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    Machine gun prayer: the politics of embodied desire in Pentecostal worship

    Richman, Naomi (2020) Machine gun prayer: the politics of embodied desire in Pentecostal worship. Journal of Contemporary Religion 35 (3), pp. 469-483. ISSN 1469-9419.

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    Abstract

    This article examines Pentecostal embodiment through a study of how 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 repurpose prayer as an embodied violent performance that is often as much directed to the devil than it is to God. As such, this article 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

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Pentecostalism, embodiment, spiritual warfare, theologically-engaged anthropology, sexual difference, spirit-possession, demonology, prayer
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Depositing User: Naomi Richman
    Date Deposited: 07 Jan 2021 08:44
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 18:05
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/41532

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