A recent book by Dr Anna Strhan from the Department of Religious Studies, entitled Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2015), was discussed in an article in The Guardian on 4 November 2015.
The article, entitled ‘We Need to Talk about Jesus: Cue Cringing Embarrassment’ by Andrew Brown, looks at a new report by the Church of England that shows non-Christians don’t like evangelism and such proselytising actually puts people off religion.
Anna’s book studies the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London and touches on why in some settings, members of this church come to experience their Christian identities with a sense of embarrassment or shame. In the article Brown describes how Anna’s research showed that the conservative evangelicals she studied experienced more awkwardness and embarrassment in trying to talk about their faith in middle-class settings such as their workplaces, in comparison with proselytising if they were doing volunteer social work on council estates at the weekends, as they were outside the constraints of their class, and felt little of this sense of awkwardness.
The full article is available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/04/christianity-evangelical-embarrassment-jesus-religion
Further details of Anna’s book are available at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198724469.do