Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative

Social scientists have long been fascinated by the Christian conversion, a form of religious experience that believers say both strengthens their faith and changes their lives. This study looks at the performance of conversion narratives and argues that the performance itself is central to the efficacy of the conversion. Through detailed analysis of a number of conversion narratives, Peter Stromberg shows how these narratives can be understood as a form of ritual, in which believers invoke central emotional conflicts and then attempt to resolve these conflicts by reframing them in terms of the language of Evangelical Christianity. Although the Christian conversion narrative is used as the primary example, the approach in this book also illuminates other practices - such as psychotherapy - in which people deal with emotional conflict through language. Review: "His [Stromberg's] transcriptions are especially valuable because they provide vivid illustration of the nature of contemporary conversions and, through the salient differences between these and the more ancient paradigms, are provocative for studies of the evolution in doctrines of conversion over the course of two millenia. Stromberg's arguments are pointedly relevant to the contemporary experiences of metanoia and, in their own ways, validate the power of those experiences to transform and to heal." Semiotica "So painstaking and detailed is this analysis ... Stromberg writes as a psychological anthropologist, but his book will be of interest to a much wider audience; any serious student of conversion will find this argument interesting." Choice "This is an important work for those who are working with or indeed telling EHE narratives." Exceptional Human Experience.