Search results for ""author jonathan strom""
Pennsylvania State University Press German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion
August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them.A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.
£33.95
Pennsylvania State University Press German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion
August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them.A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.
£72.86
JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck) Orthodoxy and Reform: The Clergy in Seventeenth Century Rostock
More than one hundred years after the introduction of the Reformation, the clergy in Rostock set out to reform the spiritual and moral life of the city and fashion it into a new Zion. Disappointed with the results of the Lutheran Reformation, their reform efforts were less concerned with confessional purity than with the practice of Christian piety. The resulting reform movement in Rostock became one of the most vigorous in 17th century Germany.Jonathan Strom examines the consequences of the Reformation, the clergy's social and economic status, the career path of a typical pastor, and the theological basis of the office of ministry. He recounts the practical reforms sought by the clergy in Rostock after the Thirty Years War. He further analyzes the theological proposals of the four principal reformers in Rostock, Joachim Schröder, Johannes Quistorp the Younger, Theophil Großgebauer, and Heinrich Müller.Against many of the major trends of the confessional age in which the state assumed ever greater control over the ecclesiastical apparatus and a bureaucratization of the clergy occurred, the Rostock clergy sought to widen the scope of their authority within the city and assert their independence. They had, however, only limited success in implementing their reforms. The ideas of the Rostock reformers would decisively influence Pietist leaders such as Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke. Their history extends our understanding of the function of the Protestant clergy in the post-Reformation era and offers a new estimation of Lutheran orthodoxy on the eve of the Pietist movement.
£113.20
