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This article focuses on continuity in the practice of the conversion of Muslims and its social implications in Venice in the period 1750–1824. Neophytes were people of other religious confessions who converted and were baptized as Catholics. Among neophytes of Muslim origin in Venice at this time were enslaved people, formerly enslaved individuals, and free men and women, as well as others of uncertain status. While the article discerns patterns of continuity in the practice of the conversion of Muslims and the wider experience of enslaved people in Venice, it argues that significant changes occurred after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. These developments emerged in response to the shifting political climate and legal reforms of the Napoleonic period (1806–1814) and the post-1814 period in which Venice came under Austrian rule, culminating in a reduction in the number of neophytes and enslaved people in the city. The geographical origins of the neophytes ranged from the Ottoman Empire and its regencies to Eastern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Atlantic. Sources from Venice's Pius House of Catechumens reveal the types of work the neophytes performed and indicate how changes in ownership dictated slaves' or former slaves' trajectories before their arrival in Venice. The article also highlights how religious conversion from Islam to Catholicism was a watershed moment for individuals, one that had a major bearing on their living and working conditions and, in some cases, their social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2023, the Groupe des Dombes, a Francophone ecumenical group, published its new study "De toutes les nations ... ": Pour la catholicité des Églises ("Of All Nations ... " For the Catholicity of the Churches). Its central affirmation, following a common reading of history, and as a result of the biblical exploration that group has undertaken together, is that "it is possible to affirm that the Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation form One Church, although in imperfect communion." This article recalls the history of the Groupe des Dombes, as a group gathering equal numbers of Roman Catholic and Protestant members, and sets out the main elements of the new study on catholicity. It concludes by discussing the central affirmation and returns to the calls for conversion, so important to the Groupe des Dombes, as a way to live together according to the gift of God: "For beyond themselves, the Churches have the common mission of bearing witness to the unity of humanity. The lived catholicity of the Church can be a sign of this." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locating the people's intense identity consciousness in the region within the larger Indian national identity crisis, this article deals with how the distinct religious identities and practices of the Hindus and Christians are forged in Northeast India. As a betwixt and between people (neither fully Indic nor Sino, but a combination), the people's new identities are shaped between South Asian Indic culture and East Asian Confucian values. While conversion has been attributed to Christianity mostly, the article shows how the people in the region converted from their Sino-Tibetan primal religion to Hinduism, forming distinct Hindu traditions. Similarly, the indigenized Christian communities have also made their faith their own producing distinct Christian traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Christian missionaries working on converting Muslim Iranians to Christianity. Their methods are based on a logic of rupture and discontinuity with Islam, presenting Christianity as the solution to a moral-political crisis of Iranians in the Islamic Republic. Anti-Islam is the focus of this conversion discourse. In a transnational Christian network formed by Iranians and non-Iranians, the evangelical missionaries work with methodology that breaks and dialogues with society and the local culture of their target audience, presenting evangelical Christianity as an alternative for Iranians. This research was carried out based on participant observation in missionary groups and Christian churches for Iranians, via digital media and face-to-face, contributing to the understanding of the conversion of Muslims to evangelical Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special section Comparative X: Religious and Gendered Transitions, linking the experiences of religious exes and transgender people through their mutual and different uses of "X" to mark liminal identity and status. Reframing religious disaffiliation through the lens of transition, the article presses on the overlap and intersection of religious and gendered movements to connect these different but related crossings as Xes. Through this crossed and comparative framework, it offers a way of looking at the norming systems of religion and gender together through the movements of those who cross them. Expanding comparative studies in religion through the interfaithless, it introduces comparative ex-religious studies as a new subfield. Drawing on the literature of religious disaffiliation and queer and transgender studies in religion, the article considers how changing the orientation through which we approach religion from its Xes might lead to a better understanding of how the normative structures of "religion" and "gender" shape one another transitively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the importance that Islamic legal texts and prescriptive literature from the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries assign to the family, especially the mother, in forming religious identity. It approaches this question by analyzing the phenomenon of the non-converting family, or the family's retention of their Jewish or Christian religion after the father's conversion to Islam. The article describes and contextualizes instances in which the family did not convert along with the father against the background of seventh-/thirteenth- and eighth-/fourteenth-century Syria and Egypt. It summarizes some of the measures that were introduced to punish non-converting families of new Muslims and contrasts these with the rulings relating to conversion in an eighth/fourteenth-century legal compendium. The legal rulings focus on positive motivation to convert rather than punitive measures but reflect a similar concern to promote the conversion of the family as a whole. They also reflect a particular concern that the wife of the convert and mother of the household should convert, a feature which is related here to the influence that mothers are held to have exercised over the religious identity of the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study revisits Mieszko I's Christianisation of his realm, juxtaposing it against the backdrop of Christian holy war ideologies, notably the evolution of the 'just war' doctrine. It scrutinises whether Mieszko's baptism in 966 stemmed from spiritual conviction or political expediency, and considers the implications of holy war ideologies for his realm. Employing a revisionist perspective, the study challenges traditional views of the crusades, suggesting a blend of spiritual motivation and political manoeuvring. Further, the research distinguishes between 'conversion' and 'Christianisation', highlighting the transformation from personal faith to societal change initiated by Mieszko. The role of his Christian wife, Dobrava, and the strategic establishment of the Polish bishopric are explored as factors in the Christianisation process. Conclusively, the findings suggest Mieszko's baptism was more politically motivated, with the holy war ideology influencing the Piast dynasty's later Christianising and expansionist policies. This compact analysis enriches our understanding of the intertwining of religious conversion, holy war ideologies, and state formation in medieval Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious persecution is a leading cause of global displacement. In the absence of supporting evidence, presenting a credible oral asylum claim based on religion is a difficult task for asylum-seekers. Asylum officials, in turn, face considerable challenges in evaluating the credibility of asylum-seekers' claims to determine their eligibility for refugee status. We reviewed 21 original manuscripts addressing credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion. We focused on (a) interviewers' methods of eliciting a claim of religion; (b) their credibility assessments of particularly complex asylum claims, namely those based on religious conversion, unfamiliar religions, and non-belief; and (c) issues related to the presence of an interpreter. We found deviations in officials' assessment patterns from established knowledge in legal psychology and religious studies. Closer collaboration between asylum practitioners and researchers in these fields is needed to improve the validity and reliability of credibility assessments of asylum claims based on religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes the intricate connection of conversion, proselytization, and the state of Ghana to achieve three overarching goals. First, it unravels how colonialism, Christianity, and Islam have historically and collectively marginalised African indigenous religions. Second, it demonstrates a clever state maneuver to continue the historic joint colonial and missionary projection of Christianity and Islam at the expense of other traditions. Third, it interrogates how the state of Ghana is mindful of the political implications of frustrating the principle of separation. Against these positions, the paper argues that despite tacit attempts to privilege Christianity and Islam over indigenous religion, the state of Ghana maintains a moderate secularist stance that enhances free and equal participation of its religiously diverse populations in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although religiosity correlates positively with authoritarianism, the temporal ordering of this relationship is unclear. Because religious teachings often promote authoritarian values, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) should increase following religious conversion. Yet spiritual beliefs may also promote egalitarianism. As such, social dominance orientation (SDO) might decrease postconversion. We tested these hypotheses using data from a subset of participants who converted to Christianity at some point during a 9-year longitudinal panel study (N = 536). We also examined a separate subsample who deconverted over the same period (N = 696). As hypothesised, RWA was stable before conversion, but increased slightly after becoming religious. Unexpectedly, SDO was stable both pre- and postconversion. Conversely, those who deconverted from Christianity experienced declines in RWA both before and after losing their religion, whereas SDO declined only postdeconversion. These results suggest that religious conversion precedes increases in RWA (but not SDO), and that declines in RWA precede deconversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the story of Mbiyana Ngidi and his five-decade conversion career, leading up to his establishment of an Ethiopianist church in 1890 – the first African Initiated Church in the Colony of Natal in Southern Africa. I focus on three events in his life – conversion, ordination, schism – and suggest that one way of reading these events is as different forms of replication: conversion as identification, ordination as imitation, and schism as reproduction. I engage with the idea in the anthropology of Christianity that Protestants desire a certain type of originality and therefore shun repetition. I argue the opposite, namely that Ngidi's story shows us how Protestants seek out replicated relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the basic starting point of the study of material religion, religion is an inextricably material phenomenon. In theorizations of religious conversion, however, materiality is accorded little attention. This article presents a case study that investigates the role of materiality in individual religious change, as well as highlighting the dematerialized underpinnings of modern Western conceptualizations of conversion. It concerns transitions from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity in contemporary Finland. In this context, the sensory aspects of liturgical life are often identified as a central pull-factor of Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, partiality towards Orthodox aesthetics is not always considered a proper reason for switching churches. The article analyses interview material gathered from converts and is informed by the concept of semiotic ideology, which it applies to examine the different and sometimes conflicting assumptions regarding material expressions as mediators between humanity and divinity present in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After people migrate to a different religious landscape, they will have multiple candidate religions to choose from, and some people may convert to a new religion. This study argues that both individual-level characteristics and a religion's organizational traits are involved in religious conversion. Using cross-sectional samples of Chinese overseas students and scholars in the US in 2018 (n = 1911), we deployed mixed multinomial models to demonstrate how conversion, measured as intergenerational and personal religious changes, is associated with individual-level factors and organizational traits of religions. We found that the choice between Christianity, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religion, compared with no religion, is associated with unique individual-level characteristics. For religious organizational traits, missionary intensity and organized activity intensity are generally associated with a higher likelihood of conversion. This study distinguishes the different levels of the operating mechanism in conversion and points out an interactive and heterogenous model for individuals' choice of various competing religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In Western democracies, Muslim converts are overrepresented in Islamist terrorism compared to born-and-raised Muslims. Consequently, researchers have begun to consider how the process of conversion to Islam might influence participation in terrorism, yet empirical data are lacking. To explore these connections, the present study measured the conversion experiences of Muslim converts, as well as their intentions to engage in radicalism. One hundred and seventy-seven U.S. Muslim converts completed the Radicalism Intentions Scale, which measures willingness to engage in violent and illegal political behaviors to support one's group, and the Adult Religious Conversion Experience Questionnaire, which measures the components of conversion, including crisis. Crisis is an experience of stress or difficulty that contributes to the collapse of one's pre-conversion belief system (e.g., when an alcoholic hits "bottom"). Results indicate that the level of crisis that converts experienced was the only conversion variable associated with converts' radicalism intentions, which suggests that crisis may be an important construct in connecting the processes of conversion to Islam and participation in Islamist terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Itobiad: Journal of the Human & Social Science Researches / İnsan ve Toplum Bilimleri Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Itobiad: Journal of the Human & Social Science Researches and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on a multi-site ethnography and participant interviews with fans of The Beatles (primarily John Lennon) and Johnny Cash, this article discusses transformational accounts of becoming-a-fan narratives. Fan interviews took place during two intervals: in the fall of 2013 and winter 2014, and in winter and spring 2019. A primary focus is Sandvoss's conception of the 'extension of the self' concerning the object of a fan's devotion. Extensions of the self operate to reaffirm the fan's sense of self and inform identification with the celebrity. To clarify this concept, this article considers 'becoming-a-fan' narratives as a way to illustrate how the self works in the lives of fans and how a turn towards fan identity helps to refocus a previous emphasis on becoming-a-fan as similar to religious conversion. I argue fans of The Beatles and Cash relate to one or more values embedded in the celebrity and, in combination with socialization to the fan object, transition to a fan identity. Harrington and Bielby's notion of texistence helps to explain what maintains this identity over the life course. In conclusion, I consider whether this new-found identity reveals an important dynamic about the way people transition to fandom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the religious biographies of Polish Traditional Wiccans in three aspects: leaving their first religious formation (in most cases, Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in Poland), initiation to Wicca and the significance of the "coming home" metaphor. The gathered source material comes from field research: participant observation combined with semi-structured interviews with thirty-one respondents (half of the whole Wiccan milieu at the time of research). The Rambo and Farhadian seven-step model2 was used to analyze the conversion process and the Streib, Hood Jr. and Keller typology3 with Danièle Hervieu-Léger's "religion in movement"4 to analyze the deconversion process. Three categories of reasons for leaving the Church are distinguished, five categories of reasons for choosing Wicca follow. The "coming home" metaphor proved to be a well-known and important motive in the respondents' narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the subject “Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Religion”, we encounter the term conversions in religion. In this paper, author presents and goes deeper into the conversion in religion as the experience of believers. As an example, author uses the conversions of the apostles Paul and Primoz Trubar, and their impact on society. In the second part of the paper, author uses the empirical research method, an anonymous survey in a group of Pentecostal Christians of the Pentecostal Church Murska Sobota in Slovenia. The main research questions for the group are: how did they turn, who told them about God, what image of God do believers have, and do they actively participate in the church? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a threefold typology of white responses to Black Theology (rejection-sympathy-solidarity) which I used in my doctoral thesis (1988). This article, which is dedicated to the memory of Vuyani Vellem, shows how the typology was used by him in a publication. It then points out a number of inadequacies in the typology and places it in a framework of encounters between the praxis of a Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) and a liberating white praxis (LWP). It uses a seven-dimensional ‘praxis matrix’ to explore such encounters, which happen along with an encounter with the praxis of the poor and the praxis of God. Since a typology of white praxes remains useful, an expanded six-fold typology is suggested to replace the previous one. Contribution: The contribution of this article is to deepen reflection on the dynamics of interaction between white theologians and a BTL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to discuss conversion in Gustaw Herling-Grudziński's stories. Characters in Grudziński's pieces are neither Jews nor Catholics, they are - as Yirmiyahu Yovel writes in his book The other within - "hybrids, a composite entity in the middle". The paper applies the figure of marranos from Yovel's research to reinterpret conversion in Grudziński's stories and biography and point out how this secret shapes inner conflict in his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will take the stance that cognitive enhancement promised by the use of AI could be a first step for some in bringing about moral enhancement. It will take a further step in questioning whether moral enhancement using AI could lead to moral and or religious conversion, i.e., a change in direction or behaviour reflecting changed thinking about moral or religious convictions and purpose in life. One challenge is that improved cognition leading to better moral thinking is not always sufficient to motivate a person towards the change in behaviour demanded. While some think moral bioenhancement should be imposed if necessary in urgent situations, most religions today see volition in conversion as essential. Moral and religious conversion should be voluntary and not imposed, and recent studies that show possible dangers of the use of AI here will be discussed along with a recommendation that there be regulatory requirements to counteract manipulation. It is, however, recognized that a change in moral thinking is usually a necessary step in the process of conversion and this paper concludes that voluntary, safe use of AI to help bring that about would be ethically acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christianity has become the religion of choice for a growing number of diasporic Chinese. This qualitative study examines the conversion narratives of first-generation Chinese converts to evangelical Protestant Christianity, exploring in particular the spiritual experiences that encouraged or confirmed their resolve to become Christians. Utilizing the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), twenty English-speaking participants were interviewed, mostly immigrants to the United States or the United Kingdom from China, including Hong Kong, or from Taiwan. The converts to Christianity in this study were in search of an intellectually plausible faith, and an overarching framework of meaning, purpose, and fullness for their lives, and were motivated as well by longings for community and belonging. Participants reported being profoundly "touched"—inexplicably moved—by the love extended to them by other Chinese Christians, and being transformed in wide-ranging and durable ways as a result. In their view, such love was qualitatively different from, and superior to, the more transactional relational dynamics with which they had been familiar. They inferred that it was "otherworldly," and necessarily emanated from a real and unconditionally benevolent divine source. The study thus illuminates the spiritual dynamics that persist in Chinese Christian conversions, even in a secular age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Conversion" has often been used to designate an event or period of discrete and intense change, especially in relation to an individual's belief and religious identity. The sources on Francis of Assisi's conversion show how pleasure and unpleasure converged in relation to material objects and the affects that they helped to create and sustain. Among others, Francis of Assisi's objects of conversion included lepers, cloth, fire, ice, and his own body. Instead of conversion as a discrete change in a predictable direction, taking the materials of Francis's conversion as the primary objects of the story animates a sense of perfect jouissance, suggesting that conversion entails realignments between pleasure and unpleasure—an experience Francis described, toward the end of his life, as "perfect joy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transcendence of divinity in Islam along with submission to God as the ultimate sovereign created a host of challenges for Muslim kings in their formal, legalistic interactions with non-monotheists, especially those communities who perceived the divine as immanent in nature and did not make a distinction between the veneration of kings and the worship of gods. While the preferred biblical mode for smoothing such engagements between the believer and non-believer was "conversion" of the latter, this approach was often neither possible nor desirable from the perspective of Muslim rulers in Asia. Thus, in many cases, Muslim kings practiced a transgressive form of boundary crossing and translation across religious divisions erected by biblical monotheism, what I call "un-conversion," by deliberately bypassing or overriding the scriptural requirements of Islam. This essay examines the theoretical implications of such un-conversions for our understanding of sovereignty and political theology in Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conclusion of this collection of studies endeavors to recapture five major questions that this special issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies poses on the subject of martyrdom: Is this gesture a form of imitation of Christ (or imitatio Christi) or is it itself a sacrifice? How does it get rid of the shadow of suicide or voluntary death? How do the singularity of its experience and the community within which and in the name of which it is exercised articulate? Can martyrdom be defined as a renunciation of human love, and in this sense as the ultimate step in a process of conversion? How does martyrdom take its place in the writing of the religious history of the modern era, in particular, as far as the Society of Jesus is concerned, in the historiography of the nineteenth century? These five questions open this collection of essays to a field of research that remains to be pursued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution draws attention to members of ecclesiastical orders who left the Bohemian Lands after White Mountain and consequently underwent conversion. The situation of ecclesiastical orders in general was closely linked with this phenomenon, which did not in the end achieve too widespread expansion. Many monastic institutions in the Bohemian Lands met with difficult developments in the Hussite and post-Hussite period and consequently experienced a deep crisis in the Early Modern Period. This also concerned the Order of Preachers, in other words, the Dominicans. One of the renegade members of this order was Jiří Holík, who fled over the border in September of the year 1666, and even obtained the position of preacher to the Bohemian exile community, which he, however, quickly lost due to failure to meet his duties. He published a range of non-Catholic books and finally settled in Riga and achieved fame as the author of books dedicated to gardening. Departures across the border from Church orders, with consequent conversion, are also attested to for members of other orders, who can later be found among the authors of so-called revocation preaching (Revocations-Predigte, sometimes also Wiederrufs-Predigte), in other words, preaching in which the authors publicly renounced their Catholic faith and declared their conversion to the Evangelical confession. The study presents three of them: the former Prague Augustinian Gottfried (Godefridus) Rabe, the Franciscan and preacher in Plzeň Raimund(us) Rzimsky and the Český Krumlov functioning Franciscan Walther Busch. These clergymen mostly later justified their departure to the Protestant regions and the related abandonment of their relevant order and conversion by objections to the Catholic confession. A role could have undoubtedly been played, however, by attempts to avoid the rules of the order, understood as being of a binding nature. Conversion to Protestantism could therefore be not only a liberation from 'incorrect' confessions, but also a personal liberation, which of course had its limits under the new conditions. The actual motives for the departure and conversion of the original monastics and their actual experiences have remained, however, hidden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In therapy, we can integrate in our work things that did not happen actually. This is also valid in the case of writing therapy. When a patient accepts a fictional practice, and tries to perform it, it breaks down his own self-defense mechanism more easily. Such a fictional practice could be talking with a body part or bad trait, rewriting the story of a trauma, introducing new characters, or telling the story from a different perspective. A world that does not follow the rules of reality can give an internal liberation that strengthens the self, weakened by external conditions, and heals the damaged self. That is what Celia Hunt's book, Therapeutic Dimension of Autobiography in Creative Writing, is about, and Thompson Kate in her The Therapeutic Journal Writing. An Introduction for Professionals and James W. Pennebaker and John F. Evans in their Expressive Writing: Words That Heal also devote several chapters specifically to this topic. The most important criteria in this type of writing are to be truly authentic without any role-play. The wisdom of trauma lies in not identifying with the circumstances that make our life narrow and turning to the whole world. This is analogous to religious conversion, the search for the Kingdom of God, the childish open-minded view of the world that Jesus encouraged us to have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present essay argues that Augustine's understanding of the physical mechanism of pain and pleasure bears an analogous relationship to the internal mechanics of his moral psychology. The significance of this analogy is threefold. It corroborates emerging consensus positions regarding Augustine's moral psychology, including recognizing the significance of Stoic influences as well as construing Augustine's psychology as monistic; it draws attention to a greater consistency between Augustine's earlier and later accounts of moral psychology than is typically recognized in scholarship; and it offers a schema that organizes the significant components of Augustine's moral psychology, like his theory of action, habit, the will, and conversion, in relation to one another within a single conceptual system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tolerance underlies many contemporary controversies, yet theorists and political scientists study it in strikingly different ways. This article bridges the gap by using recent developments in political theory to enrich empirical research and extend the study of tolerance to contexts beyond liberal democracies, such as authoritarian regimes. Our recommendations challenge dominant liberal-democratic frameworks by emphasizing variation across the (1) objects of tolerance; (2) possible responses to difference; and (3) sources of tolerance. We then illustrate the promise of our recommendations with three theoretically informed experiments inspired by historical debates about religious conversion. Our results suggest a marked 'convert effect' across not only contemporary religious but also secular political divides, with the same difference in terms of content viewed as less tolerable when resulting from conversion than when given or ascribed. The research demonstrates the benefits of greater dialogue across political theory and political science, while shedding light on a central question of tolerance today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have long been interested in the effects of conversion on religiosity. Drawing on data from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey, I revisit the zeal of the convert thesis by comparing the religiosity of both converts and cradle members within the main American religious traditions. My findings reveal that converts are not more zealous than lifelong members, in fact, converts tend to have lower levels of religious commitment. Switchers raised in strict denominations do exhibit greater zeal than cradle members. The discussion argues that people create new, hybrid forms of religious engagement based on elements from both their current and childhood religious identities. Conversion is less a sudden rupture involving dramatic, wholesale change; rather, it is a process in which some prior religious norms are retained alongside new ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes discourses of conversion involving members of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in the city of Madrid, Spain. Drawing on the biographies of members and religious leaders and focusing on their testimonials of conversion in particular, I observe how the church's message of a better life after conversion always relates to a misguided past. I have proposed the concept of self-othering to link the process through which members internalize and interpret their transformations through religion with othering, as the first step, and individual salvation, as the second step. This study observes specific rites of passage, namely baptisms, which induce an individual to become a member of the church. Self-othering as a concept helps to explain how individuals reinterpret their past and present lives through the lens of religious conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Today the Dutch religious landscape is characterized by two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a massive and dominant trend of religious disaffiliation which mostly affects the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches, while on the other hand the Netherlands also witnesses the emergence of several independent, evangelical congregations of near megachurch size. Purpose: Against the background of these opposite trends, this paper focuses on the second trend and tries to explain why some people join an evangelical congregation. Methods: For this purpose, quantitative data gathered among the audiences of six thriving evangelical congregations are analyzed in view of the following research questions: (1) What was the previous religious affiliation of the people who switched or converted to one of the six participating evangelical congregations? and (2) Which factors induced the switch or conversion to these congregations? Results: Results of bivariate and multivariate analyses show that these congregations attract both mainline and orthodox Protestant switchers as well as a significant number of secular converts, whose decision to join these evangelical congregations is induced by early socialization experiences, their intrinsic religious orientation and the switching of their partner. Closer scrutiny into the background of the apparent secular converts reveals, however, that several of these converts are probably re-affiliates. Although these secular converts indicated to be a religious none in their early teens, their conversion to evangelicalism is in part still induced by certain, early religious socialization experiences. Conclusions and Implications: This insight puts the alleged success of these evangelical congregations in more perspective. It shows that their success is more a matter of circulating, religious believers and not so much a matter of successfully reaching out to the unchurched. In all likelihood, then, thriving evangelical congregations will remain an exception in secular societies like the Netherlands and evangelical church growth in no way marks a break with the ongoing trend of religious disaffiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the nineteenth-century South Caucasus, hundreds of local farmers and nomads petitioned Russian authorities to allow them to become Christians. Most of them were Muslims and specifically requested to join the Armenian Apostolic Church. This article explores religious conversions to Armenian Christianity on Russia's mountainous southern border with the Ottoman Empire and Iran. It demonstrates that tsarist reforms, chiefly the peasant reform and the sedentarization of nomads, accelerated labor migration within the region, bringing many Muslims, Yazidis, and Assyrians into an Armenian environment. Local anxieties over Russian colonialism further encouraged conversions. I argue that by converting to Armenian Christianity many rural South Caucasians benefited from a change in their legal status, which came with the right to move residence, access to agricultural land, and other freedoms. Russia's Jewish communities, on the other hand, saw conversion to Armenian Christianity as a legal means to circumvent discrimination and obtain the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. By drawing on converts' petitions and officials' decisions, this article illustrates that the Russian government emerged as an ultimate arbiter of religious conversions, evaluating the sincerity of petitioners' faith and how Armenian they had become, while preserving the empire's religious and social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the theme of return/conversion in the Book of Hosea. The issue is presented from the perspective of the two parties of the covenant: God and Israel. At the starting point lies Israel's refusal to return to God, and Yahweh's threatening, punitive retribution to his people. The ending focuses on the conversion of the people to Yahweh, a development possible only owing to God's preceding forgiveness, expressed by his turn to his people. These four different dynamics of return are reconstructed on the basis of the twenty-two instances of the verb šûb in the Book of Hosea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 27 September 1391, a woman named Tolrana stood on the steps of the Gironella tower in Girona and, before Christian officials and her own Jewish representatives, refused to convert to Christianity or to remain married to her husband Francesc, who had converted during the recent attacks against the Jewish community. Almost thirty years later, in February 1419, the minor orphan Tolrana Benet appealed to King Alfons because she wanted to convert to Christianity but was being prevented by her Jewish guardians. She proposed to the king that she be put under the guardianship of her converso uncle, Lluis de Cardona. We do not know why the first Tolrana decided to end her marriage rather than convert, nor why the young Tolrana resisted familial pressures to remain Jewish. Yet both examples illustrate ways in which Jewish women exercised agency as a means of determining their own lives. This article focuses on the experiences of women to consider the intersection of agency and religious conversion in a community fraught with crisis around the turn of the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current attraction to Judaism throughout the world has become quite a remarkable religious phenomenon of the twentieth century: in Africa and India, there has been a global surge of millions of people identifying themselves as Jews or Israelites and positioning themselves as being part of the Jewish Diaspora. In this article, after examining the various sources of inspiration of Judaism in Africa and drawing the outlines of African philo-semitism, I explore the phenomenon of Judaization of individuals and communities in Kenya in the twenty-first century. How and why do some Kenyans start placing themselves in a new epistemological universe at a particular period of time? And how do they start regarding themselves as Jews and undergo formal conversion? Using the material drawn from fieldwork carried out in the regions of Nyahururu and Nyeri in central Kenya in January-February 2018 and February 2019 among the community of the Jews of Kasuku and various Judaizing groups of the region, I place the conditions of the Kasuku conversion in its religious, sociological, and cultural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linkage between conversion and religious freedom has been theorised with different approaches. However relevant they may be, these approaches often have the downside of starting with a given definition of "conversion", "religion" and hence "religious freedom". The analysis of conversion (whether or not it is considered to be strictly religious) would in fact suppose not to interpret the conversion as derivative from the convert, but the convert from the conversion, i.e. in what the conversion authorizes. The question is therefore that of the conditions of production and of testing the concept of conversion, consequently of the expected operationality, of the initial double fiction of an irreducibly singular transformation and of a change, through this, of an order felt as unbearable. The importance of the phenomena of conversion could well refer to the problem of pluralism, no longer only religious today, but also social, ethical and political. Conversion would thus be experienced as a protection against the ambivalence intrinsically linked to the plurality of forms of life which are now ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American literature has been one of the chief purveyors of African American culture's folklore tradition. Writers, through fiction and nonfiction accounts, keep alive the stories of such figures as Br'er Rabbit, High John the Conquerer, and John Henry. Other than these manifest folktales, there is also a canon of latent folktales that modern writers are attempting to bring back to African American consciousness. Such is the case with Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a novel that shares the informative and inspirational folktale of flying Africans. This article explores the role that flying plays not only in Morrison's novel but also its continued relevance and effectiveness for African Americans, and other oppressed communities, seeking liberation. I propose that flying is a mode of religious conversion (i.e., an act of (re-)turning) that has enabled African Americans to come in touch with supernatural resources during times of sociopolitical, communal, and personal sorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project aims to conduct a phenomenological study of religious conversion experiences of adults in El Salvador and utilizes Lewis Rambo's systemic stage model to aid in the understanding of the said conversion experiences. In this article, Rambo's systemic stage model is briefly delineated and Christianity in El Salvador is examined. Then, the survey of 20 adult Christians and their conversion experiences in El Salvador is analyzed. The analysis of the survey addresses the method, results, discussion of the results, and limitations of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The baptisms of the lords of the Ōmura, Arima, and Ōtomo families formed the breakthrough for Christianity in Kyushu. These conversions are analyzed here in light of the relevance of "empirical religiosity," the tendency to alter religious commitments and ritual practices according to their perceived efficacy in bringing about this-worldly outcomes. This article arises out of a larger project of comparative global history, which establishes a threefold model of ruler conversions. The revelation of immanent power forms the second element of this model. Close analysis of the sources reveals that in sixteenth-century Japan, just as elsewhere, the daimyo in question were driven to experiment with and then commit to the new cult due to its capacity to bestow military success, healing, exorcism, and fertility. In particular, this is shown through a detailed account of the changing religious affiliations of Ōtomo Sōrin, and his son Yoshimune. However, since the bulk of the sources relating to these conversions are European, this article also considers whether these themes are simply missionary projections. After consulting Japanese sources, this article concludes that both pro- and anti-Christian parties framed their arguments in terms of a shared empiricist epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article addresses the recent popularity of studies on Jewish conversion. In particular, it examines the volume Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present edited by Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko (Philadelphia, 2020). The author of the article suggests looking at this volume as at a representative example of recent trends, themes, methods, and challenges present in studying Jewish conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to analyze the passages about μετάνοια in Philo's texts, with special attention to the section concerning this subject in On the virtues 175-186, in order to determine what value do repentance and conversion hold for the Jewish philosopher, in which ways they are produced and expressed, and what are their effects from a moral and an eschatological point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]