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When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by [Luhrmann, T.M.]
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"Is This The End?"
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Product Details

  • File Size: 3509 KB
  • Print Length: 466 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (March 27, 2012)
  • Publication Date: March 27, 2012
  • Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B005IQZAQ0
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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  • Word Wise: Enabled
  • Lending: Not Enabled
  • Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #192,506 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
An excellent, sympathetic, yet well-researched and objective look at how "revivalist evangelicals" train their brains to literally experience God. Luhrmann, an anthropologist, spent years with Vineyard Christians as a participant-observer to explore how they maintained faith in a God that was not directly available to their ordinary senses. Luhrmann also devised a sophisticated experiment that connected various forms of prayer with the psychological tendency to "absorption," that is, becoming totally enveloped in a particular activity. She concludes that prayer in an evangelical sense is not centered on belief - especially not on unwavering belief - but rather on cognitive techniques that allow one to become "absorbed" in reconstructing a world in which God exists. The "kataphatic" tradition, or visualizing oneself in connection with Scripture and God, provided particularly striking results. Luhrmann's style is simultaneously intensely readable and intellectually rigorous. She lays out a way for both believers and nonbelievers to understand Christian practice in a 21st century world. A paradigmatic example of participant observation at its best.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Evangelicals Ethnographed

In her intriguing "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God," Stanford University cultural anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann sympathetically but objectively examines the religious psychology and practices of American evangelicals, in the spirit of William James' 1902 classic "Varieties of Religious Experience". In her previous books, Luhrmann presented fascinating ethnographic studies of modern witches and ceremonial magicians in contemporary England, the once prestigious and privileged Parsis in post-colonial India, and the training and ideological indoctrination of young American psychiatrists. In "When God Talks Back", her latest book, she analyzes the growing movement of evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity.

Luhrmann specifically examines how evangelicals come to experience God as a close, intimate, and invisible but very real friend and confidant with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization, clearly recognizing His voice. She is not quite a believing evangelical herself, more a sincerely interested, warmly sympathetic student of an important human activity in the manner of William James. In the tradition of James, and before him of the 18th century German Lutheran theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, she treats religion as a matter of psychology, feeling, and personal experience, rather than of dogma or doctrine, as emotionally and emotionally enriching rather than as rationally convincing. She addresses religion's educated modern potential sympathizers as Schleiermacher addressed its skeptical Enlightenment "cultured despisers."

Luhrmann investigated the new evangelical movement as a participant-observer.
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Format: Hardcover
Even though I do not believe in a supernatural God, I am always fascinated by my religious friends' ability to have faith. This book gave me much more understanding how the human mind can make something unreal seem alive and real for these people. I always thought religious people are borderline insane. But so many supposedly very smart people (I have deeply religious friends who are physicians, even genetic biologists). This book also made me much more feeling sympathetic to these people. Because we are humans capable of rational (or irrational) thought, we all desire to be loved, to be cared, to have a social companion.

Some of the psychological studies are also interesting. Such as the test given to evaluate mental insanity conducted on these Vineyard specimens. The study seems to indicate these Vineyard religious people relate to God positively, when asked if they feel to have been followed or spied upon, they said no. But they always feel the presence of God not associated with negative, but with love and care. If a person feel some hostile force following them, they are likely to react violently, but if they feel a benevolent force following them, they feel much more at peace.
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Format: Paperback
Before buying this book, do read the other reviews. The subtitle overreaches. This is not a sweeping, insightful study of American Evangelicals, but rather bears more semblance to an academic case study--an exploratory study of a particular group--of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. In that latter effort, the book is successful.

This is NOT intended to be a how-to guide for spirituality, which is what many readers appear to be seeking. If the reader intends to learn more about how to have a personal relationship with the divine, she or he would do well to focus on the results of one of the studies that Luhrmann conducts. Individuals were paid to engage in a certain type of prayer (imaginative, centering, or study) for 30 minutes per day, six days per week for several weeks. She found that individuals who engaged in the imaginative type of prayer, like that in Ignatian spirituality, in which one envisions oneself an active participant in the gospels, for example, personally witnessing the activities, developed more vivid imagery (and, one might infer, "a closer walk") than the other two. Centering prayer, focusing on a single word, for example, yielded "second best" results, and the intellectual study the least.

Among others, this method can assist in training oneself to be an active listener to/imaginer of (depending on one's perspective) the movement of the divine within. Life then becomes an ongoing conversation with God, not as a transcendent being, but rather as an immanent friend, who experiences pain along with the individual, who gives meaning to him or her, and who supports resilience.
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