1st Edition

Conversion to Modernities

Edited By Peter van der Veer Copyright 1996
    296 Pages
    by Routledge

    296 Pages
    by Routledge

    Peter van der Veer has gathered together a groundbreaking collection of essays that suggests that conversion to forms of Christianity in the modern period is not only a conversion to modern forms of these religions, but also to religious forms of modernity. Religious perceptions of the self, of community, and of the state are transformed when Western discourses of modernity become dominant in the modern world. This volume seeks to relate Europe and its Others by exploring conversion both in modern Europe and in the colonized world.

    Introduction, Peter van der Veer; Chapter 1 The Politics of Protestant Conversion to Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century France, Keith P. Luria; Chapter 2 A Different Road to God: The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century, Judith Pollmann; Chapter 3 Nineteenth-Century Representations of Missionary Conversion and the Transformation of Western Christianity, Peter van Rooden; Chapter 4 Religious Conversion and the Politics of Dissent, Gauri Viswanathan; Chapter 5 The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation, Nicholas B. Dirks; Chapter 6 Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects in Colonial Indonesia, Webb Keane; Chapter 7 Serial Conversion/Conversion to Seriality: Religion, State, and Number in Aru, Eastern Indonesia, Patricia Spyer; Chapter 8 Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity, Birgit Meyer; Chapter 9 Devils, Holy Spirits, and the Swollen God: Translation, Conversion and Colonial Power in the Marist Mission, Vanuatu, 1887–1934, Margaret Jolly; Chapter 10 Comments on Conversion, Talal Asad;

    Biography

    Peter van der Veer