Front cover image for Spirits and letters : reading, writing and charisma in African Christianity

Spirits and letters : reading, writing and charisma in African Christianity

"Studies of religion have a tendency to conceptualise 'the Spirit' and 'the Letter' as mutually exclusive and intrinsically antagonistic. However, the history of religions abounds in cases where charismatic leaders deliberately refer to and make use of writings. This book challenges prevailing scholarly notions of the relationship between 'charisma' and 'institution' by analysing reading and writing practices in contemporary Christianity. Taking up the continuing anthropological interest in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, and representing the first book-length treatment of literacy practices among African Christians, this volume explores how church leaders in Zambia refer to the Bible and other religious literature, and how they organise a church bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-charismatic mode. Thus, by examining social processes and conflicts that revolve around the conjunction of Pentecostal-charismatic and literacy practices in Africa, Spirits and Letters reconsiders influential conceptual dichotomies in the social sciences and the humanitites and is therefore of interest not only to anthropologists but also to scholars working in the fields of African studies, religious studies, and the sociology of religion."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2008
Berghahn Books, New York, 2008
ix, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9781845454838, 1845454839
191924258
Colonial literacies
Passages, configurations, traces
Schooled literacy, schooled religion
Literate cultures in a material world
Indices to the scriptural
The fringes of Christianity
Thoughts about religions of the book
Texts, readers, spirit
Evanescence and the necessity of intermediation
Setting texts in motion
Missions in writing
Enablements to literacy
Offices and the dispersion of charisma
Positions of writers, positions in writings
Outlines for the future, documents of the immediate
Bureaucracy in-between