Stories Senses and the Charismatic Relation

<p><em>Stories Senses and the Charismatic Relation</em> offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience rendering a deep phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced shaped constituted and performed by those who live them.</p><p>The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine considers the spiritual journeys of family members and the ‘spiritual community’ of which he was a part and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Balkans where that community was based. Jamie Barnes considers three main elements: firstly the role that sensory aspects of experience play in constituting one’s lived world and one’s ideas about the kinds of beings inhabiting it; secondly how stories and metaphors are tactically employed not only in the process of expressing aspects of past experience but also in shaping and forming both desired worlds and future pathways; thirdly how such sensed narrated and lived worlds are tentatively held together - in hope trust and love – through charismatic relationships of devotion with a divine Other. </p><p>This unusual and innovative ethnography offers a unique and reflexive view <i>from</i> <i>within</i> the world of Christian experience.</p>