Communities of the converted : Ukrainians and global evangelism / Catherine Wanner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wanner, Catherine.

Series:

Culture and society after socialism.

Culture and society after socialism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Evangelicalism--Ukraine.

Evangelicalism.

Evangelistic work--Ukraine.

Evangelistic work.

Church and state--Ukraine.

Church and state.

Secularism--Ukraine.

Secularism.

Ukraine--Religion.

Ukraine.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (317 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Ukrainians and global evangelism

Place of Publication:

Ithaca [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980's. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.

Contents:

Spiritual seekers in a secularizing state, 1905-1941

Enlightening the faithful, 1941-1988

The rewards of suffering : the last Soviet refugees

Missionizing, converting, and remaking the moral self

God is love : new bonds, new communities

Ambassadors of God

Epilogue : religion as portal to the world.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-295) and index.

ISBN:

9780801461903

0801461901

OCLC:

732957102