What can wonder engender in terms of religious, political, and broader social practice? Thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis; surrealists such as Andre Breton and Pierre Mabille; and most recently the religious philosopher Mary-Jane Rubenstein have all explored the ways that wonder is not articulated once and for all, but continuously worked upon. This book engages with anthropological explorations of wonder, responding to recent work by Michael W. Scott in order to bring the weight, colour, scent and sound of real ethnographic encounters to new ways of thinking about wonder. The question for contributors is how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true, and the real. The case studies reveal how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the formation of social institutions as various 'modalities of wonder' destabilize old forms and articulate new ones. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Religious and Political Practice.

Unique local transformations of the practice of established religions in Asia and the Pacific are juxtaposed with the emergence of new religious movements whose incidence is growing across the region. In Flows of Faith, the contributing authors take as their starting point questions of how religions manifest outside their cultural boundaries and provide the basis for new social identities, political movements and social transformations. With fresh insights into the globalization of beliefs, their local inflections, and their institutionalization, the authors explore how old and new religions work in different settings, and how their reception and membership challenge orthodox understandings of religion and culture. The chapters - set in Asia, the Pacific, Australia, and the US - illustrate the contrasts and commonalities of these belief systems, and their allegiances and networks in the region and beyond. They include new religious movements - Falun Gong, Brahma Kumaris, the Hare Krishna movement, based in East and South Asia with outreach posts in Australia and the U.S. - and established 'old' religions - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam - that are revitalized and recreated in different settings and places. Flows of Faith describes the transnational reaches of faith. Religious practices and their local manifestations track the movement of peoples, through mission outreach, flight, migration, and pilgrimage. In each new setting, religions are shaped by and in turn shape political and cultural forces, proving that they are resilient and generative, originary and distinctive. The volume is a major contribution, providing readers with a fresh and creative approach into the living experience of religious communities in a contemporary globalised world.

Unique local transformations of the practice of established religions in Asia and the Pacific are juxtaposed with the emergence of new religious movements whose incidence is growing across the region. In "Flows of Faith," the contributing authors take as their starting point questions of how religions manifest outside their cultural boundaries and provide the basis for new social identities, political movements and social transformations.

With fresh insights into the globalization of beliefs, their local inflections, and their institutionalization, the authors explore how old and new religions work in different settings, and how their reception and membership challenge orthodox understandings of religion and culture.

The chapters - set in Asia, the Pacific, Australia, and the US - illustrate the contrasts and commonalities of these belief systems, and their allegiances and networks in the region and beyond. They include new religious movements - Falun Gong, Brahma Kumaris, the Hare Krishna movement, based in East and South Asia with outreach posts in Australia and the U.S. - and established 'old' religions - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam - that are revitalized and recreated in different settings and places.

"Flows of Faith" describes the transnational reaches of faith. Religious practices and their local manifestations track the movement of peoples, through mission outreach, flight, migration, and pilgrimage. In each new setting, religions are shaped by and in turn shape political and cultural forces, proving that they are resilient and generative, originary and distinctive.

The volume is a major contribution, providing readers with a fresh and creative approach into the living experience of religious communities in a contemporary globalised world.

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"Christian theology has given to the human sciences at large hermeneutics as an interpretive science of meaning. This remarkable collection of essays by anthropologists turns a keen hermeneutic sensibility on Christian discourse and practice itself, and in the process not only makes an important contribution to the ethnography of Christianity, but also offers a profound meditation on the theory of meaning." Thomas Csordas, University of California - San Diego "The Limits of Meaning is by far the best instance I've seen of the fresh and powerful insights anthropologists are bringing to the study of Christianity. The fascinating ethnographic case studies, along with a fine Introduction by the editors and commentary by Joel Robbins, highlight the crucial importance of meaning for Christianity by focusing on points where it is most at risk or fails utterly. Extremely readable while advancing a sophisticated theoretical argument that links the deeper dynamics of Christianity with its local manifestations, this book challenges conventional understandings and opens new avenues of research. It deserves to be on the bookshelves of all serious students of contemporary world Christianity." John Barker, University of British Columbia Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork." Matthew Engelke is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. He has conducted research in Zimbabwe and published numerous articles in leading journals, focusing on Christian ritual, conversion, spirit possession, and textual authority. He is coeditor with Marshall Sahlins of Prickly Paradigm Press. Matt Tomlinson is an assistant lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University. He has conducted research in Fiji on Christianity's role in village and national politics, especially in relation to traditional chiefly systems and coups d'etat. He has published in American Anthropologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Oceania.

What can wonder engender in terms of religious, political, and broader social practice? Thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis; surrealists such as Andre Breton and Pierre Mabille; and most recently the religious philosopher Mary-Jane Rubenstein have all explored the ways that wonder is not articulated once and for all, but continuously worked upon. This book engages with anthropological explorations of wonder, responding to recent work by Michael W. Scott in order to bring the weight, colour, scent and sound of real ethnographic encounters to new ways of thinking about wonder. The question for contributors is how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true, and the real. The case studies reveal how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the formation of social institutions as various 'modalities of wonder' destabilize old forms and articulate new ones. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Religious and Political Practice.

The phrase Christian politics points in two directions: political relations between denominations in one direction, and ways that Christian churches contribute to debates about how society should be governed in the other. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.

Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.

Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological conversation with the work of "contextual theologians", exploring how the combination of Pacific Islands culture and Christianity shapes theological dialogues. Employing both scholarly research and ethnographic fieldwork, the author addresses a range of topics: from radical criticisms of biblical stories as inappropriate for Pacific audiences to celebrations of traditional gods such as Tagaloa as inherently Christian figures. This book presents a symphony of voices-engaged, critical, prophetic-from the contemporary Pacific's leading religious thinkers and suggests how their work articulates with broad social transformations in the region. Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct type of culturally driven theological dialogue. One type is between readers and texts, in which biblical scholars suggest new ways of reading, and even rewriting, the Bible so it becomes more meaningful in local terms. A second kind concerns the state of the church and society. For example, feminist theologians and those calling for "prophetic" action on social problems propose new conversations about how people in Oceania should navigate difficult times. A third kind of discussion revolves around identity, emphasizing what makes Oceania unique and culturally coherent. A fourth addresses the problems of climate change and environmental degradation to sacred lands by encouraging "eco-theological" awareness and interconnection. Finally, many contextual theologians engage with the work of other disciplines' prominently, anthropology-as they develop new discourse on God, people, and the future of Oceania. Contextual theology allows people in Oceania to speak with God and fellow humans through the idiom of culture in a distinctly Pacific way. Tomlinson concludes, however, that the most fruitful topic of dialogue might not be culture, but rather the nature of dialogue itself. Written in an accessible, engaging style and presenting innovative findings, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, world religion, theology, globalization, and Pacific studies.

The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently "dialogical." No speaker speaks alone, because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves, but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on "the monologic imagination" gives us new insights into languages' political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.

Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological conversation with the work of "contextual theologians," exploring how the combination of Pacific Islands' culture and Christianity shapes theological dialogues. Employing both scholarly research and ethnographic fieldwork, the author addresses a range of topics: from radical criticisms of biblical stories as inappropriate for Pacific audiences to celebrations of traditional gods such as Tagaloa as inherently Christian figures. This book presents a symphony of voices-engaged, critical, prophetic-from the contemporary Pacific's leading religious thinkers and suggests how their work articulates with broad social transformations in the region. Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct type of culturally driven theological dialogue. One type is between readers and texts, in which biblical scholars suggest new ways of reading, and even rewriting, the Bible so it becomes more meaningful in local terms. A second kind concerns the state of the church and society. For example, feminist theologians and those calling for "prophetic" action on social problems propose new conversations about how people in Oceania should navigate difficult times. A third kind of discussion revolves around identity, emphasizing what makes Oceania unique and culturally coherent. A fourth addresses the problems of climate change and environmental degradation to sacred lands by encouraging "eco-theological" awareness and interconnection. Finally, many contextual theologians engage with the work of other disciplines- prominently, anthropology-as they develop new discourse on God, people, and the future of Oceania. Contextual theology allows people in Oceania to speak with God and fellow humans through the idiom of culture in a distinctly Pacific way. However, Tomlinson concludes, the most fruitful topic of dialogue might not be culture, but rather the nature of dialogue itself. Written in an accessible, engaging style and presenting innovative findings, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, world religion, theology, globalization, and Pacific studies.

A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, the book presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.