Fire from Heaven The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century

9780306810497

0306810492

It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week theLos Angeles Timeswas reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible'and a pentecostal movement was created that would, by the start of the twenty-first century, attract over 400 million followers worldwide. Harvey Cox has traveled the globe to visit and worship with pentecostal congregations on four continents, and he has written a dynamic, provocative history of this explosion of spirituality'a movement that represents no less than a tidal change in what religion is and what it means to people.