Suchergebnisse

In the fall of 2011, I was appointed to the Chair of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology in the Faculty of Humanities. As I soon realized, my appointment occurred amid major transitions regarding the institutionalization of the study of religion at Utrecht University. This is part of a broader trend of renegotiating the space between 'theology' and 'religious studies'. This trend echoes a wider process of 'unchurching': as the number of students of theology declines nationwide, religion in new and unexpected guises has become both a hot item and an intriguing socio-cultural and political phenomenon. Over the past year, as part of the process of adapting to my new post, I have grappled with these complicated institutional transformations.

Charles Colson's Born Again was the most celebrated spiritual memoir of the 1970s evangelical revival, and remains the best-known book-length conversion narrative of the twentieth century. Its account of how Colson—notoriously ruthless as a political aide to President Nixon—abruptly invited Christ into his life in the late summer of 1973 following a long searching discussion with a Christian friend and of how he came to submit himself completely to God's will, inspired evangelicals to hope that the broader national crisis of morals exemplified by Watergate might be purged by the fires of revival. Colson went on, as founder of the world's largest prison ministry and as a leading evangelical thinker and writer, to place a highly-structured model of conversion at the centre of his ambitions for evangelical mission in the world. However, as revealed by his private papers, Colson's own conversion experience was more complex and ambiguous than either his published memoir or later works of advocacy suggest. His editor, Leonard LeSourd, played a significant role in shaping Born Again to match the conceptual norms of popular evangelicalism and contribute the force of a recent, conspicuous and apparently secure example of individual spiritual rebirth to the wider evangelical project of religious revival.