James Bielo's Words Upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study closely observes several Bible studies in Lansing, Michigan. I've been reading and blogging about the book this summer as part of my efforts to gain a sense of the academic perspective on evangelical Christians[1. You may have noticed that Bielo capitalizes "Evangelical," while I don't. The style of our blog has generally been not to capitalize the word, but I've maintained Bielo's own usage in my quotations.]. In this week's chapter, … [Read more...] about Bielo: The Textual Economies of Bible Studies
evangelicals
What Do Academics Think of Evangelicals?
During the past few weeks, one of the darlings of the book review circuit has been T. M. Luhrmann's When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford, spent several years attending Vineyard Churches around the country —not out of spiritual interest, but as an anthropological study. Here she is on NPR, describing a key part of her thesis: that evangelicals train themselves to perceive God: They learn to experience some of their thoughts as not … [Read more...] about What Do Academics Think of Evangelicals?