 | Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic Negotiating Respect is an ethnographically rich investigation of Pentecostal Christianity--the Caribbean's fastest growing religious movement--in the contemporary Dominican Republic. Within the context of urban poverty in a barrio of Villa Altagracia, Brendan Jamal Thornton considers the role of religious identity in the lives of young male churchgoers who navigate conversion as a transformative means of status acquisition, authority, and transition out of gang life. Thornton shows that conversion offers both spiritual and practical social value because it provides a strategic avenue for prestige and an acceptable way to transcend personal history. Brendan Jamal Thornton is an anthropologist and assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. " |
