Overview

In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated U.S. City, Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others’ life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a “relationship with God.” But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God’s designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits’ ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo.

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9781350329812

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A ground-breaking study of the role spiritual insight plays in the everyday lives of Pentecostal Christians in the United States. Frederick Klaits' deeply moving and beautifully written ethnography convincingly argues that the inspirations believers receive from God are a vital resource for envisioning redemptive possibilities in a tragically broken world. This is scholarship and storytelling at its very best. --Onaje X. O. Woodbine, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion, American University, USA

Author Information

Frederick Klaits is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. He is the author of Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS (2010) and editor of The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors (2017).

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