Language, Charisma, and Creativity

THOMAS J. CSORDAS Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994) and Body/Meaning/Healing (2002), and editor of Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (2004) and Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009).

'A timely, well-written contribution to our understanding of a number of important phenomena in the contemporary world, this is also a contribution to debates over concepts and methods in anthropological and related scholarship.' - Erika Bourguignon, Ohio State University, USA 'Csordas is so familiar with the [Roman Catholic Charismatic] movement that he is to a large extent able to overcome the typical problem of the ethnographer - the assertion that his or her research may not be generalizable beyond the local situation.' - Peter Stromberg, University of Tulsa, USA 'This study of the Catholic charismatic renewal succeeds in the difficult feat of speaking both to specialists in a cluster of scholarly disciplines and to the general reader.' - R. W. Rousseau, University of Scranton, USA

• PART ONE: MEANING AND MOVEMENT Building the Kingdom Religion in the Postmodern Condition PART TWO: HABITUS AND PRACTICE A Communitarian Ideal Ritualization and Radicalization INTERLUDE Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Charisma PART THREE: METAPHOR AND PERFORMANCE Ritual Language: Speaking the Kingdom Prophetic Utterance and Sacred Reality EPILOGUE Creativity, Constraint, and the Sacred