(cross posted on Peter Marina’s blog)
Interview with Bartholomew.
On Tuesday, July 8th, we were supposed to meet at 4PM but he was late. We met at the church, Christian Life Assemblies, located just outside of Basseterre city center. Continue reading
(cross posted on Peter Marina’s blog)
The plane makes its way over tall mountains and picture-perfect beaches. St. Kitts dwarfs the size of many other islands in the Caribbean at 68 square miles. The plane lands near the capital of Basseterre. Continue reading
(cross posted on Peter Marina’s blog)
Antigua: Sunday, June 29
Shirley Heights
Ocean Inn Hotel
A change of pace was needed on my return to the island that is now considered one of my homes. Continue reading
(Cross posted at on Peter Marina’s blog)
Dominica (dom-eh-NEE-ca) immediately impresses as a volcanic island that does justice to the word awe. The rolling hills and towering mountains, thick rainforest and hot sulfur springs, the stunning waterfalls and bubbling lakes, and perhaps best of all, a Caribbean culture yet to be tainted from tourism, make this island stunning and magical. The plane circles the high mountains of the island making even seasoned flight commuters squirm in their seats at the thought of their airship landing – or crashing – into the mountains. The plane descends unevenly into the mountains, somehow navigating in between them towards a tiny airstrip which looks like a thin piece of scotch tape.
Though the beauty of the island is flowing and flawless, ethnographically speaking, things fell apart immediately. Continue reading
(Cross posted on PeterMarina.com)
From New Orleans, the plane headed straight to the rolling hills of Barbados where Pastor Michael Alleng picked me up near the capital Bridgetown. Alleng heads Evening Light Pentecostal Church in Arch Hall, Barbados. He is a tall, lanky man standing at about six feet two inches and drives a green car. He travels frequently to other churches in Barbados, the Caribbean, and the United States, guest preaching at the churches of several leaders he knows through PAWI (Pentecostal Assemblies of the West Indies). For example, Continue reading
OK, so before last week, I didn’t even know blight was a thing. Did I do something wrong to cause the blight? Probably. Do I know what it is I did to cause it? Not even a little. I mean, I can guess it might have to do with overwatering. I should’ve stopped the daily watering a week or so before I did. Maybe that’s it. I dunno. And how do I know it’s blight? Continue reading
Go to his blog to read: How a non-believer came to respect Pentecostalism
Now available at his website.
It’s an actual physical book!
Books should be ready to ship February 1, 2013.
This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members’ “bizarre” habit of speaking in tongues. This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love—all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church’s members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of “spectacle” because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere. The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene.
To read reviews of the book, visit his website.