Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity)

Book info: Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity) (Hardcover, 240 pages) – Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Language: English.

In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated U.S. City, Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others’ life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a “relationship with God.” But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God’s designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits’ ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo. Editorial Reviews Review “A ground-breaking study of the role spiritual insight plays in the everyday lives of Pentecostal Christians in the United States. Frederick Klaits' deeply moving and beautifully written ethnography convincingly argues that the inspirations believers receive from God are a vital resource for envisioning redemptive possibilities in a tragically broken world. This is scholarship and storytelling at its very best.” ―Onaje X. O. Woodbine, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion, American University, USA About the Author Frederick Klaits is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.

Michael Richbart is a postgraduate student at the University of Buffalo, USA

LaShekia Chatman is a postgraduate student at the University of Buffalo, USA

Naomi Haynes is Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Jon Bialecki is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK