Fire From Heaven
The Rise Of Pentecostal Spirituality And The Reshaping Of Religion In The 21st Century
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week the Los Angeles Times was reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible?and a pentecostal movement was created that would, by the start of the twenty-first century, attract over 400 million followers worldwide. Harvey Cox has traveled the globe to visit and worship with pentecostal congregations on four continents, and he has written a dynamic, provocative history of this explosion of spirituality?a movement that represents no less than a tidal change in what religion is and what it means to people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pentecostal Christianity, which emphasizes the immediate experience of God through speaking in tongues, trance and ecstatic bodily motion, is not a backward-looking movement, declares Harvard theologian Cox (The Secular City), but an ecumenical force that speaks to the spiritual emptiness of our time by tapping the core of human religiousness. The author describes his visits to Pentecostal churches from Boston to Rio de Janeiro to Seoul. He delineates the movement's interracial beginnings in Los Angeles at the turn of the century, tracks its lightning spread around the globe and explores the pivotal role of women, which led, he asserts, to a conception of a nonjudgmental God with ``distinctively feminine'' qualities, making Pentecostalism a force challenging patriarchal cultures around the world. Cox expresses his misgivings about ``unattractive political and theological currents'' in the U.S. Pentecostal movement, including a fixation on demonic spirits and a ``dominion theology'' that supports ultraconservative public policy. An engrossing and illuminating report.
