Lost in Eden: Dementia From Paradise

Barclay, Aileen

doi:10.1080/15528030.2015.1028696

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Despite this extensive focus on the relation between religiosity and health in old age, less explicit attention has been devoted to comparing these experiences across cultural settings and informed by ethnography. Even less consideration has been given to exploring how religious eschatology specifically-that is, discourse concerning the end times and what happens after death-affects subjective experiences of aging (although see Gerkin 1989 andBarclay 2016 for examples from a pastoral perspective). My project constitutes an attempt to introduce evangelical notions of the end times into academic understandings of the aging process through a cross-cultural and anthropological approach.…”

Section: Douglas Bafford Brandeis Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and the End Times: Evangelical Eschatology and Experiences of Elderhood in the United States and South Africa

Bafford

2019

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Recent trends in aging studies and popular U.S. discourse reformulate elderhood as a valuable, not necessarily negative, experience, and these new models of aging have extended to a consideration of religious practices that can make old age particularly meaningful. Among evangelical Christians, a shared cosmological (and specifically eschatological) narrative structure provides solace and semiotic coherence in the face of challenges characteristic of the “third” and “fourth age.” What remains less clear is the interplay between transnational religious forces like evangelical ideology and local social contexts in which they are enacted, a process illuminated only through cross-cultural comparison. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kentucky and in South Africa, I argue that rather than viewing evangelical rhetoric as narrowly determinative, anthropologists ought to broaden common understandings of Christians’ end-times ideology as something that may, contingent on socio-historical context, alternatively help older congregants cope with the physical effects of aging or allow for reconciliation amid rapid societal change. U.S. evangelical churches often address existential concerns faced by a growing population of elders while downplaying the significance of race, yet white South African Christians employ a similar religious cosmology to place their actions during the apartheid era in a symbolically legible narrative. Both settings indicate the malleability of evangelical ideas to foreground certain concerns while erasing others, challenging assumptions about the uniform effects of global evangelicalism.

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Section: Douglas Bafford Brandeis Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and the End Times: Evangelical Eschatology and Experiences of Elderhood in the United States and South Africa

Bafford

2019

A&A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Lost in Eden: Dementia From Paradise

Cited by 1 publication

References 6 publications

Aging and the End Times: Evangelical Eschatology and Experiences of Elderhood in the United States and South Africa

Aging and the End Times: Evangelical Eschatology and Experiences of Elderhood in the United States and South Africa

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