Keping Wu

The book offers an ethnographic account of the composition, leadership, and ritual performance of a charismatic Catholic prayer group. Through analysis, it reveals how the charismatic priest maximizes his authority by integrating personal and institutional power within the context of global Pentecostalism and recent American cultural history. What happens when charisma and bureaucratic structure collide? This book provides a firsthand look at how charismatic authority emerges within highly institutional settings and explains why it matters. It demonstrates how vertical ties of personal devotion between the leader and followers and horizontal ties among group members, built through stories of conversion and healing, forge deeply charismatic relationships that strengthen group cohesion and resilience. Written in accessible language, the book explores the tension between individualism and distrust of institutional structures, and the unique experience of Catholics in a predominantly Protestant culture. Moving beyond the classic Weberian paradigm, it delivers a fresh, nuanced understanding of charismatic leadership in American culture and society and reveals how a deeply personal, sacred form of Christianity takes root. The book will appeal to scholars and students of religious studies, anthropology of religion, and anyone who is interested in Pentecostalism, Christianity, charisma, and American culture.

Free markets alone do not work effectively to solve certain kinds of human problems, such as education, old age care, or disaster relief. Nor have markets ever been the sole solution to the psychological challenges of death, suffering, or injustice. Instead, we find a major role for the non-market institutions of society - the family, the state, and social institutions. The first in-depth anthropological study of charities in contemporary Chinese societies, this book focuses on the unique ways that religious groups have helped to solve the problems of social well-being. Using comparative case studies in China, Taiwan and Malaysia during the 1980s and onwards, it identifies new forms of religious philanthropy as well as new ideas of social 'good', including different forms of political merit-making, new forms of civic selfhood, and the rise of innovative social forms, including increased leadership by women. The book finally argues that the spread of these ideas is an incomplete process, with many alternative notions of goodness continuing to be influential.