Timothy Nelson – författare

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed$2.00 a Day:Living on Almost Nothing in America.This bookforces you to see American poverty in a whole new light (Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted).Three of the nations top scholars - known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America turn their attention from the countrys poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover thatAmericas most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural.Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas.Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in Americaincluding inequalities shaping peoples health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the internal colonies in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.The unfolding revelation inThe Injustice of Placeis not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in commona history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nations places of deepest need.

Dreams and visions, prophetic words from God about "dusty souls," speaking in tongues while "in the spirit"—narratives of these and similar events comprise the heart of Every Time I Feel the Spirit. This in-depth study of a Black congregation in Charleston, South Carolina provides a window into the tremendously important yet still largely overlooked world of African American religion as the faith is lived by ordinary believers.For decades, scholars have been preoccupied with the relation between Black Christianity, civil rights, and social activism. Every Time I Feel the Spirit is about black religion as religion. It focuses on the everyday experience of religion in the church, congregants' relationships with God, and the role that God and Satan play in congregants' lives—not only as objects of belief but as actual agents. It explores the concepts of religious experience and religious ritual, while emphasizing the attributions that people make to the operation of spiritual forces and beings in their lives.Through interviews and field work, Nelson uncovers what religious people themselves see as important about their faith while extending and refining sociological understandings of religious ritual and religious experience.