When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 13, 2012 - Religion - 464 pages

A New York Times Notable Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012

A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists.
 
Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise. 

From inside the book

Contents

The Invitation
3
Is That You God?
39
Lets Pretend
72
Developing Your Heart
101
The Skill of Prayer
189
But Are They Crazy?
227
Darkness
267
Acknowledgments
327
Bibliographic Notes
367
Bibliography
389
Index
417
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2012)

Tanya Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her education from Harvard and Cambridge universities, and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. In 2007, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Bibliographic information