This thesis contends that youth from age twelve to twenty-five played a pivotal role in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening in New York and New England. Rather than merely being passive onlookers in these religious renewals, the youth were active participants, influencing the frequency, spread, and intensity of the Christian revivals. Relying heavily upon personal accounts written by youth and revival records from various denominations, this work examines adolescent religious experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 explores the impact parents had on youth religiosity, showing how the teaching and examples they saw in their homes built the religious foundation for young people. The next chapter discusses how the youth continued to build upon what they were taught in their homes by seeking for personal conversion experiences. This chapter contends that conversion experiences were the crucial spiritual turning point in the lives of young people, and explores how they were prepared for and reacted to these experiences. Chapter 3 outlines personal worship among the youth and describes the specific tactics that churches implemented in helping convert and strengthen the young. As churches used revival meetings and clergy-youth relationships to fortify these converts, young people implemented the same practices in helping their peers. Finally, chapter 4 utilizes revival records and Methodist church data to provide quantitative evidence of the widespread and crucial role that young people had in influencing revivals. Understanding the widespread impact of these youth on nineteenth-century revivals provides new insight into the ways in which young people impacted the greater social, religious, and culture changes sweeping across America at the time.

[pt] Nesta pesquisa o autor analisa a construção de narrativas de conversão religiosa em situação de entrevista, tendo-se em vista a perspectiva do presente e o processo de mudança envolvido. Tais narrativas são testemunhos da passagem de uma condição de existência ruim para uma melhor, nos quais o contraste entre o presente e o passado se faz especialmente visível. Em relação ao processo de mudança, os narradores indicam compreender que a conversão se dá num momento inesperado de iluminação. A análise das narrativas, no entanto, evidenciam que essas mudanças ocorrem dentro daquilo que o autor chama de rede de mudança: a construção discursiva de uma ampla rede de relações sociais que possibilita a (re)construção identitária. O autor propõe, ainda, que a construção discursiva da conversão propriamente, seja examinada através da noção de fluxo de mudança. Esta noção aponta para a compreensão de que as transformações na identidade social, não podem ser localizadas em um ponto específico. Embora o autor trabalhe com a análise de narrativas de conversão religiosa, ele argumenta que tais noções podem ser aplicadas no estudo de narrativas que contenham outros tipos de conversão, já que uma das características centrais de diferentes tipos de tais narrativas, é a ênfase na transformação identitária. / [en] In this research the author investigates the construction of narratives of religious conversion through the use of interviews. These narratives are testimonials of the passage from a bad life condition to a better one, in which the contrast between the present and the past is especially visible. In relation to the process of change, the narrators indicate that they understand the conversion as happening in an unexpected moment of illumination. The narrative analysis points out that those changes occur in what the author refers to as a web of change: the discursive construction of a broad web of social relations that gives rise to the possibility of identity (re)construction. The author also proposes to examine the discursive production of the conversion through the notion of stream of change. This notion indicates that the transformation of the social identity can´t be located in a specific point. Although the author has worked with narratives of religious conversion, he proposes that these notions can be used in the study of narratives concerned with other types of conversion, since one of the central characteristics of such narratives is the emphasis upon the transformation of identity.

The Prodigal Daughter (1736) is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be an approachable text that was likely geared towards a children’s audience during New England’s first Great Awakening, within the approachable format of a chapbook. However, when explored further, The Prodigal Daughter reveals a complicated textual history during a time of theological and social revival in New England. This thesis considers the historical context of The Prodigal Daughter’s narrative, as well as the poem’s publication history. The text’s transmission is carefully examined and encapsulated in this edition—giving the reader a transcription that is the result of collating twenty-eight surviving witnesses of The Prodigal Daughter. This thesis serves as a critical edition of The Prodigal Daughter, with an introduction which includes a careful consideration of gendered theology, homiletics, the literary marketplace, and the role of the devil in the female conversion narrative during New England’s first Great Awakening.

This thesis addresses the lack of scholarly attention devoted to African American Sunni women by examining how they use collective memory to negotiate embodied agency. Through an analysis of African American Sunni women’s narratives of testifying conversion, and vignettes from diaries and interviews, I show how African American Sunni women utilize racial, religious, and spiritual memory in the form of ritual practices and Islamic texts to multiply construct their bodies, and how this construction allows them to enact multimodal and nomadic forms of agency. A contextual analysis also illustrates how environment and interpretation (tafsir) further mobilizes forms of agency, articulating a need for flexibility in regard to the concept of embodied agency and challenging the dichotomy prevalent in Western and Eurocentric conceptions of liberatory agency.

That conversion is a central concept for Baptists and narrative an important part of their culture is made clear by Betlehem kristlig kalender, a yearbook published from 1886 to 1980.The aim of this thesis is to survey and analyse conversion narratives within the Baptist movement as reflected in Betlehem, by investigating what narrative expressions form the body of the stories, what is given precedence, emotional or cognitive expressions, their soul, and finally what theological themes are developed around the concept of conversion.The method employed is, following a reading of all the issues of Betlehem, to distinguish and extract the stories that are narrative in character according to Hindmarsh’s criteria. That is to say, stories that point beyond the individual to a larger principle of meaningfulness and that are powerfully thought-provoking, with a sense that their beginning, middle and end form a unified whole. The texts extracted are further analysed to find the distinguishing characteri-stics of the material in the light of the dissertation’s aim.The results of the study show that the narratives in Betlehem contain a good deal of drama. They have a clear direction from something to something, with the actual conversion forming a climax. The darkest situations are transformed, following a struggle, to the most ethereal light when morning comes, bringing peace and assurance that conversion has taken place. Women often serve as models, having already experienced conversion. It is their husbands and sons who are the object of their attention and are led towards conversion by their entreaties, arguments and also tears. Salvation, as the experience was often called, clearly changes people’s personalities. Following conversion, individuals take greater responsibility for their own and their family’s situation and it is not unusual that, in their new lives, they start to tell others of their experience.The narratives in Betlehem show a marked preponderance of the emotional over the cognitive for the first 60 years, up to the 1950s, when feelings make way for reason and good examples. One reason for this change could be that the instantaneous conversion of revivalism is replaced with an emphasis on a rational, planned decision and commitment. Another reason could be the ecumenical realities of the time, with church membership based on baptism rather than a confession of faith. The cognitive aspects, as well as postmodernism’s loss of belief in metanarratives, may be mentioned as further possible explanations.The Baptist process of conversion, its “golden chain”, interpreted through the constitution of the first Baptist church in Borekulla and the Betlehem narratives, can be defined as anthropocentric and summed up as comprising the following stages: (1) The individual is awakened from their indifference and realises their sinfulness. (2) The individual senses a danger in their sinful state and turns to God. (3) The individual accepts Jesus Christ in faith and receives forgiveness and assurance. (4) Faith is brought to life in transformative discipleship. The theology of conversion broadly follows those of other revivalist groups.

The aim of this study is to examine what kind of ingroup conversion prototypes the authors of Luke-Acts and the Gospel of John express through conversion narratives and conceptual metaphors. By analysing the works of the authors I find a range of expressions conceptualising the act or process of conversion to faith in Jesus. These expressions contribute to forming an comprehensive conversion narrative, which has part in forming and setting boundaries for the ingroup of believers towards the outgroup(s) of non-believers. The ingroup conversion prototype for Luke-Acts shows norms of outgroup love, merciful and generous actions as well as good works and inclusion led by the Holy Spirit. The ingroup conversion prototype in John sets up norms of transformation through baptism, ingroup love and a breaking with the darkness of the world. The aim is further on to examine how these prototypes correspond to the models of conversion presented by Lewis R. Rambo. The results show that Luke-Acts view of conversion corresponds both to the model of traditional transition and intensification. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, fits only in the model of traditional transition.

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