Description: Explains an overlooked but vital chapter in the history of global Pentecostalism - the widespread eruption of intense charismatic revival movements across Melanesia in the 1970s.
Brief description: Fraser Macdonald is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.
Review Quotes: In this remarkable book, Fraser Macdonald examines charismatic revival as a path that offered Melanesian revivalists in the 1970s a distinct alternative to mission Christianity. When these societies convulsed in religious enthusiasm, he argues, they were not just responding to the political forces of waning colonialism and nascent nationalism. Nor were they simply rejecting mission teachings. Instead, they were ecstatically asserting a new and different way to hope, security, metaphysical order, and even utopia.
Matt Tomlinson, Australian National University, Australia