Skip to content
The University of Edinburgh

New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity

New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity
  • Home
  • About
    • Curator contacts
  • Bloomsbury book series
  • Reviews
    • Books
    • Films
    • Forums
  • Resources
    • Author interviews
    • Teaching archive
    • Bibliography
    • Conference Dispatches
  • Occasional papers

Duffuor and Harris, “Politics as a Vocation”

Duffuor, Amy and Alana Harris. 2013. Politics as a Vocation: Prayer, Civic Engagement, and the Gendered Re-Enchantment of the City. Religion and Gender 3(1).

Abstract: Drawing upon extensive oral history interviews and long scale participant observation in two London churches, an ethnically diverse Catholic parish in Canning Town and a predominantly West-African Pentecostal congregation in Peckham, this article compares and contrasts differing Christian expressions and understandings of ‘civic engagement’ and gendered articulations of lay social ‘ministry’ through prayer, religious praxis and local politics. Through community organizing and involvement in the third sector, but also through spiritual activities like the ‘Catholic Prayer Ministry’ and ‘deliverance’, Catholics and Pentecostals are shown to be re-mapping London – a city ripe for reverse mission – through contesting ‘secularist’ and implicitly gendered distinctions between the public and private/domestic, and the spiritual and political. Greater scholarly appreciation of these subjective understandings of civic engagement and social activism is important for fully recognizing the agency of lay people,and particularly women often marginalized in church-based and institutional hierarchies, in articulating and actuating their call to Christian citizenship and the (re)sacralization of the city

Alana HarrisAmy DuffuorCatholicismCitizenshipcivic engagementgenderLondonPentecostalismPoliticsPrayerspaceUnited KingdomurbanismWest Africa
December 20, 2013 ndca-admin Bibliography Leave a comment

Share this:

Author interviews

Teaching archive

Bibliography

Conference dispatches

Contact

Contact details are listed on the Curator Contacts page.

Banner image photo credits:
Sacred Heart - Naomi Haynes
Man painting, Dolls, Candles, Monastery Artabyunk - Hillary Kaell
Car - James Bielo

Subscribe

Subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates.


  • Terms & conditions
  • Privacy & cookies
  • Modern slavery
  • Website accessibility
  • Freedom of information publication scheme

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336, VAT Registration Number GB 592 9507 00, and is acknowledged by the UK authorities as a “Recognised body” which has been granted degree awarding powers.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh.