The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace
Amy Slagle
Like many Americans, the Eastern Orthodox converts in this study are participants in what scholars today refer to as the "spiritual marketplace" or quest culture of expanding religious diversity and individual choice-making that marks the post-World War II American religious landscape.
In this highly readable ethnographic study, Slagle explores the ways in which converts, clerics, and lifelong church members use marketplace metaphors in describing and enacting their religious lives. Slagle conducted participant observation and formal semi-structured interviews in Orthodox churches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Jackson, Mississippi. Known among Orthodox Christians as the "Holy Land" of North American Orthodoxy, Pittsburgh offers an important context for exploring the interplay of Orthodox Christianity with the mainstreams of American religious life. Slagle's second round of research in Jackson sheds light on the American Bible Belt where over the past thirty years the Orthodox Church in America has marshaled significant resources to build mission parishes.
Relatively few ethnographic studies have examined Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, and Slagle's book fills a significant gap. This lucidly written book is an ideal selection for courses in the sociology and anthropology of religion, contemporary Christianity, and religious change. Scholars of Orthodox Christianity, as well as clerical and lay people interested in Eastern Orthodoxy, will find this book to be of great appeal.
Product Details
About Amy Slagle
Reviews for The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace
Nicholas E. Denysenko
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Slagle's study is an important contribution to several fields. It adds significantly to the treatment of conversion in the sociology of religion, which has tended to focus mainly on protestantism and secondarily on Catholicism. The book is extraordinarily well written and organized, combining data and theory with an ease seldom found in academic prose.
Andrew Buckser, Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University and co-editor of The Anthropology of Religious Conversion Amy Slagle's monograph represents the first substantial ethnographic study [on] Eastern Orthodox Christians in America. She focuses on converts to Orthodoxy, presenting a compelling argument that, far from rejecting modernity and the spiritual marketplace in favor of tradition, converts operate precisely within the "culture of choice" environment.
Scott Kenworthy, American Society of Church History