When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
T.M. Luhrmann
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0307277275
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times Notable Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012
A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists.
Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.
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psychotherapy effective is that patients learn to experience the empathic therapist as an internal “object” that is loving, caring, and concerned with what is best for them. This object does not exist anywhere in space. Instead, a patient who is helped by therapy is able to act and think and feel as if always aware of that therapist’s loving concern, as if the patient has become the person created within that responsive, attentive relationship. When the patient is able to maintain the behavior
effortful God may appeal to so many modern people precisely because the work demanded makes the God feel more salient. More real. At the same time, the practice of this attention may produce actual perceptual evidence of God’s presence. That is the psychological consequence of the type of prayer this kind of Christianity encourages. As congregants learn to pray and to practice prayer, they sometimes experience God with their senses. They may feel the touch of his hand or the sound of his voice;
who met for “prayer walks,” where they would stroll together down particular city blocks and pray out loud for the people living in the buildings on the street. What Hybels means when he talks about prayer as an unnatural activity is that whatever people do when they pray, they must learn to treat some inner mental phenomena as heard by an external presence, and other mental phenomena as not their own but as emanating from that presence. In the beginning, most people find it difficult. Sam was a
heart minister to you, and then you just know, there’s this voice that tells you something, and it is so encouraging. Something just pops up in your mind, and you’re like, ‘That’s the answer.’ I started listening, and it gets to this point where you just know it’s God’s voice.” He wished he were more visual. “I know this man, this man is incredible because when he prays for you, he knows exactly what’s on your mind. And I’m asking him, ‘Chuck, how do you do this?’ And he says, ‘I see words
often; evangelicals hear.48 The main point is that the mental muscles developed in prayer work on the boundary between thought and perception, between what is attributed to the mind—internal, self-generated, private, and hidden from view—and what exists in the world. They focus attention on the words and images on one side of the boundary, and they treat those words and images as if they belonged on the other. Both history and ethnography suggest that the Christian cultivation of the inner