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Rebuking the Ethnic Frame: Afro Caribbean and African American Evangelicals and Spiritual Kinship

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New Directions in Spiritual Kinship

Part of the book series: Contemporary Anthropology of Religion ((CAR))

Abstract

In this ethnographic chapter, Thomas explores the spiritual kinship ties created by Afro Caribbean and African American evangelical churchgoers in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Thomas argues that the black evangelicals of two congregations (Corinthian Bible Chapel and Dixon Bible Chapel) use spiritual kinship—discourses and practices of spiritually defined relatedness—as a means of creating a familial belonging that can traverse ethnic identity boundaries. Nonetheless, Thomas also illustrates that the spiritual kinship produced by black evangelicals, like ethnicity, generates its own social, moral, and institutional hierarchies and differences.

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Thomas, T. (2017). Rebuking the Ethnic Frame: Afro Caribbean and African American Evangelicals and Spiritual Kinship. In: Thomas, T., Malik, A., Wellman, R. (eds) New Directions in Spiritual Kinship. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_10

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