A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement

Jon Bialecki

Mar 2017 · The Anthropology of Christianity Book 21 · Univ of California Press

About this ebook

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.

About the author

Jon Bialecki is a fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His work has been published in several edited volumes as well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.