Dr Anna Strhan from the Department of Religious Studies has had her book Aliens and Strangers? The Struggles for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2015) shortlisted for BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed ethnography award .
The ethnography award, presented in association with the British Sociological Association (BSA), is awarded annually to a study that has made a significant contribution to ethnography: the in-depth analysis of the everyday life of a culture of sub-culture.
Anna’s book is a study of everyday religious lives in London, and examines what it means to hold on to a strong religious identity in a secular city, focusing on a conservative evangelical church, ‘St John’s’. The book describes how members of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they also take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. Providing more nuanced understanding of conservative forms of religion than simplistic portraits of evangelical ‘others’, the book opens up new understanding of how evangelicals find ways of negotiating anxieties, sensitivities, vulnerabilities and human frailties that characterize social life more broadly.
Aliens and Strangers is among six books on the shortlist and the winner, decided by a panel of academic judges, will be announced on April 13. The full shortlist is available at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3F83qt0JpVqX31TvBvyPt4f/the-ethnography-award-shortlist-2016
For more details of the book itself, please see the publisher’s page here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198724469.do