Religious Conversion as a Personal and Collective Accomplishment
Religious conversion has conventionally been treated as something that happens to the person. This represents a passivist paradigm within the mechanistic world view of classical science. An alternative paradigm is proposed from an activist perspective within a contextual world hypothesis typical of...
| Published in: | Sociological analysis |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
1979
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| In: |
Sociological analysis
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Religious conversion has conventionally been treated as something that happens to the person. This represents a passivist paradigm within the mechanistic world view of classical science. An alternative paradigm is proposed from an activist perspective within a contextual world hypothesis typical of interactionist and dramaturgical analysis. In this view, conversion is treated as the accomplishment of an actively strategizing seeker interacting with the others constituting a religious collectivity. The approach is illustrated from the authors earlier investigations of how seekers act to discover and make use of a particular means of personal transformation offered by and institutionalized within a conversionist group. Problems of maintaining a transformed life and difficulties in conceptualizing conversion are discussed in some detail. |
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| ISSN: | 2325-7873 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Sociological analysis
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/3709786 |