Getting The Holy Ghost

Features

Description

This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members' bizarre habit of speaking in tongues.

This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love-all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church's members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of spectacle because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere.

The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene.

The focus on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal provides a road map into the church and canvasses an intimate view into the lives of its members, capturing their stories as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. This book challenges important sociological concepts like crisis to explain religious seekership and conversion, while developing new concepts such as God Hunting and Holy Ghost Capital to explain the process through which individuals become tongue-speaking Pentecostals.

Church members acquire Holy Ghost Capital and construct a Pentecostal identity through a relationship narrative to establish personal status and power through conflicting tongue-speaking ideas. Finally, this book examines the futures of the small and large, institutionally affiliated Pentecostal Church and argues that the small Pentecostal Church is better able to resist modern rationalizing forces, retaining the charisma that sparked the initial religious movement.

The power of charisma in the small church has far-reaching consequences and implications for the future of Pentecostalism and its followers. Review: This four-year ethnographic study of a small African American church in Brooklyn, a revision of the author's PhD dissertation, is exceptionally well organized.

Sociologist Marina highlights what he sees as exotic aspects of Pentecostal worship, and is most interested in the processes of religious conversion, which he relates to speaking in tongues. He uncovered tremendous diversity of opinion within church members' thoughts concerning glossolalia. Earlier researchers examined glossolalia as a form of altered states of consciousness, but Marina offers mainly sociological explanations and ultimately argues that church members understand tongue speaking primarily as a form of social empowerment.

He also insightfully analyzes church organization, outlining the formal and informal structures of the Holy Ghost Church with attention to charismatic authority. Earlier studies of Pentecostalism predicted that church authority would become increasingly bureaucratic over time, but Marina convincingly argues that leaders in smaller Pentecostal congregations are better able to maintain their claims to charisma.

The author's presentation is clear, his attention to ethnographic detail exemplary, and his scholarship sound. A significant contribution to the study of African American Pentecostalism. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. CHOICE Peter Marina presents a rare portrait of religious rites in a small community church in Brooklyn, New York.

Marina's skillful use of qualitative data based on first hand accounts, in-depth interviews and daily encounters with neighborhood residents tell an intriguing story involving 'speaking in tongues,' rites of aggregation, and a moving pathos that is part of the historical circumsta