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"How do you graph the miraculous? Bialecki is gifted with an anthropologist’s roving eye and disciplinary polyamorousness, an acute empathetic understanding and a lucid reflexive critical sensibility, and in this book, vivid and astute, he offers a gripping depiction of currents coursing through American Christianity—indeed, the most riveting and powerful depiction I have come across in many years. The Vineyard churches, and American charismatic Christianity more broadly, have met a fully worthy interpreter, one able to match them vision for vision."—Charles Mathewes, Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies, The University of Virginia
"A beautifully written reflection on the nature of God that is both deeply anthropological and also theological, this book explores the way an invisible other becomes present to a social group and the challenge that this presence provokes. It is a surprising, even startling, account of surprise."—TM Luhrmann, When God Talks Back
“Jon Bialecki’s book is certainly a revealing ethnography of charismatic Christians. But, really, it is so much more.
A Diagram for Fire is a daring theoretical account of how difference and change are instigated, fostered, and managed. My wager is that this book will quickly earn an expansive readership among anthropological and transdisciplinary scholars.”—James S. Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Miami University
“Jon Bialecki takes the study of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity into surprising and welcome new territory by applying Deleuze’s diagram of the relations between social forces to the Vineyard movement and ultimately to religion as a whole.
A Diagram for Fire is capacious in its intellectual scope and audacious in the largeness of its claims. It captures the imagination as readers are whisked along through lyrical prose and thought-provoking theoretical interventions.”—Hillary Kaell, author of
Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage
List of contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION: CLEARLY WRITTEN ON HIS FACE
1. VINEYARD TIME
2. INSTITUTIONS AND GOD’S AGENTS
3. A DIAGRAM FOR FIRE
4. TOLLE, LEGE: TALKING, READING, AND HEARING
5. THE LIVING ROOM SEMINARS: PEDAGOGIES OF THE SPIRIT, TYPIFICATION, AND ELABORATION
6. THE BODY, TONGUES, HEALING, AND DELIVERANCE
7. COLLAPSES, TRAVERSALS, AND INTENSIFICATIONS OF THE PART-CULTURE
CONCLUSION: ON THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION AND ON RELIGION AS A PROBLEM
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
COMPLETE SERIES LIST
About the author
Jon Bialecki is a fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His work has been published in several edited volumes as well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Summary
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? This book deals with these questions in detail.
Additional text
"A Diagram of Fire succeeds both as general theory and as finely drawn ethnography."
