Overview
- Uniquely explains the processes underlying religious choice-making in urban Kenya and the country's ongoing Christian transformations.
- Offers an innovative model that helps to systematize the concept of lived religion.
- Invites readers to rethink religious normativity, identifying mobile religious identity as normative.
Part of the book series: Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies (CHARIS)
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About this book
In Kenya's vibrant urban religious landscape, where Pentecostal and traditional churches of various orientations live side by side, religious identity tends to overflow a single institutional affiliation. While Kenya’s Christianity may offer modes of coping with the fragilities of urban life, it is subject to repeated crises and schisms, often fueled by rumors and accusations of hypocrisy. In order to understand the unfolding of Kenyans’ dynamic religious identities, and inspired by the omnipresent distinction between ‘religious membership’ and ‘church visits,’ Yonatan N. Gez considers the complementary relations between a center of religious affiliation and expansion towards secondary practices. Building on this basic distinction, the book develops a theoretical innovation in the form of the ‘religious repertoire’ model, which maps individuals’ religious identities in terms of three intertwined degrees of practice.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Theoretical Perspectives on Religious Mobility
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Front Matter
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Urban Kenya as a Case Study
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Front Matter
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Religious Repertoires in Urban Kenya
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Front Matter
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Coda
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This tour de force in anthropology of religion is based on the author’s fieldwork. ... Thorough, copiously documented, and well- written, Gez’s work has implications for descriptive and constructive theologies that try to attend to grassroots beliefs, especially phenomenologies of African theology and global pentecostalism.” (Christopher A. Stephenson, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 47 (4), December, 2021)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Yonatan N. Gez is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Traditional Churches, Born Again Christianity, and Pentecostalism
Book Subtitle: Religious Mobility and Religious Repertoires in Urban Kenya
Authors: Yonatan N. Gez
Series Title: Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90641-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-90640-9Published: 24 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08062-4Published: 30 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-90641-6Published: 08 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-5854
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5862
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 358
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Christianity, African Culture, Sociology of Religion