Dr Anna Strhan from the Department of Religious Studies has just published a new book entitled Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2015).
The book is an ethnographic study of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London, and examines evangelicals’ relational practices and everyday interactions in a cosmopolitan, global city. St John’s is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle – a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s – as in wider media portraits of conservative evangelicals – see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of contemporary culture in London and in British society, yet they also take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian.
The book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness in a global metropolis. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church – including their experience of a relationship with God, which shapes their desire for coherence – Anna shows how the everyday experiences of members of the church are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.
For more details about the book, please see the publisher’s page here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198724469.do