Stephen Offutt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3621750 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Offutt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Offutt |
| SIGNATURE | OFFUTT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Asbury Theological Seminary |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Religion and Poverty
This book offers a timely and compelling look at religion and poverty, focusing primarily on the two largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, and considering religion and poverty in the United States and international contexts. Written by social scientists, the book incorporates relevant theology with a focus on how theology is lived in relation to issues of poverty. Topics include religion as it relates to social service provision, lived…
Blood Entanglements
Evangelicals and gangs are tightly linked in lower-class communities. The two groups share a religious cosmos, are members of the same families, use similar organizational strategies, and engage each other in local marketplaces. Pastors and gang leaders compete for power within communities but also informally share community governance. Gang members can even be found in churches and faith-based organizations, while an evangelical presence exists …
Entangled
ow are the two most ubiquitous community-based organizations in poor Salvadoran neighborhoods—gangs and evangelical churches—connected? Most studies concur with the Brenneman/Wolseth thesis, which states that evangelical churches uniquely provide people with a pathway out of gangs. This article argues that such dynamics are a relatively small subset of a broad range of interactions between evangelicals and gangs. Data from the Religion, Global Po…
Power in Powerlessness
In this empirically and theoretically rich book, Martin Lindhardt shows how the everyday practices of Pentecostals help marginalized Chileans create new identities, gain a sense of control over their lives, and develop new and meaningful interpretations of their social reality.Lindhardt's subjects are direct descendants of the first Pentecostal church in Latin America, the Methodist Pentecostal Church (MPC), founded in 1909. Lindhardt studied the…
The Gift Economy of Direct Transnational Civic Action
How does religion help facilitate civic action in transnational contexts characterized by material inequality and spatial separation? Short-term mission (STM) travel, a popular activity among U.S. religious groups, exemplifies a recently emerged form of transnational civic action characterized by face-to-face, decentralized, pragmatic activity. Our research analyzes how participants in STM-based relationships manage inequality while pursuing an i…
Religion, Poverty, and Development
This article serves two purposes. First, it introduces the forum that follows in this issue on religion and development. Second, it serves as a review of the small but quickly growing literature on how religion interacts with efforts by (often religious) people and organizations to ameliorate poverty worldwide. We address the need to define both 'religion' and 'development' with clarity and precision. We also call for further research in this are…
New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa
This book shows that new centers of Christianity have taken root in the global south. Although these communities were previously poor and marginalized, Stephen Offutt illustrates that they are now socioeconomically diverse, internationally well connected, and socially engaged. Offutt argues that local and global religious social forces, as opposed to other social, economic, or political forces, are primarily responsible for these changes
Multiple Modernities
This article contributes to the emerging multiple modernities thesis and its treatment of world religions. Using a cross-continent comparison of evangelical Pentecostalism, it argues that religion can have cross-cutting implications for modernity’s extension in the Global South. The social patterns and networks of national evangelical Pentecostal communities in different contexts vary, allowing them to help modernizing societies pursue unique goa…
Global Poverty and Evangelical Action
American evangelicals are actively engaged in the international political economy. Relief and development organizations hold a prominent place in the evangelical landscape. Their considerable and growing size is made possible in part by the financial contributions of individual evangelicals. Evangelical congregations are connected to the relief and development sector through official institutional linkages, international partnerships, and the inc…
The Role of Short-Term Mission Teams in the New Centers of Global Christianity
Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four-year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short-term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice o…
The Transnational Location of Two Leading Evangelical Churches in the Global South
Religion remains critically important in the Global South even as globalization intensifies. As international political and economic structures evolve, transnational religions shift societal locations within countries. These shifts cause changes within religions themselves, altering patterns of interaction that may in turn have political and economic consequences. By examining Iglesia Josue in El Salvador and Rhema Bible Church in South Africa, t…
Communities of the Converted
The Role of Short-Term Mission Teams in the New Centers of Global Christianity
Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four-year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short-term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice o…
Multiple Modernities
This article contributes to the emerging multiple modernities thesis and its treatment of world religions. Using a cross-continent comparison of evangelical Pentecostalism, it argues that religion can have cross-cutting implications for modernity’s extension in the Global South. The social patterns and networks of national evangelical Pentecostal communities in different contexts vary, allowing them to help modernizing societies pursue unique goa…
Religion, Poverty, and Development
This article serves two purposes. First, it introduces the forum that follows in this issue on religion and development. Second, it serves as a review of the small but quickly growing literature on how religion interacts with efforts by (often religious) people and organizations to ameliorate poverty worldwide. We address the need to define both 'religion' and 'development' with clarity and precision. We also call for further research in this are…
The Gift Economy of Direct Transnational Civic Action
How does religion help facilitate civic action in transnational contexts characterized by material inequality and spatial separation? Short-term mission (STM) travel, a popular activity among U.S. religious groups, exemplifies a recently emerged form of transnational civic action characterized by face-to-face, decentralized, pragmatic activity. Our research analyzes how participants in STM-based relationships manage inequality while pursuing an i…
Communities of the Converted
The Transnational Location of Two Leading Evangelical Churches in the Global South
Religion remains critically important in the Global South even as globalization intensifies. As international political and economic structures evolve, transnational religions shift societal locations within countries. These shifts cause changes within religions themselves, altering patterns of interaction that may in turn have political and economic consequences. By examining Iglesia Josue in El Salvador and Rhema Bible Church in South Africa, t…
The Role of Short-Term Mission Teams in the New Centers of Global Christianity
Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four-year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short-term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice o…
Global Poverty and Evangelical Action
American evangelicals are actively engaged in the international political economy. Relief and development organizations hold a prominent place in the evangelical landscape. Their considerable and growing size is made possible in part by the financial contributions of individual evangelicals. Evangelical congregations are connected to the relief and development sector through official institutional linkages, international partnerships, and the inc…
Multiple Modernities
This article contributes to the emerging multiple modernities thesis and its treatment of world religions. Using a cross-continent comparison of evangelical Pentecostalism, it argues that religion can have cross-cutting implications for modernity’s extension in the Global South. The social patterns and networks of national evangelical Pentecostal communities in different contexts vary, allowing them to help modernizing societies pursue unique goa…
New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa
This book shows that new centers of Christianity have taken root in the global south. Although these communities were previously poor and marginalized, Stephen Offutt illustrates that they are now socioeconomically diverse, internationally well connected, and socially engaged. Offutt argues that local and global religious social forces, as opposed to other social, economic, or political forces, are primarily responsible for these changes
Religion, Poverty, and Development
This article serves two purposes. First, it introduces the forum that follows in this issue on religion and development. Second, it serves as a review of the small but quickly growing literature on how religion interacts with efforts by (often religious) people and organizations to ameliorate poverty worldwide. We address the need to define both 'religion' and 'development' with clarity and precision. We also call for further research in this are…
Power in Powerlessness
In this empirically and theoretically rich book, Martin Lindhardt shows how the everyday practices of Pentecostals help marginalized Chileans create new identities, gain a sense of control over their lives, and develop new and meaningful interpretations of their social reality.Lindhardt's subjects are direct descendants of the first Pentecostal church in Latin America, the Methodist Pentecostal Church (MPC), founded in 1909. Lindhardt studied the…
The Gift Economy of Direct Transnational Civic Action
How does religion help facilitate civic action in transnational contexts characterized by material inequality and spatial separation? Short-term mission (STM) travel, a popular activity among U.S. religious groups, exemplifies a recently emerged form of transnational civic action characterized by face-to-face, decentralized, pragmatic activity. Our research analyzes how participants in STM-based relationships manage inequality while pursuing an i…
Entangled
ow are the two most ubiquitous community-based organizations in poor Salvadoran neighborhoods—gangs and evangelical churches—connected? Most studies concur with the Brenneman/Wolseth thesis, which states that evangelical churches uniquely provide people with a pathway out of gangs. This article argues that such dynamics are a relatively small subset of a broad range of interactions between evangelicals and gangs. Data from the Religion, Global Po…
Blood Entanglements
Evangelicals and gangs are tightly linked in lower-class communities. The two groups share a religious cosmos, are members of the same families, use similar organizational strategies, and engage each other in local marketplaces. Pastors and gang leaders compete for power within communities but also informally share community governance. Gang members can even be found in churches and faith-based organizations, while an evangelical presence exists …
Religion and Poverty
This book offers a timely and compelling look at religion and poverty, focusing primarily on the two largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, and considering religion and poverty in the United States and international contexts. Written by social scientists, the book incorporates relevant theology with a focus on how theology is lived in relation to issues of poverty. Topics include religion as it relates to social service provision, lived…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (10 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Christian Theology and Mission (4 works) · History (4 works) · Poverty (4 works) · Development economics (3 works)