Books in the Ethnographies of Religion series

Using ethnographic research methods, this book examines the religious vitality of two Christian intentional communities. The book argues that explanations of religious vitality are irreducible to one another, concluding that explanations of religious vitality exist in a nexus, rather than previously conceived cause and effect relationships.

This book explores the world of religious listening in Boston and its implications for democracy in the United States. It argues that religious communities develop socially embodied forms of divine listening, reshaping our listening practices in ways that both sanctify and democratize our audition.

In the capital city of Nairobi, Kenya, African Catholic and Sunni Muslim leaders addressing HIV and AIDS are faced with a unique challenge. On the one hand, they are called to attend to the spiritual wellbeing of the infected individual; on the other hand, they are increasingly charged with serving as the stewards of the physical bodies of those negatively affected by such a physiologically debilitating and social stigmatized disease through certain identifiable interreligious traditions common to both faiths. This book explores this development firsthand. While conducting fieldwork in Nairobi, Carey interviewed Muslim and Catholic leaders working in three areasHIV and AIDS prevention, education, and destigmatization. These recorded observations and accounts help to illustrate that religious officials from within African Catholicism and Sunni Islam are attempting to provide the common inter-religious traditions of mercy, hospitality, and justice in a holistic manner for those living with the virus in the city.The research that produced this book involved six weeks of fieldwork during the summer of 2014 to help fill in the interstices between anthropological, sociological, and ethnographic accounts provided by other leading academics in their respective fields. It presumed that religious traditions in Kenya exhibit a susceptibility to culture and context and a practical openness to its social environment which then affords this particular work a unique theological perspective in its attempt to identify and analyze patterns of social behavior and religious organization.

This book examines the condition of religious organizations or teachings within a different culture where one or more indigenous religions are already present.