Machine gun prayer: the politics of embodied desire in Pentecostal worship
View / Open Files
Authors
Richman, N
Publication Date
2020Journal Title
Journal of Contemporary Religion
ISSN
1353-7903
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Volume
35
Issue
3
Pages
469-483
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Richman, N. (2020). Machine gun prayer: the politics of embodied desire in Pentecostal worship. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 35 (3), 469-483. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.1828506
Abstract
This article examines Pentecostal embodiment through a study
of the way prayer is spoken of and performed in a prominent
Nigerian Deliverance church. It argues that the Deliverance
churches’ exaggerated emphasis on the demonic serves to
re-purpose prayer as an embodied violent performance that is
often as much directed to the devil as it is to God. This article
thus reveals the ways in which the entanglement of divine and
demonic beings in the Pentecostal body results in the
production of a subject that does not just act upon itself, but
in fact seeks to defeat and hence deliver itself. Moreover, in
offering a detailed account of how the movement’s theology
of the body is made manifest in performances of prayer, the
article argues for scholarly attention to the role that theological
doctrines play in the constitution of embodied experience in the
study of religions more generally.
Sponsorship
Arts and Humanities Research Council Studentship
All Soul's College Scholarship
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.1828506
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/329685
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.