Chapter 8. The Persuasive Path: Giulio Morosini’s Derekh Emunah as a Conversion Narrative

2020 ◽  
pp. 156-181
Keyword(s):  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-658
Author(s):  
J. Michelle Molina

In 1768, a young Swedish Lutheran, inspired by Voltaire, took up life as a merchant to learn more about the world and to find “true religion” based upon reason. When he boarded a ship to Corsica, his travelling companions were two hundred Mexican Jesuits recently expelled from the Americas. In close confines with these members of the Society of Jesus for the duration of his five-week journey, Thjülen chose to convert to Catholicism and, shortly after arriving in Italy, he became a Jesuit. This essay explores the nature of his conversion, utilizing affect theory to argue that he converted less to Catholicism than to the Society of Jesus, or—more precisely—Thjülen converted to remain in proximity to a particular Mexican Jesuit named Manuel Mariano (Emmanuele) de Iturriaga.


2000 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 124
Author(s):  
Don Noble ◽  
Fred Hobson
Keyword(s):  

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 82-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Engelke

AbstractThis paper focuses on the conversion narrative of a man in the Johane Masowe weChishanu Church, an apostolic church in Zimbabwe. Taking up recent discussions within anthropology on Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the author shows how apostolics talk about conversion as a distinct break with 'African custom'. It is argued that anthropologists of religion need to take such narratives of discontinuity seriously because they allow us to understand better the dynamics of religious change.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Ball

The most common motif in early twentieth century radical literature is the conversion narrative. A variation on the bildungsroman, these works feature conversions to socialism or to the labor movement that are modeled on techniques used by evangelical revivalists and on the experiences of religious converts. The most widely read and emblematic radical authors to consistently employ this trope were Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Not only did London and Sinclair continually utilize the conversion story in their fiction and nonfiction, they both described their own discovery of socialism as a religious conversion. In their work, both authors diligently seek to conflate Christianity and socialism and to prove that, not only are the two compatible, but that authentic observance of Christianity demands the endorsement of socialism. London and Sinclair use their writing as a method of evangelism that aims to convince their audience that socialism is a religious enterprise and means to salvation.


HIMALAYA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Samuele Poletti

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.


but at the same time the self-identity of evangelicals contrasted sharply with the secular individualist self which has often been taken as the normative development of the Enlightenment. It remains to make a few observations linking this distinctive evangelical self-understanding to the appearance within evangelicalism of an active and vocal laity. The narrative identity of evangelicals expressed through stories of conversion was embraced by a wide spectrum of society, including women as well as men, laity as well as clergy, and all orders from the lowest to the highest in social rank. If we take into view contexts such as Sierra Leone at the end of the century, we can add that this narrative identity included people of different races as well. Conversion was a central emphasis within evangelicalism and the genre of conversion narrative is correspondingly and surprisingly broad in its sociological reach. One of the implications is that the concept of the laity within evangelicalism, under the impetus of conver-sionism, became something more like the apostle Paul’s use of the term laos to refer to the whole people of God, comprehending both clergy and non-clergy. In the eighteenth century this came into focus in certain debates about call to the ministry, ordination and what constituted a legitimate min-istry. As Jerald Brauer writes, ‘The moment one argues for the illegitimacy of a minister because he has not had a genuine conversion experience, one opens the possibility of ministry to any who have had such a conversion experience.’ Thus, the narrative identity of evangelicals, expressed through


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 345
Author(s):  
Bat Sheva Hass

This article, which is part of a larger ongoing project, examines relationships, friendships and levels of belonging in Dutch society, as well as in the Dutch Muslim community in narratives of women converted to Islam. The ethnicity of these women is always visible as ‘native Dutch’ and shapes their conversion narratives. This ethnography raises a number of questions that form the basis for the analysis presented here: How do Dutch Muslim women shape their identity in a way that is both Dutch and Muslim? Do they incorporate Dutch parameters into their Muslim identity, while at the same time weaving Islamic principles into their Dutch sense of self? The findings show how the conversion narrative can be mobilized by Dutch Muslim women to serve identity formation, levels of belonging and personal (religious) choice in the Netherlands, where Islam is largely considered by the non-Muslim population to be a religion that is oppressive and discriminatory towards women and is associated with foreignness and being the Other. It is argued that, in the context of being Dutch and Muslim, these women express their freedom of choice, which is manifested through friendships, relationships and marriages (Islamic vs. civil), while their ethnicity and conversion experience is a visible component in their identity. In so doing, these women push the limits of the archetypal Dutch identity and are able to criticize Dutch society while simultaneously stretching the meaning of Islam and being critical of Dutch Muslim communities to craft their own hybrid identity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
ANN VASALY

Abstract: The introductory letter of Petrarch's collection of prose epistles (Epistolae Familiares) includes a number of traditional programmatic elements, including a dedication to his close friend Ludwig Van Kempen, a narrative describing the collection's genesis, and a defence of its style and contents, rooted in the example of Cicero's letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus, which Petrarch had discovered some five years earlier. In other ways, Fam. 1.1 is an absolutely unprecedented introduction to an epistolary collection — ultimately staging within the letter a kind of ‘conversion narrative’ that transforms the yet-uncompleted collection into an instantiation of the spiritual journey of its author.


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