This book compares how Pentecostal believers in majority white and African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive insights from God about their own and others' life circumstances. The book shows that through their worship, believers come to know that they are personally connected in various ways to God and to one another, and that they must be redeemed from sinfulness and other moral perils. In ways that reflect their differing positions in the American racial and class formation, these insights enhance believers' personal capacities together with their abilities to care for others, shaping their divergent political outlooks in the process."--
In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated U.S. City, Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a “relationship with God.” But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo.
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