Reviewed by Rebekka King (Middle Tennessee State University). David R. Swartz has invited you to party. At first glance, the party appears to be a disparate group: the well-dressed Republican senator Mark Hatfield is engaged in a deep conversation with scraggly haired Jim Wallis.
Book reviews
Brown, Candy Gunther. 2012. Testing Prayer: Science and Healing
Reviewed by Anna I. Corwin (UCLA). In 2010, Candy Gunther Brown and her research team published a compelling and controversial article in Southern Medical Journal arguing that proximate intercessory prayer, performed in their study by Pentecostals in Mozambique
Wolseth, Jon. 2011. Jesus and the Gang: Youth Violence and Christianity in Urban Honduras. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press
Reviewed by Henri Gooren (Oakland University). This fine ethnography begins with a murder. “They shot him, they shot El Títere. El Títere is dead”. Children are shouting and running; soon a crowd forms near the shirtless corpse of a young man who was “barely twenty”
Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Reviewed by Anna Strhan (University of Kent). How do people engage with questions about the good and how we ought to live in everyday social encounters? What role do particular moral logics play in the constitution of human subjects, and how, when and where does the formation of ethical subjectivities happen?
Luhrmann, T.M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
Reviewed by Nofit Itzhak (University of California, San Diego). While conducting fieldwork for her dissertation project among contemporary witches in Britain, Tanya Luhrmann woke up one morning to the startling vision of six druids standing against the window of her London apartment
Guadeloupe, Francio. 2009. Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean
Reviewed by Brian Howell (Wheaton College). Beautiful islands of beaches, colorful and fascinating cultures, and delicious tropical cuisine, it is no wonder the economies of the tiny island nations of the Caribbean have become dominated by tourism in their postcolonial history.
Burdick, John. 2013. The Color of Sound: Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil
Reviewed by James S. Bielo (Miami University). Eight young men gather on a Sao Paulo rooftop – surveying the city’s sprawling jumble of ramshackle houses, the periferia – writing rhymes and composing gospel raps. A congregation is divided as they hear and see a samba band perform
Gifford, Paul. 2004. Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy
Reviewed by Joel Robbins (Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego). Paul Gifford is one of the most knowledgeable and prolific scholars of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. He has written both surveys on general topics, such as the public role of Christian churches in Africa, and monographs focused on specific countries
Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition
Reviewed by Naomi Haynes (University of Edinburgh). Reviewed by Naomi Haynes (University of Edinburgh)
As part of the ongoing expansion of AnthroCyBib, we aim to engage work that is not self-consciously focused on the anthropology of Christianity. It goes without saying that such work often has something to say to the sub-discipline
Cao, Nanlai. 2011. Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou.
Reviewed by Steve Hu (University of California, Santa Barbara). The explosive growth of global Christianity in the last century is nowhere more evident than in China where approximately 67 million Christians, roughly 5 percent of the total Chinese population, claim affiliation to Christianity (Pew Forum Report, Global Christianities: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World Christian Population, 2011)