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In the House of the Serpent Handler - A Story of Faith and Fleeting Fame in the Age of Social Media (Paperback)
Loot Price: R557
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In the House of the Serpent Handler - A Story of Faith and Fleeting Fame in the Age of Social Media (Paperback)
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List price R614
Loot Price R557
Discovery Miles 5 570
You Save R57 (9%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Offers an intimate and engrossing look at the latest generation of
Pentecostal believers who “take up” venomous snakes as a test
of their religious faith. Focusing on several preachers and their
families in six Appalachian states, journalist Julia C. Duin
explores the impact that such twenty-first-century phenomena as
social media and “reality television” have had on rituals long
practiced in obscurity. As Duin reveals, the mortal snakebite
suffered by pastor Mack Wofford in 2012 marked the passing of the
torch to younger preachers Jamie Coots and Andrew Hamblin, who were
featured in the 2013 series Snake Salvation on the National
Geographic Channel. Seeing their participation in the show as a way
of publicizing their faith and thus winning converts, Coots and
Hamblin attempted to reinvent the snake-handling tradition for a
modern audience. The use of the internet, particularly Facebook,
became another key part of their strategy to spread their
particular brand of Christianity. However, Coots’s own death in
2014 was widely reported after the TV series was canceled, while
Hamblin, who emerges as the central figure in the book, was
arrested and tried after a shooting incident involving his
estranged wife. His hopes of becoming a serpent-handling superstar
seemingly dashed, Hamblin spent several months in prison, emerging
more determined than ever to keep to the faith. By the end of the
narrative, he has begun a new church where he can pass on the
tradition to yet another generation. Duin’s thorough, sympathetic
reporting and lively style bring the ecstatic church services she
witnessed vividly to life, and through interviews and quotations
from the principals’ Facebook postings, she has allowed them to
express their beliefs and reveal their everyday lives in their own
words. She also gives the reader an up-close view of how a reporter
pursues a story and the various difficulties encountered along the
way. These engrossing elements add up to a unique story of the ways
in which the practitioners of a century-old custom—one that
strikes most outsiders as bizarre—are adjusting to the challenges
of the new millennium.
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