for the Study of Religion Afterword (original) (raw)

This special issue makes a welcome addition to the burgeoning anthropologically inspired work on Christianity. It takes as its central theme the thorny issue of religious experience, and in this case particularly the kind of experience that lies at the centre of Protestant Christianity-direct, unmediated experience of God's presence. Refreshingly, it is framed not merely in terms of changes in intellectual fashion-the turns towards the body, the senses, ontology, aesthetics-but also in terms of substantial and substantive changes within Protestant Christianity itself. These changes may be linked to what we could call a Pentecostal revolution within Protestant Christianity, which has placed the experience of God at its centre-so much so that much Pentecostal effort goes in to inculcating such experience (Brahinsky 2012). Being experientially connected with God becomes an outcome, rather than a precondition , of religious activity. The term 'Pentecostal revolution' stems from Ruth Marshall's work in Nigeria (Marshall 2009), where she identifies a simultaneous reconfiguring of the political and religious landscape as Pentecostalism took hold and expanded across the country. The concept could equally be applied to other contexts. Although it is not clear the extent to which the rise of Pentecostalism has restructured entire polities in other contexts, as it appears to have done in Nigeria (though it may well also have done), it is certainly true that people's spiritual, material, and political lives have been radically transformed through Pentecostalism. It is also true that the experiential focus of Pentecostalism has leached into a much broader range of Christian constituencies-from the Alpha movement (see Stout and Dein 2013) to Catholic Charismatic Renewal (see Csordas 1997)-such that it is a central pillar of much Christian activity in the contemporary world. This empirical topicality, as well as its intellectual topicality, makes this a valuable special issue. Its articles cover a range of geographical and temporal contexts. Combining historical, literary, and Bible studies approaches with more contemporary anthropological ones, it tacks backwards and