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Zusatztext This is a wonderful book that leads us into some unexpected places. The everyday lives of conservative evangelicals in London are portrayed with immense subtlety. We learn about faith but also doubt, triumph but also shame, religious subjectivity alongside metropolitan sensibility. By the end, we have to reconsider what we thought we knew about religious coherence-and about conservatism itself Informationen zum Autor Anna Strhan is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Her research interests lie in the interrelations between religion, ethics, meaning, and modernity, both historically and in contemporary cultures. She is the author of Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. Klappentext Based on in-depth fieldwork with a conservative evangelical church in London, Aliens and Strangers? explores the everyday realities of what it means to try to hold on to a strong sense of religious identity in a secular, modern urban context. Zusammenfassung In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. 'St John's' is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle - a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John's see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of members of St John's are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers' both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Modernity, Faith, and the City 2: Dividing the Subject: Embodiment, Interrelationality, and Ethical Subjectivity 3: Speaking Subjects: Difference, Indifference, and Moral Fragmentation 4: The Listening 'I' 5: What does God want? Coherence, Love, and the Personality of God 6: Of Time, the Body and the City: Belief, Absence, and Incompleteness Conclusion: The Conflict and Tragedy of Culture Bibliography ...
