This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members' "bizarre" habit of speaking in tongues. This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love-all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church's members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of "spectacle" because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere. The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene. The focus on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal provides a road map into the church and canvasses an intimate view into the lives of its members, capturing their stories as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. This book challenges important sociological concepts like crisis to explain religious seekership and conversion, while developing new concepts such as "God Hunting" and "Holy Ghost Capital" to explain the process through which individuals become tongue-speaking Pentecostals. Church members acquire "Holy Ghost Capital" and construct a Pentecostal identity through a relationship narrative to establish personal status and power through conflicting tongue-speaking ideas. Finally, this book examines the futures of the small and large, institutionally affiliated Pentecostal Church and argues that the small Pentecostal Church is better able to resist modern rationalizing forces, retaining the charisma that sparked the initial religious movement. The power of charisma in the small church has far-reaching consequences and implications for the future of Pentecostalism and its followers.

Mormonism: A Guide for the Perplexed explains central facets of the Mormon faith and way of life for those wishing to gain a clearer understanding of this rapidly growing world religion. As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to grow in the United States and especially in other countries (with a total membership of over 15 million, more than 50% of which is outside the US), and as theologians and church leaders wrestle with whether Mormonism is in fact a valid expression of modern Christianity, this distinctive religious tradition has become increasingly an object of interest and inquiry. This book is the ideal companion to the study of this perplexing and often misunderstood religion. Covering historical aspects, this guide takes a careful look at the whole of Mormonism, its tenets and practices, as well as providing an insight into a Mormon life.

Pentecostals have not sufficiently worked out a distinctively Pentecostal philosophy of art and aesthetics. In Pentecostal Aesthetics: Theological Reflections in a Pentecostal Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, with a foreword by Amos Yong, Steven Felix-Jager corrects this by reflecting theologically on art and aesthetics from a global Pentecostal perspective, particularly through a pneumatic Pentecostal lens. Felix-Jager contends that a Pentecostal philosophy of art and aesthetics must comply with the global, experiential, and pneumatocentric nature of the Pentecostal movement. Such a philosophy can be ontologically grounded in a relativistic theory of art. Theological reflections concerning the nature and purpose of art must then be sensitive to the ontological foundations secured thereof. In this fashion, Pentecostals can gain ample insight about the Spirit's work in today's contemporary artworld.

A.J. Tomlinson (1865-1943) ranks among the leading figures of the early Pentecostal movement, and like so many of his cohorts, he was as complex as he was colorful. Arriving in Appalachia as a home missionary determined to uplift and evangelize poor mountain whites, he stayed to become the co-founder and chief architect of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) and the Church of God of Prophecy, which together with their minor offspring now constitute the third-largest denominational family within American Pentecostalism. R.G. Robins's biography recreates the world in which Tomlinson operated, and through his story offers a new understanding of the origins of the Pentecostal movement. Scholars have tended to view Pentecostalism as merely one among many anti-modernist movements of the early twentieth century. Robins argues that this is a misreading of the movement's origins-the result of projecting the modernist/fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s back onto the earlier religious landscape. Seeking to return the story of Pentecostalism to its proper historical context, Robins suggests that Pentecostalism should rightly be seen as an outgrowth of the radical holiness movement of the late nineteenth century. He argues that, far from being anti-modern, Pentecostals tended to embrace modernity. Pentecostal modernism, however, was a working class or "plainfolk" phenomenon, and it is the plainfolk character of the movement that has led so many scholars to mislabel it as anti-modern or fundamentalist. Through the compelling narrative of Tomlinson's life story, Robins sheds new light on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American religion, and provides a more refined lens through which to view the religious dynamics of our own day. v