1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996248276103316

Autore

Wanner Catherine

Titolo

Communities of the converted [[electronic resource] ] : Ukrainians and global evangelism / / Catherine Wanner

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca [N.Y.], : Cornell University Press, 2007

ISBN

0-8014-6190-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (317 p.)

Collana

Culture and society after socialism

Disciplina

280/.4094770904

Soggetti

Evangelicalism - Ukraine

Evangelistic work - Ukraine

Church and state - Ukraine

Secularism - Ukraine

Electronic books.

Ukraine Religion

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-295) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Spiritual seekers in a secularizing state, 1905-1941 -- Enlightening the faithful, 1941-1988 -- The rewards of suffering : the last Soviet refugees -- Missionizing, converting, and remaking the moral self -- God is love : new bonds, new communities -- Ambassadors of God -- Epilogue : religion as portal to the world.

Sommario/riassunto

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980's. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new



public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.