The Promises and Flaws of Pentecostalism - Essay Example

The Promises and Flaws of Pentecostalism Pentecostalism has spread like wildfire, not only throughout the United s, but in Asia and Africa as well. It is set within the conservative, evangelical precincts of Christian belief and mostly derives from the Holiness Movement of Methodism. The Holiness Theology gave Methodism, and thus pentecostalism, the benefit of entire sanctification, the first part of which is the conversion, being born again through the body and blood of Christ, and the second, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which serves as a confirmation of personal holiness. Pentecostalisms adherents claim, not that it stands against the formal clericalism that is most prominent in the Catholic church, but that its way of celebration deserves equal, perhaps greater, emphasis. It is not a cerebral experience. To be infused with a spirit coming directly from God, God in the Person of the Holy Spirit, is a direct participation in the love and the work of the Godhead. Or to put it more in a pentecostalists words, it gives a congregation gifts, and even powers; powers that include healing by faith and even exorcism. A pentecostalist meeting is more ecstatic than anything else, although there are also sermons and sacraments with the main emphasis on the sacrament of baptism. Pentecostalism traces its roots to the Bible, the Book of Acts, specifically Chapter Two, which describes events after Christs Ascension to Heaven some days after His crucifixion. When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind,and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2, 1-4) II. The Catholic Roots of Pentecostalism and Pentacostalisms Modern History There are charismatic movements within Catholicism itself. Of course, the very core of Catholicism, as that of pentecostalism, is Trinitarian. For example, the trinitarian mystery is powerfully evoked in the works of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa. For Augustine, human beings were created by God in the image of God, but since God is infinite, the image could only be partial, a point also stressed by St. Thomas Aquinas. The Trinity describes God, obviously enough, as being triune: God as the Father, the Creator; God as Christ the Son, the Word, the Redeemer; and God the Holy Spirit, Who is Love. The trinitarian relationship is reflected in humans analogically in formulations such as Memory, Understanding and Love, Lover, Beloved, and Love. For Augustine, being formed in Gods image was an analogical participation in God, analogical, but only in a sense. While God for Augustine cannot actually be known by human beings on His own level while they are still in the fallen world, He can nevertheless be known. Thus in The Confessions he wrote, Most eagerly then did I seize that venerable writing of Thy Spirit: and chiefly the Apostle Paul...And the face of that pure word appeared to me one and the same: and I learned to rejoice with trembling. So I began; found here amid the praise of Thy Grace; that whoso sees may not so glory as if he had not received, not only what what he sees, but also that he sees (for what hath he, which he hath not received?) and that he may be not only admonished to behold Thee, Who art ever the same, but also healed, to hold Thee, and that he who cannot see afar off, may yet walk on the way, whereby he may arrive, and behold, and hold Thee. (St. Augustine, 1909,121) For Augustine, the participation was vivid and intensely personal. The Confessions was Augustines testament to his terribly difficult yet ultimately joyous transformation from a promiscuous sensualist to a soul filled with the Holy Spirit. I think it is fair to count Augustine as a great figure informing the history of todays pentecostalism. For that matter, one might also include Bonaventure, a Schoolman of the Scholastic period which also includes St. Thomas. One of Bonaventures ways of climbing his own ladder to God was to observe how nature worked in order to understand Gods Ideas by studying His creations. Though this particular one of Bonaventures methods cannot be compared directly to an infusion of the joy of the Holy Spirit, it did give Bonaventure endless ecstasy, and the most subtle understandings. Why cite Augustine and Bonaventure? To suggest, beyond making a reference to historical origins, that the Catholic Scholastic Age (Augustine lived a bit earlier) represents a mid-point along a straight line between the Book of Acts and todays pentecostalists, would be to suggest too much. But it might be apt to make the claim that Christianity, even as it has evolved a complex doctrinal development, has looked to God directly, not only through written revelation, but via patterns of personal mysticism, and this is now reflected in the more communal mysticism of the charismatic churches. The similarity to pentecostalism in The Confessions is not in the charismatic communion of saints, for Augustines odyssey here was personal almost to the point of obsession. (We must also remember that Augustines work was hardly limited to autobiography; he wrote The City of God, which, among other things, comprehends a sizable piece of the history of the Roman Empire and describes life in the coming Kingdom of God.) But Augustine, not unlike the the communal pentecostalist, was looking for a personal encounter with God and he found it, not communally, no, but in himself, himself as a triune image of God, and we may say that in so doing, like the communal pentecostalist, he found divine ecstasy. He had started out as a womanizer, and then, ashamed of his concupiscence, spoke intimately, self revealingly, to God from his own first person I, and addressing God in the familiar you. One does not feel too much of this at a more orthodox Catholic Mass, but Augustine was a Catholic if there ever was one, and his book is a classic in spiritual autobiography. Is there not something of the pentecostalist in Augustine? He is giving up the vanities, all the incredible pleasure he has loved on this Earth, to be one with God. It is his reaching out, his stretching forth, his absolute openness, to God, to the Son, to the Spirit. In his introduction to the text Pusey states, "The Confessions, here printed, speaks for itself. The earliest of autobiographies, it remains unsurpassed as a sincere and intimate record of a great and pious soul laid bare before God." (St. Augustine 1909, 3) Bonaventure was a singular and often solitary person, St. Francis was a hermit, and both of them seem to have found ecstasy as well. All three sought personal communion with God, sought the meeting or encounter with God, wanted to see the Face of God behind the cloud. Reflecting on Vatican II, the most recent Council of Bishops and probably the most ecumenical, Pope John Paul II is magisterial,splendid, but also lacking the common touch of the pentecostalist. Paul is excited by the unity of the diverse tongues, but only those of the international Catholic bishops, the latter day disciples, when he says, "On the basis of my experience at the Council I wrote Sources of Renewal. At the beginning of the book, I stated that the book was an attempt to repay the debt to the Holy Spirit incurred by every bishop who participated in the Council. Yes, the Council contained something of Pentecost-it set the bishops of the world, and hence the whole Church,upon the paths that needed to be taken at the end of the second millennium." (Paul, 1994 158) One can and must contrast the Catholic Church with the Pentecostalist Church for it makes more of a marked contrast with it than do other Protestant denominations, and Catholicism is the historical and spiritual root of all of them. The contrast makes me pose the question of whether Pentecostalism and other like-minded movements might be taking away proper emphasis from the project of understanding God through His works. I will address that below. Of course Pentecostalism is a Protestant denomination; it has Protestant roots, and it is just one of the Charismatic movements, which also include many Catholics; all of which together form the Renewalist sea in the ocean of Christianity. The Renewalist sea has 500,000,000 Christians that are included in an ocean of two billion. The story of the modern Pentecostalist Movement in America is told vividly by Harvey Cox in his book, The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century. After beginning with William Penn, whose aim was to found a New Jerusalem in the New World when he arrived on its shores in the 1700s, Cox tells us a vivid story of contrasts. The White City, a temporary architectural extravaganza, mostly of facades that featured Greek and Roman styles, graced the site of the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. The White City exemplified what planners felt were the highest European values and culture, something which they wanted the new America to exemplify, not only in the name of art, but in the service of commerce. The White City was also the scene of "The Worlds Parliament of Religion." Although that gathering was billed as a great ecumenical conference, and indeed drew speakers from and adherents to, the great religions of the world, its context was such that it signified a New Jerusalem "in which proper English would be spoken and a Jerusalem in which refinement and decorum would prevail." (Cox, 1995, 29). Indeed, the Conference drew not only academics and speakers that were already well known, but in keeping with them, a rather well to do crowd of listeners. According to Cox, this was because in Protestant America, one coin of the realm was a belief that if outer circumstances, in this case the beautiful, classical, White City, were refined, well proportioned, and clean, the inner man would likewise be cleansed, reorganized, and his sins washed away. It is not as if this could not be at least partly true, not so much of architecture, of course, but of social ambiance and shared spiritual experience, as opposed to simple doctrinal observance or sacramental ceremony, effective though these are. I will discuss below the opinions of some Pentecostalists that gifts and charisms bring grace to an otherwise money-crazy world. However in the case of the Worlds Parliament of Religion and its elegant circumstances in the White City it was not only that people would become more refined and more religiously ordered, but that they also had to accept the idea, which they declined, "...that their coming to Chicago had been impelled by the Christian Holy Spirit. Indeed their respectful refusal to accept the implicit Christian basis for the meeting turned out to be the central dilemma...of the parliament." (Cox, 1995, 35). In short, it was to be an ecumenism that would take place in a single tent. But all the speakers had brought their own umbrellas under which to unite the worlds variety of worshipers. They were not all, and not at all, prepared to accept Christian theism, even pentecostal, as a perspective with which to see the world, or around which their respective eschatologies could some be woven. There were Asian people, and American black people, and Jewish people, and Africans at the Parliament, and while the story of Pentecost had been the combining of different tongues into one unity, the Parliament was only an attempt at ecumenism under a common banner. Although much of the commentary about the Parliament after it ended focused on its Pentecostal attributes, the fact of the matter was that it was not the gathering of all souls over which the Holy Spirit was "poured out over all flesh," as described in the Book of Acts. Cox contrasts this (along with the fact that the Columbian Exposition ended with a fire which could have been of divine origin that destroyed the White City) with the beginnings of a true Pentecostalist revival on Asuza Street in Los Angeles in 1906. This was preceded by the final decades of the nineteenth century [in which] the conviction grew among many American Christians that this long-awaited new outpouring of the Spirit might soon occur. Here and there healings and instances of tongue speaking were reported.Church newspapers and conferences began to speak more and more about "another Pentecost"...Then in April 1906...at a tiny black mission in Los Angeles, a series of events took place that convinced at first hundreds, then thousands of people...[that] the revivals they had been praying for had indeed begun. Those who embraced this thrilling message because convinced that it was no longer a matter of praying for a revival; they were the revival, living evidence that what everyone had been waiting for had now commenced. They went forth to tell the world, and the modern pentecostal movement was born. (Cox, 1995, 48) One cannot help remark on the similarity to Barack Obamas campaign slogan, we are the ones we have been waiting for. This was a gathering, later to become a congregation involved in a continuous Movement, that was under the aegis of William Joseph Seymour, a black revivalist preacher from Louisiana who had come to Los Angeles from Houston in 1906. Blacks, Mexicans, Japanese and Europeans had been flocking into Los Angeles, the City of Angels, which had held out and actually substantiated for some, hope and home for all peoples. Many of them were Christians, haling from a variety of different denominations. Many of them were poor, and the promise of Los Angeles had not been able to improve their circumstances. Cox tells us that the spirit of the Apocalypse did much to enliven the new congregation, as four days after the Asuza mission opened, the San Francisco Earthquake and the ensuing fire almost destroyed the entire city. (Cox, 1995, 59-60) The congregation was inspired by the thought that the end of the world had come, but in fact it had not. Still, the Asuza Street Mission became the site of what is still the worlds largest black pentecostalist congregation. (Cox, 1995, 72) The work of the Holy Spirit was carried on, as new congregations came to life, some by conversion, others by creation. Miracles, seeming or real, occurred at Pentecostalist congregations in America and other countries. But the Pentecostalists were seen by many other fundamentalist and mainline churches as transferring emphasis from the word of scripture to the work of spirit. The new pneumatological unity itself began to splinter, yet the growth of the Pentecostalist movement as a whole continued to flourish. This pattern of division and proliferation continued apace in the pentecostal movement roughly until the outbreak of World War I. Then it slowed down, though only temporarily, between the two wars, but blazed forth again after World War II, this time finding its "fields white unto harvest" in the black ghettos or urban American and in the growing cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America." (Cox,1995, 78) Cox attributes the success of pentecostalism to its appeal to primal spirituality, and the consequent elicitation of primal speech. More, there is also pentecostalisms ability to reach deep into the heart and call forth primal hope, and primal piety. These terms are highly significant, he points out, because they are considered by Emile Durkheim to be elementary forms of religious life., and by Noam Chomsky to be a universal underpinning of all human languages. I think Cox wants to say that they are foundational in religious life, and for epistemology, the idea of the foundational is a distinction of great importance because it denotes an absolute rock bottom for thought to distinguish the truth or falsity of statements and beliefs about reality. For Kant, the ground of even indicative "is" statements lies in the capacity of mind to organize the world exterior to the subject according to certain innate categories of mind. There are also such categorical moral imperatives in Kant. Foundational, then, with regard to pentecostal utterances and feelings, can also be taken in a Kantian sense, meaning that they correspond to an innate, God-given organizing ground and impulse in the human mind to unite with the Maker; for the effect to unite with the Cause, for the creature to unite with the Creator. And it is here also, that the Augustinian and Thomistic scholastic precedents are relevant, for both Augustine and Aquinas sought union with God and thought that the trinitarian analogical replication in man was a path to divine union. The primal aspects of pentecostalism form, I think, a pretty powerful argument, unless one wishes to deny the existence of God, which is certainly something that cannot be dealt with in the scope of this paper. One could only begin by trying to refute, for example, the five proofs of God propounded by Aquinas, and this, in my opinion, has never been done satisfactorily. III. Other Voices I turn now to a justification from other authors for the validation of pentecostalism and its continued relevance. In his essay, Signs of Grace in a Graceless World: The Charismatic Structure of the Church in Trinitarian Perspective, Frank D. Macchia of Vanguard University says that "We live in an increasingly "graceless world." (Macchia, 2006, 2) "Throughout the myriad of relationships that extend our sense of self into the world, we teeter between threats of ruthless domination and cowardly assimilation." He notes that the world is dominated by strategic thinking, and that in such a world there is limited, if any, acceptance of free floating impulse, so that "The result is a clericalism in which the notion of charism is overwhelmingly discussed in the context of ordained ministry. Neglected are the richness, variety, and exuberance gifts as pictured in such texts as 1 Corinthians chapters 12 to 14 and exercised throughout the lives of "ordinary" Christians." Macchia, 2006,2-3) Pentecostalism, he feels, produces a community of subjectivity, which, better than individual, isolated interpretations of scriptural meaning, makes charism and the bestowal of personal spiritual gifts among worshipers the key to the reception of divine grace. Thus a kind of divine we is formed, a selfless participation in the Holy Spirit Who unites in the bond of Love the Father and the Son. "As Mirolav Volf has shown, part of the process of becoming a gift-evoking fellowship is to appreciate the deeper and broader insight into the nature of the church as an interactive communion...as well as the source of our communion in God." (Macchia, 2006, 4) But this does not mean that the sacramental and clerical obligations of the church are to be abandoned, Macchia says. Instead what it does is to add even more life to the Scriptures and to their exposition from the pulpit. "The charismatic structure of the church also serves to expand the field of the grace that comes to us in the gospel." (Macchia, 2006, 10) In his paper, Poured Out on All Flesh: The Spirit, World Pentecostalism, and the Renewal of Theology and Praxis in the 21st Century, Amos Yong, Regent University School of Divinity Associate Research Professor of Theology, makes pentecostalism the possibility for renewal of the church, the theological academy, interest in the Holy Spirit, and of the world itself. This continuing role of the charismatic movement, particularly of pentecostalism, he contrasts with most other fundamentalist movements as well as the more modernist movements, in that the former believe that the significance of speaking in tongues ended at the time of the Apostles, whereas the latter think that "...supernaturalistic Christianity was a leftover from the pre-modern era." (Yong, 2007, 18) Surely, he thinks, this leaves out the great majority of the poor, the disabled, the ethnically shelved and even, in general, women, because these groups have been side-lined by most other churches, both historically and even today, not only hierarchically, but even in the lay power structures. The lesson of the tongues in Acts obviously points to inclusive community, and it is this that pentecostalism so finely adheres to. The lesson of Pentecost, he says, takes us beyond the justification by baptism in which our sins are forgiven through Christ, all the way to glorification whose effect in us is provided by The Holy Spirit so that we see that we are truly "Gods own people." (Yong, 2007, 22) Like Howard Zinn in his history of the United States told from the points of view of ordinary people, Yong also points out that pentecostalism has a long and subjective history and literature that also includes stories of many whose voices have been relegated to the margins of the church, including those associated with revivals and awakenings of the nineteenth and eighteen centuries; the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century; the Schwarmerie of the Radical Reformation; the wide range of charismatic movements of the Middle Ages; the Montanists of the third and second centuries, etc. (Yong, 2007, 25) On behalf of a renewal of renewalism, these voices must be studied, he says, because they offer a hermeneutics of experience, most specifically of those, specially dear to pentecostals, who have been marginalized and disaffected by mainstream society. In addition, such a hermeneutics might inform and even reform theology and doctrine themselves. In this vein, Yong goes on to suggest wider applications in the sociological and anthropological context which heretofore has investigated pentecostal subjective experience as merely phenomenal, naturalistic, empirical, and pre-modern rather than as delivering actual truth, including the truth in what has pejoratively been named the paranormal. Turning the same light onto the sciences, Yong suggests that the insights given by the Holy Spirit can shed light on the neurological pathways that he suggests are imprinted by God "whereby human beings encounter the divine, even as the biochemical sciences can expand our understanding of the complex genetic, physical, and environmental elements which sustain and nurture human sociality and religiosity." (Yong, 2007, 29) Yong speaks with equal conviction and reason of the new light pentecostalism can shed on other similarly vast categories of the human understanding and the human condition. For these (and other) reasons, pentecostal theology can be said to be renewal theology. It is not static, but is renewed and always being renewed (hopefully, by the Holy Spirit) Further, it is open to future encounters, to unseen horizons, to unexpected visitations of Gods breath. Finally, as I have attempted to argue, pentecostal theology is itself a speech-act through which pentecostals believe they are empowered to engage in the Spirits work of renewal in the church, in the theological academy, and in the world. These domains are distinct, but not separate, because of the Spirit who has been poured out on all flesh. (Yong, 2007, 36) Any evaluation of the claims of Pentecostalism might also benefit from a psychological and perhaps even a philosophical, critique, for it is the claim of Pentecostalism that the Person of the Actual Holy Spirit is present to and in the congregation. Yongs reaching out to the sciences, and his references to the anthropological and sociological viewpoints, point to the need to subject pentecostalism to the critical rays of the psychic sciences, but I will do so only in passing. In particular, Freud (and incidentally the social-economic theorist Marx, who followed him in this regard) is known as regarding religion as the opiate of the masses, though I do not know if it was Freud himself who actually coined this term. Although the following long quote from Freud more properly belongs in an Appendix, it is part of my critical review of pentecostalism below and therefore I must put here. From Darwin I borrowed the hypothesis that men originally lived in small hordes; each of the hordes stood under the rule of an older male, who governed by brute force, appropriated all the females, and belaboured or killed all the young males, including his own sons. From Atkinson I received the suggestion that this patriarchal system came to an end through a rebellion of the sons, who united against the father, overpowered him, and together consumed his body. Following Robertson Smiths totem theory, I suggested that this horde, previously ruled by the father, was followed by a totemistic brother clan. In order to be able to live in peace with one another the victorious brothers renounced the women for whose sake they had killed the father, and agreed to practise exogamy. The power of the father was broken and the families were regulated by matriarchy. The ambivalence of the sons towards the father remained in force during the whole further development. Instead of the father a certain animal was declared the totem; it stood for their ancestor and protecting spirit, and no one was allowed to hurt or kill it. Once a year, however, the whole clan assembled for a feast at which the otherwise revered totem was torn to pieces and eaten. No one was permitted to abstain from this feast; it was the solemn repetition of the father-murder, in which social order, moral laws, and religion had had their beginnings. The correspondence of the totem piece (according to Robertson Smiths description) with the Christian Communion has struck many authors before me. (Freud, 1939, 168-9) Not for the faint of heart, Freuds exegesis exposes the pentecostalist and overall Christian project to the anthropological and sociological light that Yong has suggested be qualified and redirected by a pentacostalist theology onto the anthropologists and sociologists themselves. What are we to make of all of this? IV. Critical Conclusions Much of Yongs essay is devoted to social praxis, and although in theory his theory could be subjected to an anthropological/sociological dissection, he avoids the infinite regress by hypothesizing a Holy Spirit-infused world which, if attainable, would in its transcendence leave far behind the world as we have it today. And it is precisely that new world, and the world behind, that is the promise of pentecostalism. What the pentecostalists have discovered is that the experience of God is matchless; that if indeed it is a human experience then the potential and reality of it is part of the human condition, not to be denied by any passivity of spirit, historical conditioning, caste-imposition, class, ethnic or racial distinction. The possibilities in pentecostalism need not disrupt the Catholics too much, especially since so many are already enthusiastic charismatics; the only question which then must be posed in regard to this is whether pentecostalism takes too much away from the Catholic devotion in communion and to the ascension to God via the trinitarian image in man and nature. This is the danger, but only if pentecostalism sets up the subjective experience as being absolutely primary, and that this can and does happen there is already evidence. But it is not as if there were a need for a synthesis; for Augustine has already demonstrated autobiographical Catholicism and nobody has said, not even Aquinas, who puts great emphasis on experience of God as only analogical experience, that the romance with God and the breathtaking experience of the Spirit are somehow inimical to repentance and belief. As for Freud, one can ask, has he had the pentecostalist experience; does he not realize that the great why not?, suggests that understanding can come from the top down and not from the bottom up, and that no one has ever proved that this is not the case? There is a great fear in modern times of the hyperbolic, but as Macchia has pointed out above, this is merely a sign of a graceless, money-driven society, and that it is the "Spirit of Christ in the world" (Macchia 2006, 2) that has been subsumed by the materialists under the category of the hyperbolic instead of being accepted as the context and beginning of everything. As for Kant, I hope I have shown above that he is already in our court. If, however, we choose to believe with Mill that there are no innate categories of mind, then we can still celebrate with Mill, because he gives us to believe that inductive experience, gives us our categories through associating our perceptions. Since we are not limited, by the Kantian innate categories, he says, we are empowered to better ourselves, and improve our class-ridden society along liberal lines, simply by changing our experience! Surely that is what the pentecostalists have, along with everything else they have said, been saying all along. Pentecostalist and charismatic churches in general have taken a beating for being holy-roller to the extreme and there is truth to that. Moreover, they are somewhat heavy-handed when it comes to asking for money, especially on television. Moreover, It was fairly recently that Benny Hinn was taken to task, I believe, it was in The New York Times for immensely wealthy even as he postured about his love and care for the poor. The record of revivalist preachers defrauding their congregants is long and well-documented. The critical view will accept the evidence of genuine spirituality at the same time as that same spirituality, by dint of its immense power, being turned to other, sometimes nefarious uses. Since it is doubtful that an actual infusion of grace in Spirit could motivate anyone to use it for harms sake, or to put it on display in an offensively exhibitionist way, it is clear that pentecostalism had better mind its ps and qs lest it risk what may be its real power to welcome the coming of Spirit and her miraculous gifts. Bibliography St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, in Eliot, Charles W. LL.D ed. 1909 P.F. Collier and Son, New York Paul, His Holiness John II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope 1994, Alfred A. Knopf p.158) Cox, Harvey Fire From Heaven, The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century.(1995, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York) Macchia, Frank D., Signs of Grace in a Graceless World: The Charismatic Structure of the Church in Trinitarian Perspective, 2006, PentecoStudies Yong, Amos,Signs of Grace in a Graceless World: The Charismatic Structure of the Church in Trinitarian Perspective, 2007, PentecoStudies, Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism, 1939, Vintage Books, New York. St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, in Eliot, Charles W. LL.D ed. The Harvard Classics, 1909, P.F. Collier & Son, New York The Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1946, 1952, and 1971, British and Foreign Bible Society, Stonehill Green, Westlea, Windon SN5 7DG, Great Britain. Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography by John Stuart Mill, 1873, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London. Fuller, B. A. G., A History of Philosophy, 1938, Henry Holt and Company, New York Copleston, Frederick, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume VIII, 1966, Doubleday, New York James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Google Book Search. Pew Forum, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals, 2006. Encycloopedia Britannica, Britannica Centre, Chicago Google, The Free Dictionary. Swatos, William H. Jr., ed. Internet Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Read More