Book Review: Amy Slagle: The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity

Abstract

Amy Slagle’s The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace is an excellent study of the process of conversion to Orthodoxy by mainly middle-class Euro-Americans in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Jackson, Mississippi. It is informed by a sociological interpretive framework that emerges from the author’s inductive approach that allows the data to guide the analysis. Conversion is viewed not as a passive process that happens to converts, but as an act or series of actions that these conscious adults choose to engage in, both spiritually and physically. Slagle wishes to show the way that converts, clergy, and lifelong church members draw on the competing repertoires of the American spiritual marketplace and Orthodox belief and practice to understand and enact conversion, and to engage in the ongoing process of constructing post-conversion identities within the church (13). The marketplace metaphor proves effective, not only for thinking about the range of possible groups available for contemporary Euro-American religious seekers, but also the ways in which converts conceive of and articulate their conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Slagle conducted ethnographic research at several churches by means of participant observation and in-depth interviewing over the course of 7 months in 2005 and 2006. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the beliefs and practices of the Orthodox Church and a ‘‘thick description’’ of the churches in Pittsburgh and Jackson. In chapter 2, the author discusses the ways that different social actors, seeker converts and intermarriage converts, manipulate the spiritual marketplace by making choices of various kinds. Slagle emphasizes the book-driven, intellectual nature of conversion particularly among seekers (49) which sets up a dichotomy too often observed in Orthodox churches: that of the bespectacled Anglo convert, confident in his/her knowledge of theological and liturgical minutiae and the