scholarly journals Join the Holy Spirit on Zoom

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Giuseppina Addo
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Worship Services ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Aesthetic

The COVID-19 global pandemic impacted all social relations, including the way religious communities engage in worship services. Due to strict social distancing protocols, the only viable solution for many congregations was online worship. This article investigates how platforms in cyberspace, such as Zoom, can provide a substitute for the core religious practices found in physical worship services, particularly for African Pentecostal believers who rely heavily on the aesthetic and sensory experience of their religious environment. Drawing on the theoretical concept of affordance, it is argued that digital affordances such as the chat box and emojis are used by believers to communicate affective moments arising from the sensory experience of worship. Members of the congregation become ‘digital spiritual hype people’ who render support to leaders in order to create and regenerate an affective environment where the presence of the Holy Spirit can be felt. The Holy Spirit, a fundamental pillar for Evangelical Christians, is understood as an embedded presence within the digital infrastructure. The internet connection, the phone and computers and screens are all re-appropriated as spiritual tools through which miraculous healing can be dispensed to believers in need. This research stands at a critical juncture between what might be termed the ‘pre-COVID era’ and the ‘post-COVID era’. As vaccination plans continue to roll out and social distancing measures are slowly being lifted, a ‘post-COVID era’ for African Pentecostals means negotiating the boundaries between online and offline spaces to fulfil core religious practices.

Theology and Visual Culture in Early Modern Calvinism

2021 ◽  
pp. 286-303
Author(s):  
William A. Dyrness
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Vision Of God ◽  
The Aesthetic

Recent scholarship on the arts and the Reformation has come to focus more broadly on the cultural reconstruction the Reformation made necessary and the resulting material and visual culture. Calvin’s challenge in Geneva was not about what the Reformation had left behind but what would replace that medieval world. Key for Calvin was the experience of worship: the oral performance of the sermon, the singing of Psalms and partaking the sacraments, as a dramatic call enabled by the Holy Spirit summoning worshippers to a vision of God and God’s presence in the world. The regular communal worship and the preached drama of sin and salvation constituted the aesthetic-dramatic mirror (Turner) of the emerging Protestant imagination. This encouraged a mutual caring for the needy but also carried deep aesthetic implications. In the Netherlands this imagination is evident in the placement of textualized images in churches, and in landscape paintings and portraits, and, in France, it stimulated Huguenot architects to recover classical orders in the service of restoring to the earth its Edenic beauty.

Boundaries and Flows

Island Gospel ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Melvin L. Butler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
York City ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Northern Coast ◽  
Worship Services ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Theological Differences ◽  
Church Communities

This chapter begins by chronicling the author’s adjustment to Jamaica’s northern coast. Boundaries and flows are then explored through a discussion of Jamaican church communities in New York City, and in Jamaican towns of the northern coast. The chapter calls attention to the ways in which believers understand the musical and theological walls that characterize their religious homes, while also bringing into relief the musical common ground shared by various Pentecostal assemblies in these locales. The worship services of the three congregations explored in this chapter feature music that reflects a shared Pentecostal identity and emphasis on being “filled with the Holy Spirit.” However, these communities also set musical boundaries that index significant theological differences. In each context, musical worship engenders a sense of spiritual “at-homeness” that relies on the ritual reconciliation of “local” and “foreign” musical material.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Seeing, imagined, and lived

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandi Silva Knuppel
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Theories Of Practice ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
Definition Of

Scholarship on Hindu traditions and practices proposes the practice of darshan as fundamental to Hindu traditions, particularly in temple worship, observing that devotees seek out images of deities primarily to see them and “receive” their darshan. These works typically gloss the definition of darshan with a sentence or two about seeing, exchanging glances, and/or receiving blessings. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which darshan is ideally imagined in conjunction with other bodily sensory practices through sources of authority, such as texts and senior devotees, to create a specific sensory experience and expectation in the transnational Gaudiya Vaishnava community. I then look to the lived realitiesof darshan in this tradition, specifically how devotees negotiate the structures created through sources of authority in their daily lives. Through this juxtaposition of idealized and lived darshan, I argue that we need a new approach towards theories of practice to take into account the complexities of darshanic moments in this and other religious practices.

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