Christian moderns freedom and fetish in the mission encounter Keane, Webb

Klaver, Miranda

doi:10.2752/175183408x376791

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…As an epistemic virtue, objectivity became a particular way of valuing detachment (cf. Candea, Cook, Trundle & Yarrow 2015; also Keane 2007), the authority of which was drawn from the painstaking suppression of any distorting ‘subjective’ influences upon one's perception of one's object of analysis.…”

Section: Biblical Literalism and The Virtue Of Objectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Steeped in the moral narrative of modernity and the epistemological promise of purification (cf. Keane 2007; Latour 1993), it offered an authoritatively concrete way to put the knower in cognitive contact with the reality of God's laws. See also Joseph Webster's (2022) note about similarities between laboratory science and fundamentalist Protestant hermeneutics when it comes to the pursuit of unmediated knowledge of reality.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Victor

2024

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth‐century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination's dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show that as an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.

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Section: Biblical Literalism and The Virtue Of Objectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%