Language, Charisma, and Creativity. The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

Csordas, Thomas J.

ISBN 10: 0520204697 / ISBN 13: 9780520204690

Published by University of California Press, 1996

About this Item

Hardcover, no dust jacket. Ex-Libris with usual library matter and stamps to top, bottom, and fore-edge of page block. Otherwise pristine. 320 pp.

Seller Inventory # 729963

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Language, Charisma, and Creativity. The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520204697
• ISBN 13: 9780520204690
• Binding: Hardcover

About this title

Synopsis

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary tasks of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. This story, unlike an ethnography of a little-known tribal society, is about people who are quite like everybody else but at the same time inhabit a substantially different phenomenological world.

Csordas has observed and studied Charismatic groups throughout the United States. He begins with an introduction to the Charismatic Renewal and a history of its development during the roughly thirty years of its existence. He describes the movement's internal diversity as well as its international extent, emphasizing Charismatic identity and the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life.

Language, Charisma, and Creativity extends and builds on the ideas of self-transformation that Csordas introduced in his earlier book on Charismatic healing. This work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, studies of religion and ritual, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American studies.

About the Author

Thomas J. Csordas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (California, 1994).