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Browsing by Subject "Conversion"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Assembling the Orthodox Soul: Practices of Religious Self-Formation among Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy
    (2013-07) Winchester, Daniel Alan
    This dissertation is the result of a multi-sited ethnographic study of contemporary conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region of Minnesota. Theoretically, this case study of Orthodox conversions is utilized as a way to better approach and account for the phenomenon of religious self-formation, here defined as the process by which social actors, with the aid and encouragement of others, incorporate aspects of a religious tradition into their own subjective experiences and self-interpretations. Through talking, interacting, and practicing with Orthodox Christian converts, this study provides answers to how individuals come to inhabit and experience a religious system as a personal reality, making a particular construal of the religious world a formative part of how they experience themselves as persons. While the empirical details are necessarily confined to the ethnographic case at hand, central to this dissertation is a wider claim that coming to grips with the question of how religious cultural systems enter into the lived experiences of individuals requires a better understanding of the constitutive effects of religious practices on those who perform them. Moreover, through detailed analyses of three significant religious practices and their phenomenological effects on the converts who participated in them, I demonstrate how these constitutive relationships between particular religious practices and subjectivities unfolded over time and in context, extending cross-disciplinary literatures on religious narrative, embodiment, and materiality.
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    Embracing the Text: Stories of Conversion in Sixteenth Century Spain and Beyond
    (2021-08) Hultgren, Robert
    The population of Iberian Muslims who had been converted to Christianity, Moriscos, was marked by its diversity. While most Moriscos worked as tradesmen, making silk or working fields of fruits for example, many Morisco merchants and land-owners populated the higher echelons of Iberian society. Some Moriscos spoke Arabic as their first language while others spoke only Castilian, Aragonese, or a different Romance dialect. The disparate nature of this community extends to their religious beliefs as well: some Moriscos appeared to fully embrace their conversion to Catholicism while a great many others refused to accept it and continued to practice Islam in secret. The one salient and ubiquitous characteristic of this group was, in fact, the experience of conversion. The following study contains a close reading of four Morisco narratives which present the reader with the conversion experience of some of the most foundational members of the early Islamic movement. By examining a theme that would have been very relevant to every Morisco reader, this dissertation shows how Moriscos positioned themselves within a society that was becoming ever more intolerant of their perceived, and real refusal to accept Catholicism and Spanish Catholic social norms.