Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky - Hardcover

Kimbrough, David L.

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9780807822272: Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807822272 ISBN 13: 9780807822272

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 1995

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The Holiness serpent handlers, who originated around 1910, are one of the most controversial religious groups in America. Their practices have brought them into conflict with authorities many times, and the often sensationalized media accounts of their services fascinate and horrify us. But as David Kimbrough so ably documents, snake handlers are sincere worshipers who honestly believe that they are protected by God when they take up serpents.
Kimbrough traces the snake handlers' belief system to fundamentalist strains that rejected the kind of "intellectual" faiths associated with educated eastern ministers. They sought a folk religion, and lay preachers arose from their ranks to deliver the emotion-laden sermons they demanded. According to Kimbrough, the practitioners of snake handling find comfort in the certainty of scriptural commands, choosing to set themselves apart from the world through a religious practice that they believe aligns them with God and prepares them for a privileged position in the next life. For Kimbrough, snake handling represents an intensification of the fundamentalist impulse rather than a deviation from it.

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From Library Journal:

Kimbrough presents his research, based primarily on oral interviews, on the history of the religious ritual of snake handling. He focuses on the Saylor family to illustrate the evolution of the snake-handling movement, which intensified as the economy and lifestyle of the Appalachian Mountain region moved from agricultural subsistence to industrial capitalism. When families moved from farms to coal fields, folk religions emerged to fulfill emotional needs not met by traditional churches. Kimbrough's work is much more scholarly and analytical than Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain (LJ 12/94) and more narrowly focused than Thomas Burton's Snake Handling Believers (LJ 3/15/93). Recommended for academic collections.?Eloise R. Hitchcock, Tennessee Technological Univ. Lib., Cookeville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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