracted from the article]

The promulgation of the new state-level conversion laws in India or some changes in already existing ones by ordinances is premised upon various conspiracy theories of Hindu fundamentalists against Muslims. Implicit in and placed at the centre of these new anti-conversion laws and public debates thereof is the conspiracy theory of love-jihad that Muslim men lure Hindu women on the pretext of love and get them convert to Islam to eventually outnumber the Hindu majority. This article argues that the anti-conversion laws in India result from anxieties of the dominant caste and class regarding gender and caste, leading to the imposition of the mainstream orthodox religious and political will upon the marginalized. The creation of anti-conversion laws is based on assumptions, fears, conspiracy theories, and moral and religious values primarily shared by the 'upper-caste' section across the political spectrum. Furthermore, it also shows a growing nexus between conservative religious forces and state apparatuses that restricts religious and social mobility of the marginalized sections through legal changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research often identifies evangelical Christians based on a double-barreled, yes-or-no, question asking respondents whether they are an evangelical or born-again Christian. This paper uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the implications of this measurement strategy. Among White Americans, more than one-third of those whom researchers classify as evangelical using the standard double-barreled question actually eschew the evangelical label; the same is true for just under two-thirds of African Americans. Additionally, these born-again non -evangelical Christians hold less conservative political outlooks compared to the self-identified evangelicals with whom they are grouped, and, in fact, oftentimes more closely resemble those who reject both the evangelical and born-again labels. Despite this, the double-barreled identification question produces a White "evangelical or born-again" group that looks politically similar to a composite "evangelical" or "born-again" group based on two questions asking about each identity separately. Finally, important differences appear across race, suggesting that religious and political histories affect how people interpret and respond to double-barreled questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a rich body of scholarship in recent years that challenges the accepted idea of the spread of nationalist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by highlighting the flexible, ambiguous, opportunistic or instrumental ways in which the inhabitants of central and eastern Europe engaged with ideas about nationhood. However, so far these discussions of 'national indifference' have not extensively examined the crossovers with flexible and ambivalent attitudes and actions regarding matters of religion, such as oscillating religious commitment, hybrid forms of religiosity and conversion. This article examines cases of conversion and reconversion (apostasy) between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, in order to deepen our understanding of how institutionally determined forms of religious ascription often became blurred at the level of everyday activities as people exercised choice over matters of faith for various personal, social and economic reasons. By extending the concept of national indifference through an examination of religious indifference, the cases under consideration elucidate how confession became entangled with ideas about national and imperial belonging in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attempt by the editors of I Christianity and Global Law i to understand global law using a historical perspective is commendable. It offers a full-orbed approach to fundamental questions: how to understand global law; whether global law can be based on Christian principles; whether Christianity can influence the development of global law and enrich it with its own principles. The second part of the book focuses on principles characteristic of Christianity that are or can become principles of global law, and are therefore compatible with secular law, and even support and enrich that law. [Extracted from the article]

It could be the beginning of a joke: Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr. Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Chuck Colson walk into a monograph. While sprightly and occasionally wry, however, Rebecca Davis's book I Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics i is no joke. At times in the book, it is unclear whether Davis is more interested in conversions as exemplars of big twentieth-century phenomena (such as Cold War paranoia, varieties of Blackness, and mass-media celebrity culture) or as models of self-discovery. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the conversion processes of Polish women of Catholic background to Islam. Data from participant observation of mosque-based, women-only weekend gatherings for converts and in-depth interviews with 29 Polish female converts to Islam are presented to illustrate the dialectic between the persistence and transformation of religious habitus. Our analysis demonstrates that in the conversion process, Catholic habitus remains pervasive, and shapes converts' engagement with the new religion; however, some elements of it become reflexive and change. We make a case for extending the discussion on habitus transformation by drawing attention to what we term a "translation" of religious beliefs and practices. Women in our study translate the system of Islamic practices and beliefs into a specific Catholic logic that is more intelligible to them and, in the process, recognize some of the power dynamics inherent in the religious field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Born-again conversion offers the paradoxical promise of self-transcending self-transformation, which takes narrative form when converts attempt to recount their experiences: how to tell a story of self-transformation, in which oneself is neither the author nor the agent of change? Existing scholarship suggests that conversion narratives work insofar as they resolve underlying paradoxes and stitch together a sense of coherent selfhood. This paper tacks in the opposite direction: the analysis focuses on the tendencies of conversion narratives to blur, blend and double over categorical bounds of selfhood, highlighting paradoxes rather than looking for their resolution. The paper contends, therefore, that conversion narrative practices facilitate converts' experience of conversion, not only insofar as they resolve paradox and stitch together coherent identity, but also insofar as they cultivate ephemeral experiences and explorations of narrative paradoxes that are inherent to—though often hidden from—most any attempt to find and feel identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the phenomenon of conservative Christians in the United States converting to Russian Orthodoxy. The author explores the reasons behind this conversion, including a desire for what they perceive as the oldest and most authentic version of Christianity, as well as a preference for the highly embodied character of Orthodox devotions. Politics also plays a significant role, with these converts being repulsed by secular progressivism and seeking to build an alternative world that upholds traditional gender roles and marriage. The article highlights that these conversions are not just a fringe phenomenon, but part of a wider transnational movement. [Extracted from the article]

Stefanos Katsikas's article, "Proselytes of a New Nation: Muslim Conversions to Orthodox Christianity in Modern Greece," explores the conversion of Muslims to Christianity in Greece during the establishment of the nation-state. The article discusses the historical context of religious conversion in Ottoman territories and focuses on the Greek War of Independence and the early years of King Otto's reign. Katsikas argues that Muslim conversion to Christianity was often pragmatic, motivated by factors such as survival, protection of property, and the advantage of being associated with the dominant religion. The article provides insights into the experiences of converts during the war and its aftermath, but offers limited information on conversions after independence. The study also touches on the language skills of Muslim converts, but does not delve into this aspect in detail. Overall, the article contributes valuable analysis to the study of religious conversions and the formation of nation-states. [Extracted from the article]

Germany was a divided country from 1949 until 1989. During this period, West Germany remained a rather religious country, while East Germany became, under socialist rule, one of the most secular regions in the world. We use this case of socialist state intervention as a natural experiment to test Voas' model of secular transition, which states that all Western and Central European countries follow the same path and speed of secularization. We employ ESS, GSS, and KMU surveys, as well as church statistics, to show that Voas' model holds for West Germany but not for the East. In East Germany, the state accelerated the secular transition substantially: through coercion, incentive structures, and education, it succeeded in triggering mass disaffiliations from the church irrespective of age, and in discouraging parents from socializing their children religiously. This led to a self-perpetuating process that resulted in a rapid increase in the number of people who were never socialized religiously at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewing capitalism as emerging primarily from within the framework of empire rather than the nation state, this essay considers the relationship between capital, conversion, and settler colonialism in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872). It looks, first, at the novel's critique of Wakefieldian organized settlement schemes as systems sustained by various forms of capital accumulation and free/unfree labour; and second, at its over-arching evangelical conversion narrative, which both frames and structures the main body of the text. The essay argues that, far from directing its satire wholly or even primarily towards metropolitan Britain, the novel enacts two circulating mid-nineteenth-century settler colonial anxieties: concerns about a perceived crisis of diminishing industriousness and economic exhaustion in colonial Australia and New Zealand, and concerns about the efficacy of British humanitarianism and missionary conversion. It considers the former in the context of the disruptions to settlement caused by the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, and the latter in the context of missionary and humanitarian efforts to ameliorate conditions for Indigenous peoples from the 1830s onwards. The essay's larger claim is that Erewhon presents capital and conversion as structurally interconnected mechanisms of an evolving Anglo-settler state in New Zealand. Radicalizing a tradition of economic critique of empire beginning with Adam Smith, Butler satirizes the idea of colonialism as an essentially liberal system by showing how much it is intertwined with exploitative practices of territorial expansion, dispossession, capital accumulation, unfree labour, missionary conversion, and racial assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irenaeus's reading of John 8:57, especially his conclusion that Jesus was approximately 50 at the time of his crucifixion, is well known. While secondary scholarship typically explains Irenaeus's exegesis of this text with reference to his possible sources or his doctrine of recapitulation, this study looks to his broader religious context. A similar argument from Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael suggests that Jesus' age is relevant to ancient discussions of religious conversion. Just as Abraham's circumcision at 99 made room for all proselytes under that age, so too the Irenaean Jesus has passed through every stage of life, enabling persons of any age to join Irenaeus's church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on forced conversion of the Jewish moneylender Shylock as the most grave injustice of the play. It mentions critical condemnation of the forced conversion oversimplifies and obscures the literary and historical complexities and eventual conversion of the Jews constituted a necessary precursor to the second coming of Christ. It also mentions possibility of sham piety, and the skepticism towards it in early modern England and Protestants objected to Catholic ceremonies.

For the people of Kenya, recent global debates on the emotional and medical harm caused by female genital mutilation (FGM), allied to arguments about the human rights of the women subjected to such acts, have a significant historical resonance. In the 1920s, Christian missionaries in central Kenya mounted a concerted campaign to prohibit 'female circumcision' among their flourishing African congregations. This provoked a backlash, with thousands of Kikuyu Christians deserting the missions to found their own independent churches and schools in the early 1930s. These events, commonly referred to as the 'female circumcision controversy', mark a turning point in Kenya's colonial history. Taking as its starting-point the murder in 1930 of a female missionary with the African Inland Mission, the article explores the actions and attitudes of white women missionaries, revealing a subtle and complex picture of missionary views of African society and the process of Christian conversion, arguing that, as the circumcision crisis developed during 1929, these women stood at the centre of the gathering storm, their experience emblematic of the emotional, cultural and political challenges in the circumcision debate. This account adds an important new dimension to our understanding of gender in Kenya's circumcision debate, but it also reveals why colonial silence has surrounded the event at the very centre of the crisis: the murder of Hulda Stumpf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Forestiers et voyageurs" by Joseph-Charles Tache is presented. It outlines the characters and explores their symbolic significance. It examines the efforts of franciscan and Jesuit missionaries to convert everyone to Christianity, business of the fur trade, and the environmental protections.

This article examines the case of the controversial seventeenth-century theologian Jacob Reihing. In 1621 Reihing fled Pfalz-Neuburg, where he had played an instrumental role in re-Catholicizing the territory, to seek asylum in Württemberg. His defection provoked shock and dismay in political, religious and academic circles in Pfalz-Neuburg and Bavaria. In Stuttgart Reihing was granted the protection of the duke and sent to the University of Tübingen. Jesuits and Catholic princes made a series of interventions, first in an effort to encourage Reihing to return to the fold and then to blacken his name. In spite of these pressures, the endorsements of the duke of Württemberg continued apace: Reihing was allowed a very public ceremony of conversion and was appointed professor of theology in Tübingen. The task of rehabilitating the former Jesuit fell largely to the University of Tübingen. Its professors attempted to refashion Reihing as an archetypal Lutheran scholar and carefully tended his public image over the remaining years of his life. For their part the Jesuits intensified their attempts at character assassination. The battle over Reihing's reputation continued until and, indeed, beyond his death. This article explores the controversies generated by Reihing's conversion and subsequent life and career and examines in particular the struggle over his reputation. In doing so it addresses a wider clash of ideals governing academic identities, lifestyles and behaviours in which scholars and institutions divided by confession participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that St Augustine's presentation of Varro's Antiquitates rerum divinarum in City of God was pivotal to the latter text's disappearance. It shows how Augustine used the Antiquitates' tripartite theology (poetic, civil, and natural) to destroy Varro's authority on traditional Roman religion. In Augustine's reading, Varro's open criticism of the gods of myth and poetry implied an equal rejection of the civil cult. This left the natural gods of the philosophers, but Augustine derided Varro's attempts at philosophical theology. The result was that, to readers of the City of God, the Antiquitates rerum divinarum appeared as a failure: Varro had been incapable of justifying traditional Roman religion, while lacking the courage to attack it openly. Readers could then turn to the City of God itself as a better guide to the Roman gods, and there was no further need to read or copy the Antiquitates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Americans in the early nineteenth century, friendship and faith both carried emotional power. It is no surprise, then, that friendships among like-minded believers intertwined with religious experience. This essay explores the spiritual dimensions of friendship during the early republic by considering one social network that had its hub in the household of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake. Bryant and Drake, who lived in Weybridge, Vermont, ran a tailor shop and were fixtures of their Congregationalist community. They formed an unconventional union; their relationship was devoted and passionate, and friends and relatives acknowledged its romantic nature. But in many ways, their household resembled others in early republican New England. Like other families, they fostered piety in their home, which became a spiritual and social gathering point for neighbors as well as far-flung friends who migrated about the region. Bryant, Drake, and their friends sustained emotional and religious connections through prayer, ritual, spiritual conversation, and correspondence and shared reading and benevolent activity. Their intimate connections suggest how friends forged spiritual communities that existed outside the bounds of formal churches and cohered in the face of dislocation. The emotional experience of friendship lent itself to the emotional experience of religion by heightening a sense of obligation and selflessness and focusing attention on matters of the soul. The intersecting experiences of friendship and religion speak to how spiritual networks helped people navigate a rapidly changing and often incomprehensible world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of Protestantism among U.S. Latinos has been the focus of considerable discussion among researchers. Yet few studies investigate how Latino Protestants and Latino Catholics differ, or which types of Latinos convert from Catholicism to Protestantism. Our study tests various theories about why some Latinos convert including a modified version of the semi-involuntary thesis, the national origin hypothesis, and assimilation theory. We use data from a large national sample of U.S. Latinos and find some support for assimilation theory and less for the semi-involuntary thesis. However, context matters. If we divide Latinos into national origin groups, these groups strongly predict who converts and who are lifelong Protestants. We discuss how war may influence the religious composition of early migrants and thus shape both the religious composition and conversion of later migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destruction of the nations and the role of the Gentiles in the worship of YHWH are two major concerns in the final part of the book of Isaiah. While much of Isa. 60-2, as well as Isa. 59:15b-20, 63:1-6, 66:12, 16, conveys a hostile standpoint vis-à -vis the Gentiles, the material in Isa. 56:1-8 and 66:18-21 reflects a more inclusive perspective. The final part of the Book of the Twelve focuses on the same issues and reveals the same lack of a uniform attitude towards the nations. Zech. 2:11, 8:22, 14:16-21, and Mal. 1:11 speak of the participation of the Gentiles in the worship of YHWH, while Hag. 2:20-3, Zech. 1:15, 2:12-13 (Eng. 2:8-9), 14:12, etc. articulate their destruction. In this essay I argue that the juxtaposition of these conflicting views regarding foreigners creates final forms of both sets of texts which give the impression that the Gentiles have but two choices: military annihilation or acceptance of and active participation in the Israelite religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent attention to issues of religious diversification, mobility, and multiplicity, few sociologists have attended to the socio-cognitive dimensions of multiple religious participation. Sociologists have long suggested that the socio-mental processes involved in the addition of new religions differ from those found in religious conversion, but more work is needed to fill out this process. In particular, we need to move beyond seeing religious addition as simply a partial or lesser version of conversion. Analyzing narratives of people who include religious participation in African-derived traditions alongside other religious involvement may be particularly instructive in this regard, as they have an extensive history of multiple religious involvement. In the present article, I draw from interviews with Lukumi and Ifa multiple religious participators in the United States, noting three patterns in the narratives that display a sociomental "style" that may distinguish multiple religious participators from converts more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from an ethnographic study of fasting among converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, this article develops a conceptualization of embodied metaphor as a form of cultural cognition in action. The findings demonstrate that fasting reshaped converts' subjectivities and subsequent actions through the creation of a series of metaphorical associations between concrete, bodily experiences related to food, hunger, and appetite and more abstract religious discourses pertaining to the soul, sin, and the acquisition of religious virtue. While current influential models of cultural cognition in sociology have focused on explaining the divide between cognition at the semantic level of discourse (i.e., discursive consciousness) and the somatic level of bodily perception and habit (i.e., practical consciousness), this study argues that embodied metaphor is a cognitive process that accounts for the dynamic, mutually informing interactions between these two cognitive registers. By way of conclusion, I argue for the broader theoretical, methodological, and empirical significance of this study for sociological scholarship on culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of religious classes for converts in the United States. Focusing on "new member classes" in two religious communities (a Muslim association and an evangelical Christian church), we introduce the concept of "pedagogies of conversion" to describe how religious organizations teach converts about their new religion and set up guidelines to frame the conversion process. By examining the pedagogical tools that religious instructors use on a daily basis to foster spirituality among new members, we investigate how converts learn to become religious people. We demonstrate that while there are significant differences in the doctrines (know-what) being taught in the Muslim and evangelical classrooms, the tips and pieces of advice delivered by instructors on how to be religious (know-how) are strikingly similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boaz, Danielle N. I Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora i . I Freedom of Religion and Belief in Turkey: Religion, Society and Politics i . I Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662. i Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. I Positive Law from the Muslim World: Jurisprudence, History, Practices. i New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. [Extracted from the article]

An essay is presented on popular depictions of Jewish women in the antebellum U.S. Particular focus is given to themes of religious, fiscal, and cultural conversion. Details on newspaper coverage of Jewish actress Rachel Felix, on the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, and the novel "The Marble Faun" by Nathaniel Hawthorne are presented. Other topics include sensationalism, excess, and rationality.

The article discusses social aspects of membership retention among with religions that maintain strict doctrines, focusing on U.S. religious denominations. Topics include the impact of high fertility and pronatalist doctrines on the growth of religious movements, the impact of support from a religious community on retention of religious converts, and exit costs for members. Groups addressed include Mormons (Latter Day Saints Church, LDS), the Amish, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Recent theoretical and empirical evidence has been pointing toward a new development with regard to religion in the Western world: one of polarization between secular and religious individuals. Statistical analyses test the existence of such a trend from 1985 until 2009–2010 at a regional level within three separate national contexts: the United States, the UK, and Canada. Repeated cross-sectional survey data are studied by means of a series of multinomial logit and logistic regression models with generated predicted probabilities. The results show the existence of three distinct patterns of trends since the mid-1980s, one of which consists of religious polarization as measured by the present study: the proportional decline of nominal affiliates coupled with no decline or an increase of unaffiliated and religiously committed individuals. This trend can be found in Great Britain as well as in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Elias of Babylon, a priest from Baghdad, Iraq who traveled across Europe as well as through Spanish colonies in Latin America during the late 17th century. Particular focus is given to the author's research about Elias of Babylon's life and identity. Details on the study of global microhistory are also presented. Topics discussed include Elias of Babylon's writings and his conversion to Catholicism.

The author responds to commentary by Jesse Smith on his article "Toward a Critical Sociology of Atheism: Identity, Politics, Ideology." He identifies a number of questions and issues raised by Smith about atheism, including trajectories of atheist identity and activism. Other topics discussed include the notions of conversion, the relationship between atheism and politics, and the influence of the ideology of scientific atheism.

The earliest surviving Northumbrian high crosses at Ruthwell and Bewcastle associate the Second Coming of Christ not only with Judgment but also with mercy. Each high cross has a sequence in which Christ in majesty is recognised by animals, once evil but now converted to good. Christ blesses the scroll of the Book of Life, which he holds: by implication he also blesses the converted animals. On both crosses, a panel representing John the Baptist holding the Agnus Dei (Christ seen as the Lamb of God) comes just above the panel of Christ acclaimed by the beasts. The Agnus Dei panels refer to the heavenly liturgy, in which the Lamb appears in glory, and also to the Latin ‘Agnus Dei’ chant (‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us’) recently introduced from Rome to accompany the breaking of bread at Communion. At Ruthwell, where the crosshead partially survives, the programme culminated in another scene of the Apocalypse, in which the four evangelists, each with his symbolic attribute, surrounded another image of Christ in glory. The remarkably optimistic images of the Second Coming of Christ on these two monuments indicate that the highly educated commissioner was familiar with versions of the early Christian liturgies in which the Second Coming of Christ was ardently desired, not feared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through a case study of early Mormonism, this article addresses the question of how embattled new religions survive and may even flourish in the face of fierce and sustained opposition to their “heretical” beliefs and practices. The data for this study are based on a thematic content analysis of a random sample of “patriarchal blessings” bestowed upon early converts to nineteenth-century Mormonism. We conclude that patriarchal blessings, pronounced in the prophetic language of the Mormon restoration movement, functioned as an important commitment mechanism for converts while simultaneously contributing to the exposition and reinforcement of distinctive Mormon teachings as a new religion on the American frontier. More systematic comparative study of prophetic religious traditions like Mormonism needs to be done in order to adequately document the range, variations, and modalities of those commitment practices that fortify new religious communities in response to opposition and adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a dataset of territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century, this article investigates the determinants of adoption and diffusion of Protestantism as a state religion. A territory's distance to Wittenberg, the city where Martin Luther taught, is a major determinant of adoption. This finding is consistent with a theory of strategic neighbourhood interactions: introducing the Reformation was a risky enterprise for territorial lords and had higher prospects of success if powerful neighbouring states committed to the new faith. The actual spatial and temporal patterns of expansion of Protestantism are analysed in a panel dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though considerable literature on conversions exists, there is a lack of literature comparing conversion processes in different religious groups. This paper is based upon an analysis of 50 conversion narratives to various religious groups using the narrative interview process of German sociologist Fritz Schütze. Narrative interviews are used to map the entire biography of a person, and its relation to the conversion experience. The interviews are analyzed using “constant comparison” according to “grounded theory.” Based on this analysis, I propose that we consider personal biography, push and pull factors, religious content, life course agency, network influence, and the relationship between all these factors when interpreting conversion processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pentecostal membership and born-again conversion have been growing in popularity across Africa. Yet despite the many explanations posited for their growth, few studies have attended to the local meanings attached to the born-again identity specifically. In this study, I compare narratives of born-again conversion among a sample of Pentecostal and Catholic young people in Malawi, in order to better understand its meaning and appeal as a religious identity. I argue that the born-again identity is highly salient for those who claim it; and that although its roots are in Pentecostalism, it has diffused widely into other denominations. I also argue that for these young people, it is described not primarily as a conversion of belief but as a conversion to a new moral lifestyle; and that the major difference between Pentecostals and Catholics is in their expressed sense of the attainability of this conversion, not of its desirability. The connection between the born-again lifestyle and the impact of modernity in the development context is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Ottoman source material related to the Janissary Corps and the spread of Islam in the Ottoman Balkans. It examines the Janissaries Islamisation correlation in a broader concept of social conversion introduced by R. W. Bulliet. It explores the historical development of the Janissary Corps from its compulsion to its abolition or gradual abandonment. It also highlights the discovery of peasant Janissaries in two regions of the Ottoman Balkans. It investigates whether the peasant Janissaries were not recruited under the Devsirme levy based on the detailed Ottoman registers from the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century.

The article discusses highlights of the Fifth Workshop on Early Modern German History, held in Munich, Germany on September 25, 2006. Topics tackled at the workshop included commodities, houses of second class elites, social relevance of interdenominational conversions and the confessional culture, and social implications of health, disease and medical science, social construction of diseases, social identity of midwives and their role in 17th-century legal proceedings.

Drawing upon data from the NJPS 2000-1, we argue that traditional approaches to the study of religions mobility -- both apostasy and switching -- are increasingly problematic. Apostasy from ethno-religions communities, in particular, must be reformulated to incorporate an ethnic dimension. Analyses using this revised concept of "ethno-apostasy" lead to results that at times diverge from those of previous research. The findings suggest that the premise that religious switching is a binary change from one mutually incompatible state to another must be reconceptualized to account for declining support in American society for the assumption that a person can hold only one religions affiliation at a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on religious conversion has challenged the wide- spread perception that most converts experience a .dramatic, instantaneous transformation akin to Saint Paul's experience on the Damascus road. This essay builds on this scholarship by exploring the conversions of people who experienced a change of spiritual affiliation in the context of their participation in an intentional community affiliated with either the Catholic Worker or the Camphill movement. Drawing on participant observation and personal interviews, it argues that conversion for Catholic Workers and Camphillers is more often a wayward journey than a flash of light. Individual participants may discover a new religious identity or rediscover their roots while living in community, but most often the community itself encourages them to engage in ongoing experimentation and discovery over the course of a lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guest appearances by Chaucer and Gower in Greenes Vision reflect a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tradition of paired citation; here they represent rival literary values and styles, exploited by Greene in a complex and playful mock- repentance. While Greene claims to be moving away from a licentious, Chaucerian comedy, he is really expanding his range to incorporate the farcical vein of the recently published anonymous Cobler of Canterburie, and the tale offered by Gower as a corrective to the former follies of Greene's pen in fact closely resembles his earlier romances. Within the vision the authority of both the poets is dismissed when King Solomon appears to reject every study except Theology; what appears to be a dramatic conversion from folly to wisdom is in fact a much more playful and unstable piece in which all claims to literary authority come to look suspect. Even though the Vision is (as Newman insisted when he published it posthumously in 1592) authentic Greene, the ‘real’ Greene presents us with a radically inauthentic authorial self. In constructing and playing with his persona Greene exploits shared interests with both Chaucer and Gower and exploits related techniques; it seems both from the Vision and the later dream-vision A Quip for an Upstart Courtier that his self-interested appropriation of elements of late-medieval poetry for his own ends does not preclude informed and intelligent engagement with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two celebrated cases of the conversion of Indian youths to Christianity by missionaries in Bombay: the case of Dhanjibhai Nauroji of 1839 and the case of Shripat Sheshadri of 1843. The cases were precedents in Indians challenging Christian conversion by way of the law courts, and highlight the adaptive responses of the Parsi and Hindu communities of Bombay and western India to Christian proselytism, and the attractions and challenges of the larger colonial environment to Indians' ability to regulate and safeguard their community and caste norms. The article argues that in response to Christian proselytism and colonial power and ideology, Indians utilized traditional and non-traditional mechanisms that ultimately led to challenges, accommodations, and reassessments of Indians' place under the ideological framework of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the religious conversion process from conventional religions to conservative Protestantism among urban immigrants in Taiwan. The findings show that converts were attracted not by Christian dogmas but by the social support and practical blessings provided by the churches. Many prospects from conventional religious backgrounds come to the Christian church seeking miracles or charismatic experiences that provide continuity with their conventional religious heritage. Our study reveals that if Christian churches adapt their religious culture to meet the needs of urban immigrants from conventional religions, Christian churches can recruit these people. At the same time, while providing some cultural continuity, these churches can still retain a strong self-identity distinguishable from the conventional religions of the Taiwanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the conversion patterns of students and scholars from the People's Republic of China studying at United States universities. Based on in-depth interviews and observations conducted on university campuses in two midwestern cities, we examine the similarities and differences of conversion between the two Chinese student communities. While the social and cultural contexts in China are prevalent in their conversion narratives, the local context or the ecology of local churches is important to explain the variations of the churches that the Chinese converts have joined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a four and one-half year participant observation study of conversion at a Chinese Protestant church. It was found that a variety of helping behaviors held important consequences for conversion. Church members were found to provide favors and gifts in ways that are unusual in Chinese society (e.g., anonymously, to perfect strangers, with no expectation of return, and to persons of lower status). These patterns of giving confound the traditional Chinese manner of building social networks and instead bind individuals to a larger society of Chinese Christians. These findings suggest that under certain conditions, examination of microsociological interaction rituals may complement other explanations of church growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how religious organizations have influenced Chinese immigrants' conversion to evangelical Protestantism. Using data collected through ethnographic fieldwork in a major metropolitan area in the Midwest from 1998 to 2003, I describe the extensive resources devoted to evangelism by religious institutions and argue that they must play an important role in converting Chinese immigrants to evangelical Protestantism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]