Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement - Hardcover

Csordas, Thomas J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520204697 ISBN 13: 9780520204690

Verlag: University of California Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary tasks of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. This story, unlike an ethnography of a little-known tribal society, is about people who are quite like everybody else but at the same time inhabit a substantially different phenomenological world.

Csordas has observed and studied Charismatic groups throughout the United States. He begins with an introduction to the Charismatic Renewal and a history of its development during the roughly thirty years of its existence. He describes the movement's internal diversity as well as its international extent, emphasizing Charismatic identity and the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life.

Language, Charisma, and Creativity extends and builds on the ideas of self-transformation that Csordas introduced in his earlier book on Charismatic healing. This work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, studies of religion and ritual, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American studies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas J. Csordas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (California, 1994).

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"A timely, well-written contribution to our understanding of a number of important phenomena in the contemporary world."—Erika Bourguignon, Ohio State University

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"A timely, well-written contribution to our understanding of a number of important phenomena in the contemporary world."—Erika Bourguignon, Ohio State University

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Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

By Thomas J. Csordas

University of California Press

Copyright 1997 Thomas J. Csordas
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520204697
1
Building the Kingdom

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal has never had a single identifiable charismatic leader in the Weberian sense, although among the movement elite there exists an informal hierarchy of charismatic renown based on reputation for evangelism, healing, or local community leadership. Neither has the movement had a dramatic history, although there have been apocalyptic moments, periods of internal tension and ideological split, and the occasional intrigue of high Church politics. It is certainly a phenomenon with roots in both Pentecostal and Catholic traditions, as well as a phenomenon with distinct local and global manifestations.1   To begin, then, we will aim for a sense of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as a social and cultural phenomenon, a "movement," with the caveat that by the next chapter it will become necessary to problematize the very concept of movement.

Indeed, from the "indigenous" standpoint, Charismatics themselves have occasionally resisted describing the Renewal as a movement. They have often qualified the notion, sometimes emphasizing that theirs is a movement "of the Spirit" in the sense that it is inspired by and belongs to the deity, at other times insisting that it is a "movement" of the Spirit in the sense that what is moving is the Holy Spirit itself. In this latter sense the Renewal is not really a sociocultural phenomenon at all, but strictly a spiritual one. From the standpoint of anthropological theory, in recent years it has become clear that the standard paradigm for understanding social and religious "movements" faces problems in at least three respects: its conception of movements as discrete entities rather

than as phenomena characteristic or diagnostic of the cultures in which they are spawned; its ability to account for meaning in addition to causality and social dynamics of movements; and its assumption that the categorical subjects of movements are not necessarily only peoples, populations, or social types but indeterminate selves in a process of reorientation and transformation. We will return to these issues in the next chapter, but to sustain that discussion we must first survey the diversity among manifestations of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal first in its country of origin, the United States, then globally.

The United States

The year commonly accepted as the beginning of the movement is 1967. During a retreat at Duquesne University (the "Duquesne Weekend"), a group of students and young faculty members experienced the spiritual awakening of Baptism in the Holy Spirit through the influence of Protestant Pentecostals. They soon shared their experience with like-minded students at Notre Dame and Michigan State universities. Although on occasion one can hear individuals claim that they individually or with a small prayer group prayed in tongues before or independently of this point, the narrative of origin among this relatively young, well-educated, and all-male group is standard. It has consistently been recounted as a kind of just-so story in greater or lesser detail by virtually all social science authors who have addressed the movement (Fichter 1975; Mawn 1975; K. McGuire 1976; M. McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Bord and Faulkner 1983; Poloma 1982), while for some among the movement's adherents it has attained the status of an origin myth. The new "Catholic Pentecostals" claimed to offer a unique spiritual experience to individuals and promised a dramatic renewal of Church life based on a born-again spirituality of "personal relationship" with Jesus and direct access to divine power and inspiration through a variety of "spiritual gifts," or "charisms." The movement attracted a strong following among relatively well educated, middle-class suburban Catholics (Mawn 1975; Fichter 1975; McGuire 1982; Neitz 1987; Poloma 1982). Since its inception it has spread throughout the world wherever there are Catholics.

In the United States, development of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal can be roughly divided into stages:

1) Prior to 1967 Catholics who underwent the Pentecostal experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit often were persuaded by their Protestant mentors that Catholicism and Pentecostalism were incompatible, and frequently left the Catholic church.

2) From 1967 to 1970 Catholic Pentecostalism was a collection of small, personalistic prayer groups emphasizing spontaneity in worship and interpersonal relations, loosely organized via networks of personal contacts, and not fully differentiated from other associations such as the Cursillo movement. Protestant Pentecostals and nondenominational neo-Pentecostals remained a strong influence.

3) From 1970 to 1975 the renamed Catholic Charismatic Renewal underwent rapid institutionalization and consolidation of a lifestyle including collective living in "covenant communities," distinctive forms of ritual, and a specialized language of religious experience. Prayer groups and covenant communities were often composed of both Catholic and Protestant members, though the leadership was predominantly Catholic.

4) From 1975 to the end of the decade the movement entered an apocalyptic phase, based on prophetic revelation that "hard times" were imminent for Christians. Many covenant communities saw their form of life as essential for coping with the coming trials, and a split occurred in the leadership between those who held that the prayer group is a separate type of Charismatic organization with its own role and those who held that it was an initial stage in a necessary development toward a full-scale covenant community.2   In general, leaders attempted both to influence the direction of the Catholic church and to maintain an ecumenical outlook, while the Charismatic Renewal progressively attained international scope.

5) The 1980s brought recognition by movement leaders that its growth in the U.S. had dramatically decreased. They also saw an increasingly clear divergence between Charismatics gathered into tightly structured intentional communities who wanted to preserve the earlier sense of apocalyptic mission and those who remained active in less overtly communitarian parochial prayer groups. A second split occurred, this time among covenant communities themselves, over issues of government and authority, as well as over relations to the larger movement and the Church as a whole. By the mid-1980s both streams of the movement had initiated evangelization efforts directed as much at their less committed or

flagging Charismatic brethren as at the unconverted.3   Also in the 1980s, a new wave of Protestant influence was introduced with the rising popularity of so-called Third Wave Pentecostal evangelists.

6) By the late 1980s and early 1990s some among the communitarians considered themselves a distinct movement. Among the parochially oriented stream, Catholic identity became heightened as fewer groups cultivated combined Protestant and Catholic "ecumenical" memberships and as the Church took a more active supervisory role. Meanwhile, boundaries between Charismatics and conventional Catholics became more ambiguous, as many...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520204697
• ISBN 13: 9780520204690
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar