A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann studies how members of American evangelical Vineyard churches learn to experience God as present, personal, and responsive. She examines prayer, imagination, attention, community, and interpretation without treating participants as foolish or assuming that anthropology can decide whether God actually spoke.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
Questions about God are not only philosophical; people also learn recognizable ways of relating to and perceiving the divine. This book helps travelers understand how practice and community can shape spiritual experience while preserving the difference between explaining how an experience develops and settling its ultimate source.
Good starting place if…
You want a humane account of hearing God that takes participants seriously while examining practice, imagination, attention, and culture.
Know before you begin…
This is a substantial ethnography centered largely on Vineyard Christianity, not a universal account of prayer or religious experience. It neither verifies divine speech nor reduces it to pathology, and it cannot determine what happened in any particular person’s experience. Its categories also remain those of an outside researcher in conversation with participants.