Religious Conversion

While leadership scholars increasingly acknowledge the influence of followers in the leadership process, less attention has been paid to their role in the destructive leadership process. Specifically, the current debate lacks a broad-based understanding of different susceptible follower types that synthesizes related research across academic domains. Expanding on Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser's (2007) toxic triangle model of destructive leadership, we integrate research and theory across various academic literatures to derive a cohesive taxonomy of vulnerable followers that we call the susceptible circle. We describe the core characteristics of each follower type, drawing on Barbuto's (2000) theory of follower compliance to highlight the psychological processes that motivate each follower to comply with destructive leaders. We then conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research.

In this article, I put the ‘supply-side model’ advocated by religious economists to an empirical test. The ‘supply-side’ model in some measure already constitutes a move ‘beyond the market’, as it seeks to expand and enlarge the economic interpretation of religion by linking it to a concept of networks and social tensions and integrating the concept of religious and cultural capital. In applying the model to the (dynamics of the) historical growth of Protestantism in 19th and early 20th-century China, I examine three distinct aspects of the conversion process: the supply-side (missionaries), the demand niches (Chinese converts), and the question of ‘strict’ churches. Arguing that the religious background of Protestant converts – their rootedness in Chinese popular religion – determined this process throughout, I seek to develop an understanding of religious competition, supply and demand that takes cultural interpretive frameworks into account.

Modern Western temporality is often characterized (quoting Walter Benjamin) as " homogeneous, empty time. " This temporality is said (in the influential works of Johannes Fabian and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example) to result from a process by which sacred Judeo-Christian time was secularized: beginning in the Renaissance and finally achieved by the Enlightenment. Taking Fabian and Trouillot as a point of departure, this essay considers the past five centuries of Western chronological history. Temporal secularization is revealed to be far less linear (and much more recent) than Occidentalist common sense would assume. Given the actual strangeness of the " Common Era " Gregorian calendar—according to whose rhythms much of the world now structures its life—two models are proposed for dealing with that calendar's complex legacies. Following Nietzsche, we can productively take a hammer to the idol of Western chronology: not to smash it, but to make it ring.

EXPLORING HOW PLACE was implicated in discourses of power and kingship, this paper investigates the ways in which ideologies and cosmologies informed the production of sacred authority and the iconographies of royal sites in the period c AD 400‐800. This paper pertains to the evolution of early medieval kingship but also that institution’s relationship with prehistoric antecedents. It is suggested that the construction of localised small-scale kingships was as meaningful as those of the more prominent institutions such as Tara and Cashel. Through highlighting a NE‐SW axis redolent in royal landscapes, it is argued that kingship’s relationship with place was central to discourses over power, ideology and the ‘holy man’. This saw the early Irish church appropriate aspects of a cosmological scheme linked to the creation and (re)-imagining of royal sites.

The nascent anthropology of Christianity highlights rupture as central to conversion. Yet thick ethnography of a Bidayuh village in Malaysian Borneo reveals how conversion can also foster modes of thinking and speaking about continuity between Christianity and “the old ways.” Through a study of the shifting moral and religious topography of a community in which three churches coexist alongside a few elderly animist practitioners, I argue that such discourses and practices of continuity highlight the pluralistic and sometimes contradictory nature of Christianization. At the same time, they generate an understanding of conversion as a temporal and relational positioning that encompasses both converts and nonconverts.

This article suggests that religious identity is not necessarily a convert identity but can be grasped as personal identity that is shaped in a lifestyle framework. Based on research on Buddhist practitioners in France and in the Czech Republic, the analysis focuses on discourses of religious commitment. It shows how such discourses emphasize interior sentiments. Different dimensions of Buddhist investment such as religious practice, collectives, teachings and symbols are reframed into authentic expressions of Buddhist practitioners’ subjectivity. These practitioners conform to the primacy of authenticity. This dynamic is socially constructed through social interactions and social processes on macro-levels, including social class and consumerism.

In this article, I juxtapose Pentecostal churches with youth gangs, two popular barrio institutions that at first glance appear to be irreconcilable but when considered together evince organic parallels that reveal important insights into contemporary life in urban poverty. Reflecting on ethnographic data from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere, I argue that due to an analogous ritualization of everyday life – through rigorous rules and clearly defined consequences for breaking them – both Pentecostal churches and youth gangs, despite their ostensible differences, afford a unique kind of freedom in constraint, and by providing reliable spaces of predictability, control, and mastery, have become popular stages for managing the precariousness of barrio life in late modernity.

In Practice in Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Anti-Climacus enters into an extended engagement with Matthew 11.6, ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at me’. In so doing, he comes to an understanding that ‘the possibility of offense’ characterises the ‘crossroad’ at which one either comes to faith in Christ's revelation or rejects it. Such a choice, as he is well aware, cannot be made from a neutral standpoint, and so he is led to propose that it is ‘the thoughts of the heart’ (i.e. a person's disposition) that constitute the pivotal factor in determining whether or not God will reconcile a person into the Christian faith. In this paper, I discuss Anti-Climacus' interpretation of Mt. 11.6 and consider his reasons for interpreting a person's predisposition as being so decisive for faith.

ABSTRACT: The politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this field presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. This article makes the case for a different approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, affirming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. This hails a particular kind of subject of freed om and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.

In 1919, three Ugandan Anglicans converted to Orthodox Christianity, as they became sure that this was Christianity’s original and only true form. In 1946, Ugandan Orthodox Christians aligned with the Eastern Orthodox Church of Alexandria. Since the 1990s, new trends in conversion to Orthodox Christianity in Uganda can be observed: one is some growth in the number of new converts to the canonical Orthodox Church, while another is the appearance of new Orthodox Churches, including parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church. The questions we raise in this article are: Why did some Ugandans switch from other religions to Orthodox Christianity in the first half of the 20th century and in more recent years? Were there common reasons for these two developments? We argue that both processes should be understood as attempts by some Ugandans to find their own way in the modern world. Trying to escape spiritually from the impact of colonialism, post-coloniality, and globalization, they viewed Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Islam as part of the legacy they rejected. These people did not turn to African traditional beliefs either. They already firmly saw their own tradition as Christian, but were (and are) seeking its “true”, “original” form. We emphasize that by rejecting post-colonial globalist modernity and embracing Orthodox Christianity as the basis of their own “alternative” modernity, these Ugandans themselves turn out to be modern products, and this speaks volumes about the nature of conversion in contemporary Africa. The article is based on field evidence collected in 2017–2019 as well as on print sources.

Religious conversion is the process by which a person commits to the beliefs of a new religious tradition and shifts away from their previously held religious beliefs (Stark and Finke 2000). Religious conversion and its mechanisms have been studied for millennia (Zinnbauer and Pargament in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(1), 161-180, 1998) and were among the first phenomena to be studied by psychology (Paloutzian et al. in Journal of Personality, 67(6), 1047-1079, 1999). This review of conversion begins with a discussion of diverse conceptualizations, and hence multiple definitions, of conversion. Next, recurring components of major psychological and sociological conversion theories are explored those consistently recognized as important for understanding and explaining the large amount of variance across conversions. Such components include the convert's agency, the convert's social integration, the temporal span of conversion, the nature of conversion's consequences, and the roles that crisis, emotion, religion, and identity play in conversion. Identifying which components of conversion, and the issues that surround them, are consistently of significance to scholars provides future researchers practical starting points for accurately measuring the conversion process.

Nasreen Qadri is an Israeli pop singer of Palestinian-Arab origin whose professional achievements came in return for her loyalty to Israel. Successfully crossing cultural lines, Qadri claims Mizrahi identity, challenges the Ashkenazi-Zionist definition of Jews and Arabs as antagonistic ethnonational binaries, and helps Mizrahim reclaim their Judeo-Arabic heritage. However, following her controversial attempts to convert to Judaism, she fell short of crossing into religious-national privilege in Israel-Palestine. Qadri’s failure to overcome colonial segregation testifies to how Israeli racism is based on a perceived religious blood community, which is anchored in state laws and to which non-Jewish women are mostly exposed. Qadri’s case demonstrates how racialized politics of conversion are related to demographic considerations that show the fragility of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Finally, this article suggests that Palestinians in Israel may face elimination, if they seek racial and religious equality with Jews based on a shared Arab culture with Mizrahim.

This article demonstrates how Hebrew Christians – or Jews who
converted to Christianity but retained Jewish identity – resonated
with the claims of the Zionist movement in its first decades,
particularly with regard to its notion of Hebrew identity. In their
espousal of Zionist ideals and their attempts to join Zionist efforts,
Hebrew Christian notions of Hebrewness reflected the
multivalence of Hebrew identity in the Zionist movement itself,
and particularly the understanding of Hebrewness as racial, ethnic,
and cultural. The influence of the Zionist movement upon Hebrew
Christians was especially evident in Hebrew Christian attempts to
form their own institutions. These organizations promoted Jewish
national culture dissociated from Judaism, expressed assertive and
even aggressive motivations (what I term “Muscle Hebrew
Christianity”), and recognized the ineluctability of anti-Semitism
regardless of Jewish religious beliefs. Examining the somewhat
obscure movement of Hebrew Christianity can ultimately help us
to better understand the ways Zionism was interpreted in its
formative stages, especially in light of its own divisions and
various emphases.

Violence toward corpses and graves, especially the unusual practice of exhuming and burning remains, persisted sporadically through the 20th century in Iran but found new dimensions in the form of mass graves and a systematic desecration of cemeteries in the period following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This paper seeks to explore the roots of cemetery violence by examining the dynamics of apostasy and the experiences and challenges Babi and Bahai converts faced in their interment practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This period witnessed a significant change in communal identities. Unconventional self-definitions expressed in religious conversions and in fluid or multiple communal affiliations and religious convictions defied traditional boundaries and led to tension between nonconformists and religious authorities. One way for Shii ulama and Jewish rabbis to reassert a conventional center was through the control of cemeteries, including by not allowing converts to be buried in these semisacred spaces.

Abstract from my article published in History of Religions 54, no. 3 (2015), 260-287: For decades, it has been debated whether people converted to the ancient mystery cults, or whether the experience of conversion was restricted to Christianity, Judaism and philosophy. Some refer to all members of the mystery cults as converts; some say that conversion did take place among pagans, although very rarely; some argue that Lucius’s experiences in the Metamorphoses are proof of this (although the only “pagan” proof); but many others see conversion as a Christian phenomenon and flatly reject that Lucius or any other pagans ever experienced conversion. After a theoretical and methodological discussion of the problems related to the term “conversion” as well as to the arguments that have earlier been raised against the possibility of conversion in the mystery cults, I argue that modern conversion studies can nuance our understanding of conversion in  antiquity and provide a fruitful approach to studies of the mysteries.

This article focuses on the entanglement of trajectories of transnational education/work and religious conversion among Chinese overseas students who move to the UK before returning to China. In contrast to the existing literature on returnees where the gaze is only turned on highly prestigious schemes/trajectories of return, we look at those who become involved with Christian evangelical congregations and bible reading groups in response to a general state of disillusion with social beliefs of global competition and success. By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in London and Beijing, we engage with literature on lived religion, migration and the care of the self through a sociolinguistic lens. We take pressures for successful return as a technology of hope that shaped our participants' experiences of Christian conversion, and examine religious practices as support-based subject-transformation projects whereby our participants regulate their and others' practices and feelings through daily semiotic activities as they operate within global spaces of higher education and the labour market. In so doing, we detail a complex interplay of self-transformation experiences, collective practices of refusal, and capitalist logics of market expansion.

Keywords: Success; return; hope; Christian conversion; subjectivation; labour; China.

Having a "born-again" experience has historically been a marker of sectarian or evangelical Protestantism. Yet the percentage of American Catholics reporting a born-again experience has nearly doubled in the past few decades―from 14 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2016―a much faster increase than that of evangelicals or any other religious group. How do we explain the disproportionate rise of born-again Catholics? Drawing on data from the 2004-2016 waves of the General Social Survey, this study tests four potential mechanisms: (1) evangelicals converting to Catholicism; (2) born-again Catholics immigrating to the US; (3) evangelical-to-Catholic diffusion due to growing conservative-political alliances; and (4) having a born-again experience (both an indicator of sectarian religious piety and loose affiliation with more standard Catholic self-perceptions) is becoming more common among Catholics with less formal education. After testing alternative explanations, we show that reporting a born-again experience has increased almost solely among Catholics without a college degree. This suggests that the born-again experience is increasing primarily among those Catholics who tend to be more marginalized within society at large (potentially making sectarian religious experiences like being "born-again" more attractive) and less versed in more mainstream identity-markers of their own religious tradition.

English
Since Elmer Miler's work on Toba Pentecostalism in the early 60's, the issue of native churches in the Argentine Chaco region began to be addressed by several authors. In this regard, a series of socio-religious phenomena started to be known in Chaco anthropology, contributing to introduce fresh topics and conceptual approaches into a rather classic cultural area in Lowland South American ethnological studies.
This article synthesizes the main theoretical approaches developed to analyze these socio-religious movements, as well as the conceptual challenges they posed to already established social theories. It reviews also the key issues addressed since 1954 to the present, such as the relationship between shamanism and Christianity, native readings of the Bible, temporality and historicity, and the connections between myth and history. Finally, it outlines possible directions for research within the wider perspective of religious studies in an intercultural context.

Spanish
A partir de los trabajos sobre "pentecostalismoToba" de Elmer Miller, a comienzos de la década del 60', los estudios sobre la emergencia de iglesias indígenas en el Gran Chaco comenzaron a multiplicarse, y una amplia serie de fenómenos de creatividad cultural se hicieron visibles a los estudios de ciencias sociales de la religión.
Este trabajo sintetiza algunas de las principales corrientes teóricas desarrolladas para analizar estos fenómenos y los desafíos y problemas conceptuales y metodológicos que aquellos plantearon. Al mismo tiempo, hace una síntesis de los principales temas estudiados, entre los cuales se pueden incluir las relaciones entre shamanismo y cristianismo, hermenéuticas indígenas de la Biblia, discurso, ritual y performance en las iglesias indígenas, religiosidad y política, temporalidad e historicidad mítico-históricas. Finalmente, se presenta un panorama de las posibles líneas de trabajo que surgen de los estudios analizados, dentro del contexto más global de los estudios de la religión desde una perspectiva  intercultural.

Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.

The article examines how recovering drug addicts employ testimonies of conversion and addiction to develop and sustain personal identity and create meaning from varied experiences in life. Drawing on 31 autobiographies of recovering drug addicts we analyze conversion and addiction testimonies in two European contexts (Serbia and the Netherlands, including a sample of immigrants). The analysis shows how existing frames of reference and self-understanding are undermined and/or developed. We first describe the substance abuse in participants’ addiction trajectory. Next, we outline the religious aspects and the primary conception of recovering addicts’ conversions as an example of spiritual transformation and narrative change. Moreover, participants select and creatively adapt cultural practices in their testimonies. In many of these examples (mostly in the migrant sample) converts clearly employ elements from their personal and family histories, their ethnic and religious heritages, and their larger cultural and historical context to create a meaningful conversion narrative.

Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism-its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modernist thinking, Protestant ideals, and teleological trajectories; the factors behind reconversion and religious oscillation in sub-Saharan African contexts; inculturation and other continuity paradigms in Catholicism; the significance of the Renaissance for early modern Catholic missions; and the ministry of a contemporary Italian Catholic missionary serving in northern Mozambique. This article proposes that Catholic history and Catholic assumptions offer valuable resources for thinking beyond and thinking against linear models of religious conversion.

Colonial race relations are regularly portrayed in light of the attempts to divide and rule colonialised Asian communities. While this article does not challenge this view, it attempts to uncover a hitherto hidden level of interaction and even intermarriage at the grassroots level in colonial Malaya and Singapore. With the exception of the various Peranakan communities that predated British rule, little to no evidence exists to show that interaction and especially intermarriage existed within early first-and second-generation migrant communities during the British colonial period. The findings show how colonial attempts to encourage a heightened sense of race and its frail-ties may have fallen short among some sections of the Asian community.

Im Zentrum dieses Aufsatzes steht die Übersetzungsszene, in der Goethe die “große Lücke” in Faust I—das Problem der Begegnung zwischen Faust und Mephistopheles—überwand. Die Lösung besteht, so meine These, in der Betonung von Struktur, Motivik und Vokabular des hagiographischen Bekehrungsschemas, das der Faustlegende ohnehin angehört und das Goethe nicht zuletzt aufgrund seiner Erfahrung mit dem Pietismus beschäftigte. Diese Tendenz kulminiert in der Übersetzungsszene: in seiner Bemühung, Transzendenz zu erleben, inszeniert Faust eine Bekehrungsszene, die jedoch letztlich an seinem modernen Selbstverständnis scheitert. Zwar kommt es bei ihm zu einer Art ‘Neugeburt,’ aber an der Stelle der erwarteten Hinwendung zu Gott erfolgt seine Verbindung mit dem Teufel und insofern eine verkehrte Bekehrung. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass jede Bekehrungsbeschreibung zugleich einen bestimmten Subjektivitätsentwurf impliziert, lese ich diese verkehrte Bekehrung vor dem Hintergrund einer Veränderung des Subjektbegriffs um 1800 als eine poetische Auseinandersetzung mit der Dialektik der modernen Subjektivität.

ABSTRACT  This article explores the efforts of Muslims, particularly European converts and Moroccan immigrants, to represent Islam in southern Spain. It examines Muslims’ different representational strategies; their debates about representation; and related tensions between converts and immigrants regarding religious authenticity, representational authority, and social inequalities. The article contributes to understandings of Islam in Europe by examining how Muslims’ representational practices unfold in Andalusia, a social context shaped by both pan-European, secular concerns about Islam, and a longstanding local tradition that both shuns and celebrates Spain's Muslim heritage. The author argues that converts’ and immigrants’ different placement in Spanish racialized imaginaries of Islam, uneven access to romantic historical narratives of Muslim Spain, and distinct structural positions in Spain's political economy converge to produce an unequal multiculturalism. This is expressed in converts’ and immigrants’ racial, gendered, and class-based anxieties about representing Islam in Spain.ABSTRACTO  Este artículo investiga las diferentes motivaciones y estrategías utilizadas por musulmanes, tanto conversos Europeos como inmigrantes Marroquíes, para dar una buena imágen del Islam en la ciudad de Granada, España. A través de una descripción etnográfica de sus diversas prácticas de representación, el autor analiza varias cuestiones que dividen la población musulmana en Granada, sobre quiénes protegen la autenticidad religiosa y quiénes tienen la autoridad de representar el Islam en Andalucía. Estas discusiones entre musulmanes conversos e inmigrantes reflejan las desigualdades entre ellos, y sus diferentes posiciones dentro de las estructuras políticas, sociales, y económicas en Granada. Además, resultan de las distintas maneras en las que los conversos y los inmigrantes son vistos y tratados en Granada, una ciudad en que opiniones sobre el Islam han sido siempre influidos por una dualidad de la memoria histórica local, en la que se celebra y se huye a la vez del pasado musulmán de Granada.

Arctic missionaries have been studied extensively as agents of change but the role of Inuit women in the adoption of Christianity has been largely overlooked. In this paper we discuss Inuit women who played an important role in the processes of evangelisation and conversion. We focus on the first converts in South Baffin Island as well as the cases of Teresikuluk, a young woman who tried to turn her relatives from shamanism to Christianity, and of Pelagie, the first Inuit nun, in the Kivalliq. The missionaries often presented these women as role models choosing the right path in contrast to other individuals who kept their 'pagan' that is shamanic traditions. For these Inuit women, Christianity was attractive as it freed them from many ritual restrictions, providing them with more freedom and power. Many women were among the first converts, but in most areas men took the leading roles as preachers and evangelists. It proved to be hard for women to pursue a religious career and here the constraints of their social roles played an important part.

Oxford University Press, 2013.
This book provides a critical history of the distinctive tradition of Indian secularism known as Tolerance.  Since it was first advanced by Mohandas Gandhi, the Tolerance ideal has measured secularism and civil religiosity by contrast with proselytizing religion.  In India today, it informs debates over how the right to religious freedom should be interpreted on the subcontinent.  Not only has Tolerance been an important political ideal in India since the early twentieth century; the framing assumptions of Tolerance permeate historical understandings among scholars of South Asian religion and politics. 

In conventional accounts, the emergence of Tolerance during the 1920s is described as a victory of Indian secularism over the intolerant practice of shuddhi “proselytizing”, pursued by reformist Hindus of the Arya Samaj, that was threatening harmonious Hindu-Muslim relations. This study shows that the designation of shuddhi as religious proselytizing was not fixed; it was the product of decades of political struggle.  The book traces the conditions for the emergence of Tolerance, and the circumstances of its first deployment, by examining the history of debates surrounding Arya Samaj activities in north India between 1880 and 1930.  It asks what political considerations governed Indian actors’ efforts to represent shuddhi as religious on different occasions; and it asks what was lost in translation.  It reveals that by framing shuddhi decisively as a religious matter, Tolerance functioned to disengage Indian secularism from the politics of caste.

This paper will highlight attitudes to British colonialism among some middle-class Indian Christian communities and will use as a case study the anti-colonial discourse within the Methodist Church. It will illustrate how diverse shades of political resistance existed among this Church community despite fears of state retribution. Discourses such as Dravidian Nationalism, Eastern Nationalism, and even the Methodist Church itself were influential in creating oppositional space and fostering intellectual freedom at a time when such expressions were frowned upon. This study thus challenges the perception that middle-class Indian communities were so pro-British that others often derogatorily referred to them as "Black Europeans".

2020 Mossière, G. « Embracing Islam to Improve and Restore the Vulnerable Subject: Religious Conversion as Hermeneutics of the Self. A Case in Prison ». Dans Srdan Sjemac & Ines Jindra (dir.), Lived Religion, Conversion and Recovery, Palgrave McMillan, Palgrave Studies in Lived Religion and Societal Challenges, p. 147-170.

Although the spiritual vibration of conversion can be felt (by the curious outsider) through what conversion performers say in their testimonial discourse, what transforms the convert ‘on stage’ into a ‘new being’ and what is ‘the real’ (le réel) in conversion performance remain unclear. An important question in this connection is, What is ‘real’ in a conversion representation, both with respect to the convert’s interaction with the audience and to the construction of social reality? Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, in this essay I argue that through testimonial discourse converts construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of ‘the real’ in their performative discursive practice. In the first part, I question the constructed nature of testimonial representations—as well as some academic knowledge production that has governed conversion research in the last few decades—and how these representations encourage ‘outsiders’ to read the narrative repertoire as a negation or mirroring ‘the real’ of the conversion experience. In the second part, I apply Roland Barthes’ analytic reflections on photography to conversion research, especially the notions of the studium (the common ground of cultural meanings) and the punctum (a personal experience that inspires private meaning). This brings me to a number of theorists (mostly never used in the field of religious conversion)—Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Žižek—who are important to the perspective that is developed in this essay.

Highly reactive phenolic compounds of pyrolysis bio-oil are recognized as a major cause of the unpleasant properties of this biofuel. Catalytic hydrodeoxygenation of phenolic compounds of bio-oil is an efficient technique for improving the quality of bio-oil. Dual function catalysts consisting of metal and acid sites are usually used for transformation of bio-oil/bio-oil model compounds to high value hydrocarbons. Metal and acid sites are generally involved in hydrogenation/hydrodeoxygenation and dehydration/hydrocracking/dealkylation/alkylation reaction mechanisms, respectively. In this work, the product selectivity of hydrogenation of phenol, o-cresol, m-cresol and guaiacol was investigated over combined catalysts of Pd/C with zeolite solid acids of HZSM-5 (Si/Al of 30, 50 and 80) and HY (Si/Al of 30 and 60). Catalytic activity and product distribution in the hydrogenation process were affected by the density and strength of zeolite acid sites. HZSM-5 (30) with only weak acid sites showed lower cyclohexane selectivity compared with HZSM-5 (50) and HZSM-5 (80) which had both weak and strong acid sites. HY (30) and HY (60) containing only strong acid sites favored production of cycloketones.

Link to Full-Text Articles :
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2015/ra/c5ra00367a

The following article analyzes the concepts used in the Astronomer’s Vita Hludowici imperatoris to specify the Andalusian combatants defending Tortosa from Carolingian attacks between 804/806 and 809 AD. Of all these terms, Mauri and cives stand out above the rest and, consequently, receive special treatment. After comparing them with other data provided by Latin, Muslim and archaeological sources, the study concludes that the first of these concepts makes reference to Andalusian sailors groups, which are known as baḥriyyūn in Arabic literary works, and the second to Hispano- Gothic elites from the city of Tortosa.
El siguiente artículo analiza los conceptos utilizados en la Vita Hludowici imperatoris del Astrónomo para designar a los combatientes andalusíes que defendieron Tortosa de los ataques carolingios entre los años 804/806 y 809. De todos esos términos, el de Mauri y el de cives destacan por encima de los demás y, en consecuencia, reciben un trato especial. Tras compararlos con los datos ofrecidos por otras fuentes latinas, musulmanas y arqueológicas, el estudio concluye que con el primero de esos conceptos se hace referencia a grupos de marineros andalusíes, los conocidos en las obras árabes como baḥriyyūn, y con el segundo a las élites hispano-godas de la ciudad de Tortosa.

This paper, a review essay of The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (2014), first summarizes some of its social scientific chapters and then attempts to begin building an integrative theory of religious conversion. This theory is based upon a critical realist perspective and draws on Paloutzian's multi-level interdisciplinary paradigm of conversion research, recent developments in the cultural sociology of religion, and the language of conversion, and it could be extended to integrate additional levels. The paper ends with a brief discussion of human flourishing and the possible role of conversion in it.