Conversion Narratives Research Articles

Georg Lukács and Revolutionary Realpolitik, 1918-19: An Essay on Ethical Action, Historical Judgment, and the History of Political Thought.

"Bolshevism as a Moral Problem" and "Tactics and Ethics" were discussions of political ethics closely related to Max Weber's contemporaneous "Politics as a Vocation." They diverged from one another in their historical assessments of possibilities for ethically responsible revolutionary action. They are best understood as developments of an approach to political judgment originally forged by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose concerns were associated by Weber with Realpolitik and which continue to animate discussions of "political realism." Overwriting these concerns as transitional moments in personal conversion narratives or the history of political thought has an inhibiting effect on historical and political judgment.

A Review of Milena Benovska, Orthodox Revivalism in Russia: Driving Forces and Moral Quests. London: Routledge, 2020, 240 pp.

The review discusses the problems and challenges faced by any researcher of Orthodox religiosity in the post-Soviet space. Milena Benovska, the author of the monograph under review, attempts—sometimes quite successfully—to portray Orthodox revivalism in post-Soviet Russia as a bottom-up process driven by the activism of parishes. This uneasy task has led the author to Kaluga, where she has gathered the main material for her study. The analytical framework of the study involves the anthropology of morality, the study of conversion narratives, the politics of memory, and reflections on religious nationalism. These directions determine the structure of the book, which consists of four chapters. In addition, the introduction provides some interesting reflections on the author’s own place in the field. The review outlines the general problems the author has to deal with and suggests the promising ways to resolve a number of the raised questions and inconsistencies.

“Love Jihad”, “Forced” Conversion Narratives, and Interfaith Marriage in the Sikh Diaspora

This paper sets out to critically examine the “forced” conversion narrative circulating across the Sikh diaspora. The “forced” conversion narrative tells the story of Muslim men allegedly deceiving and tricking “vulnerable” Sikh females into Islam. The paper explores the parallels between the “forced” conversion narrative and the discourse on “love jihad” propagated by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as drawing out its particularities within the Sikh community. The paper is informed by new empirical data generated by a series of qualitative interviews with Sikhs in the UK, US, and Canada, and captures the complexities and nuances of my respondents in their interpretations of, and challenges to, the “forced” conversions narrative. The paper adopts a decolonial Sikh studies theoretical framework to critically unpack the logics of the discourse. In doing so, it reveals a wider politics at play, centred upon the regulation of Sikh female bodies, fears of the preservation of community, and wider anxieties around interfaith marriage. These aspects come together to display Sikh Islamophobia, whereby the figure of the “predatory” Muslim male is represented as an existential threat to Sikh being.

Learning from Muslims and Jews: In Search of the Identity of Christ from Eighth-century Baghdad to Seventeenth-century Hague

AbstractIn past iterations of ecclesiastical historical writings and teachings, there has not always been sufficient acknowledgment of the encounters between Christians and their religious Others. This article is an exercise in diachronic comparative interreligious encounter: a Muslim-Christian engagement in the eighth century CE and a Jewish-Christian epistolary exchange in the seventeenth century CE. The former took place in Baghdad in the court of a caliph, whereas the latter took place between individuals in London and the Hague, between Baruch Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg. While it might be tempting to highlight the narratives of conversion away from one religion into another—whether from Christianity to Islam, Christianity to Judaism, or vice versa—in current historiography, it also seems that quotidian realities of interreligious exchange often do not lead to such conversions, and yet leave the participants better informed and further enlightened about the practice and pursuit of their own religion. The following two accounts are neither triumphalist nor tragic. Patriarch Timothy and Caliph al-Mahdī's exchange in eighth-century Baghdad shows the degree to which divine identity and Christian apophasis mattered. The letter exchanges between Spinoza and his interlocutors also show the degree to which divine mystery as ontological demarcator for both the doctrine of the Trinity and corresponding Christology, as well as Spinoza's repudiation of both, mattered. Lastly, these two examples of interreligious engagements show a pathway of encounter which does not dismiss or cancel the religious Other.

Jihadi Audiovisuality and Its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations

Jihadi Audiovisuality and Its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations

Winckles, Andrew O. Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: ‘Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader .’

Winckles, Andrew O. <i>Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: ‘Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader</i> <i>.’</i>

Blessed by the Lord: A Visual Portrait of a Jumli Pentecostal Congregation

Many Christian converts in the Sinja Valley of Jumla, northwest Nepal, reveal that they have been struck by the Bible because it referenced real events, especially miraculous cases of healing. These miraculous events provide tangible ‘evidence’ of God’s power that somewhat replicate the expectations that people nurture with respect to the Hindu deities. In such way, miracles play an especially crucial role in supporting the conversion of women and youngsters living in large families, who, partaking as veritable protagonists in Biblical events, are turned into the as quintessentially Christian subjects of a conversion narrative that helps substantiating their radical decision vis-à-vis the rest of their family.

Evaluation Schema in the Sendong Survivors’ Narratives

The conversational/everyday story is the least studied of the two primary forms of narratives: literary and conversational/everyday. Though some studies on the schemas or elements comprising conversational narratives, most of these are from Western perspectives. To address this gap, this paper determines the types and features of the evaluation schema reflected in the oral narratives of personal experiences of the typhoon Sendong (Washi) survivors in the barangays of Sta. Filomena, Hinaplanon, and Santiago of Iligan City, Philippines. Forty informants (40) were asked to describe their Sendong experiences orally, and audio-recorded interviews were transcribed. The narrative clauses were coded using Labov and Waletzky’s six narrative schema model as the main framework highlighting the evaluation schemas of these narratives. Results showed two general evaluation schemas in the Sendong narratives: the external evaluation and the embedded/internal evaluation. It is also revealed in the study that evaluation schemas can also be categorized based on content. These typologies include individual evaluation, collective evaluation (which could be inclusive or exclusive), outsider’s evaluation, and the “you” evaluation. The study concludes that the presence of these culture-specific types of evaluation (other than the individual evaluation) reflects the collectivistic culture of the Filipinos, that of focusing more on the “we” than the “I” as depicted in the evaluative comments of the Sendong survivors in this study.

Carving out a legal narrative from Galarza to Soria: Accounting for the complexities of history, race, and place in educational research

In this article, the authors reflect on the methodological tools they used to recover hidden perspectives within two desegregation cases, Karla Galarza v. The Board of Education of Washington D.C., 1947 and Debbie and Doreen Soria, et al. v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees, 1974. Placing these two narratives in conversation and excavating the stories behind their creation, they add depth and dimension to our understanding of the long struggle for educational equality. They renew calls for educational researchers to consider the utility of a critical historical lens to more fully account for the complexities of race across time and place.

Κατασκευή αφηγηματικών ταυτοτήτων και υβριστικός λόγος: Η περίπτωση του γλωσσικού στοιχείου μαλάκας

In this article, I explore the role of swearing in conversational narratives. More specifically, I examine how the Greek swearword ‘malakas’, employed either by the narrators or by the story recipients, contributes to narrative identity constructions. Drawing on positioning theory, I argue that via the swearword ‘malakas’, a variety of significant narrative identities are made manifest, such as the outgroup member-story character, the ingroup member-story character, the competent narrator, the affiliative story-recipient etc.

Abstract Knowledge, Embodied Experience: Towards a Literary Fieldwork in the Humanities

The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of ‘literary fieldwork’ that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo’s (2016) concept of “humanities fieldwork” and Ghosh’s (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author’s literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author’s creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.

‘Because of the missionaries': The ambiguous presence of past missionaries in the Marshall Islands

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the contemporary presence of pioneering missionaries to the Marshall Islands by looking at how conventional conversion narratives construe them as agents of radical transformation. Ridden with ambiguity, conversion is a recursive factor in social and political life, a fact that point to the context-dependent nature of this specific narrative. While rupture often serves as a useful metaphor in folk-models of conversion, it reflects a perspective with a clear political goal and therefore glosses over its inherent ambiguity and dynamism. In the Marshall Islands, the conversion narrative (where the past was horrid while the present is harmonious) is only one way of addressing contemporary challenges through the past. Running parallel to this is another narrative that speaks to a perceived moral degradation in the present, a discourse that relies on a harmonious rather than horrid past. By contrasting the contemporary presence of past missionaries with a historical analysis of the conversion era, this article argues that, more than a moment in history, cultural change is a discursive tool in which the people populating the ethnographic present use distinct representations of the past to address what is at stake here and now.

How the Bible Works

This article is about Russian Baptists’ perception of their faith as a text. I argue that they practice their lived faith by interiorizing the language of the Russian Synodal Translation of the Bible as their ‘language of reasoning’. I support this claim by analyzing two aspects of faith: as an act of conversion and as a process of living a Christian life. To illustrate the mechanism of sustaining faith, I use the case of a rehabilitation ministry for addicted people to unpack narratives of conversion, gender order, and family life. Biblical literalism is the basis of the Russian Baptist faith narrative, and in this article I scrutinize the mechanism of its construction.

Designing Player Intent through “Playful” Interaction

Designing Player Intent through “Playful” Interaction

A longitudinal study of women's representations and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth

ObjectiveTo explore women's representations of pregnancy and childbirth and how these representations are constructed and have changed. BackgroundIn the 1980s, many women in Quebec demanded that the birthing process be both demedicalised and humanised, resulting in the legalisation of the midwife profession while expanding their choices over birthing locations within the public health system (e.g., birthing centres, the home, or hospitals). Birth-related technologies were also improving at that time. Nearly 40 years later, we wanted to learn about their perceptions. MethodThis qualitative and contextualised phenomenological study surveyed 25 first-time mothers who had received care from midwives, general practitioners, or obstetricians. Each participant met with the researcher twice during her pregnancy and once after giving birth to engage in narrative conversations, which were analysed from an interdisciplinary viewpoint (socio-anthropology). FindingsParticipant perceptions of pregnancy varied. Some saw it as a state that distorted the body, while others saw it as a long period of struggle with a compulsory step that was also fascinating and/or even happy. Women undergo an incremental process of change before contemplating childbirth, and typically undergo a transitional period when nearing the event itself. They may think of childbirth as joyful and/or painful. Representations are built intersubjectively through influences involving family, the media, and care providers. Stories from their mothers, therefore, created undeniable impressions. ConclusionIn a context heavily influenced by technology, easy pregnancies and/or childbirth events are typically deemed “lucky.” This negatively reinforces both the cultural and intergenerational values transmitted regarding these events.

The Jew's Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative by Efraim Sicher

The Jew's Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative by Efraim Sicher

Muslim narratives of desistance among Norwegian street criminals: Stories of reconciliation, purification and exclusion

Stories about sin, regret and forgiveness are fundamental in Islam and other world religions. Islamic revivalism mediates a redemption narrative tailored to street criminals who want to break with the cycle of stigmatization, imprisonment and violence. Drawing on so-called conversion narratives, this article examines the repertoire of such stories among male street criminals in Norway who turn, or ‘return’, to Islam. I have identified three narrative types: reconciliation, purification and exclusion. I explore the content of these stories and the work they do for tellers and their audiences. Arguably, these narrative types represent forms of desistance that open up and restrict particular paths into Islam and out of street crime.

The Effect of Vocabulary Depth and Breadth on English Listening Comprehension Can Depend on How Comprehension Is Measured.

This study examines the relative contribution of vocabulary breadth (VB) and vocabulary depth (VD) to three different listening comprehension measures. One hundred and thirteen English majors were given VB and VD tests, and three listening comprehension tests. Based on three pairs of hierarchical multiple regression analyses, we found that the relative contribution of VB and VD varied across the three listening comprehension tests. Specifically, for the listening test with an expository text dictation to assess integrative skills, both VB and VD made a unique positive contribution to comprehension, but this was greater in the case of depth. For the listening test involving narrative conversations to assess literal comprehension, neither VB nor VD (after controlling for each other) could independently predict comprehension, whereas for the listening test that comprises expository passages to assess inferential comprehension, VD could separately predict comprehension but VB could not. These findings suggest that the relative contribution of VD and VB to listening comprehension may depend on how a listening test is constructed. Therefore, the findings will contribute to listening comprehension and vocabulary knowledge research, and vocabulary teaching and learning.

El construccionismo social en la conducta suicida: conversaciones narrativas con estudiantes universitarios

En este artículo presentamos los resultados de una investigación que tuvo como objetivo compren-der los significados que los estudiantes de la Universidad Católica Luis Amigó de Manizales (Colom-bia) les dan a sus experiencias relacionales, en el contexto familiar y social, identificando aquellos aspectos de las relaciones que pueden ser factores protectores del riesgo suicida. Es una investiga-ción de corte cualitativo con un diseño hermenéutico, siendo la narrativa la estrategia para la pro-ducción dialógica. Tomamos como categorías de análisis los significados atribuidos a las relaciones con la familia, con los amigos y en el propio contexto investigativo. Encontramos que son factores protectores del riesgo suicida: la aceptación, la confianza y la posibilidad de ser auténtico y de ex-presarse libremente. Consideramos el potencial preventivo de las conversaciones narrativas basadas en el reconocimiento y el diálogo en las relaciones interpersonales.

Uma "fake news" setecentista? Investigação a respeito da "conversão dos índios Orizes" nos sertões da Bahia (c. 1710 - c. 1730)

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de uma recente investigação sobre uma narrativa de conversão ocorrida nos sertões da Bahia. De acordo com ela, um padre de nome Eusébio Dias Lassos de Lima, no ano de 1713, converteu os índios Orizes-Procazes, grupo tido como um “dos mais bárbaros e perigosos dos sertões”. Ao cotejarmos documentação de diversos arquivos, inclusive da Torre do Tombo, e analisarmos tal narrativa, foi possível concluirmos que esta notícia publicada em Lisboa no ano de 1716, citada inclusive em várias teses, foi colocada em dúvida, sendo afirmado por coetâneos que tudo não passou de invenção do padre em colaboração com um “editor” lusitano. Apresentamos aqui as intencionalidades, as condições de produção da notícia, e os regimes de verdade que estavam subsumidos nos enunciados dos envolvidos.