REVIEWER MEETS REVIEWED

SEMINAR SERIES AT THE RAI

Aliens and Strangers: The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals

Wednesday 3 May at 10.30 am (tea & coffee served from 10.00 am)

at the Royal Anthropological Institute, 50 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 5BT

THIS IS A FREE EVENT

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Dr Anna Strhan, author of Aliens and Strangers: The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals, and Professor Joel Robbins, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The author offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of an evangelical Anglican church in London. St John’s is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle--aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle. The congregants see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. The book reveals the processes through which the congregants learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, the author shows how their everyday experiences are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these.

Bookings/enquiries: Ted Goodliffe (TGoodliffe@britishmuseum.org)

Location : Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London
W1T 5BT
United Kingdom
http://www.therai.org.uk