Why people convert: A balance theoretical approach to religious conversion

This paper presents a model of religious conversion that integrates process models in the tradition of Lofland and Stark (1965) with the cognitive balance model of Gartrell and Shannon (1985). By placing balance theoretical principles in the context of a process model, the model presented here seeks to explain conversion as a process that is facilitated through the cognitive states of individuals. This technique, it is argued, produces a view of conversion that denies neither individual agency nor the structural constraints placed on the individual by the group. Implications for the study of conversion are discussed.Many thanks to the participants in the Emory University Sociology Department's presentation seminar for helpful comments. You know who you are. Thanks also Nancy Ammerman, Sonya Gamble, Karen Hegtvedt, and Frank Lechner.BITNET: SOCY7182 & EMUVM1.     

The Step Model of Transformative Religious Experiences: A Phenomenological Understanding of Religious Conversions in India

This is a phenomenological study of individual conversion experiences to Christianity from different religious traditions in India. The author has collected 165 accounts of conversion experiences by using maximum variant sampling and multiple methods of data collection. By using grounded theory, the author has generated a step model of transformative religious experiences. The step model incorporates the religious experience in conversion to which the converts attribute great significance. It accommodates both the role of religious practices and social psychological factors in the conversion process. This study also brings to light the hostilities to conversion in a multi-religious context.     

Issues in replicating the Trauma—Stren conversion

The Trauma--Stren (T-S) conversion procedure was examined at a large state university and the construct related to personality and cognitive process variables. Significantly more respondents reported T-S conversion than in the original studies. Conversion was not significantly correlated with personal variables. The presence of experiences in which an event was reported as simultaneously traumatic and strenful is reported, and the criteria for clearly identifying the conversion phenomenon are questioned.     

Feminist Metanoia and Soul-Making

This article critiques tradition Christian understanding of sin and alienation and the process of conversion through reception of transcendent grace. It reconstructs the understanding of human transformation from a perspective of feminist spirituality and ethics. Fallenness is reinvisioned in terms of women's subjugation by patriarchal social and cultural systems, and conversion is seen in terms of the process by which women's journey leads them to question these systems and embark on a process of emancipation from them to create a new self and a new society. Both alienation and transformation are viewed in terms of the interrelation of the psychic and the social.     

Bidirectional cognitive computing method supported by cloud technology

To realize the bidirectional cognitive computing supported by cloud technology, the cloud model is taken as a bidirectional cognitive computing model based on probability and statistics, a bidirectional cognitive calculation method is constructed, and the bidirectional cognitive conversion between concept connotation and extension is studied. In view of the defects in the existing backward cloud conversion algorithm, two stable multistep backward cloud conversion algorithms are proposed, which lays the foundation for the realization of a stable bidirectional cognitive calculation process. A bidirectional cognitive computing model is proposed, which combines the characteristics of human cognition and the bidirectional cognitive conversion algorithm to simulate bidirectional cognitive computing process based on concept by means of calculation. Moreover, the application of bidirectional cognitive transform algorithm in image segmentation is studied combined with the characteristics of human image cognition. It is also compared with the classical algorithm and methods based on cloud model. The results show that the proposed method has lower mean error and is obviously better than other algorithms, which fully proves the effectiveness of the method.     

Some notes on Freud's concept of conversion

Abstract

The author investigates conversion, the process by which psychic contents are transformed into bodily symptoms. The author concludes that this process cannot be explained by libido theory or by assuming the existence of a psychic energy. He argues that although Freud was convinced that “the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation … can never be fully comprehensible to us,” this process is, nonetheless, comprehensible in terms of Freud's own conceptualisation. To understand this process, one must take the characteristics of the primary process to which the “replacement of external by psychical reality” belongs as radical as his thesis of a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. This thesis includes not only the hallucinatory satisfaction of instinctual wishes, but also the hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire to avoid unpleasure, which is understood as a process by which the internal conditions of this affect are displaced from the presentational world into perceptions via conversion.     

BECOMING BELIEVERS: STUDYING THE CONVERSION PROCESS FROM WITHIN

Abstract Employing an extended case method ethnography ( Burawoy 1998 ), the researcher joined five new members forming a spiritualist's group under the leadership of an experienced advocate. Over a period of eighteen months, the researcher attended all the group's activities and events. Data were collected to reflexively interrogate the process theory of conversion proposed by Lewis Rambo (1993) . The data revealed conversion to be a multifaceted and dynamic process of cognitive change, mediated by structural, and contextual forces. The results provide a reconceptualization of Rambo's theory, presenting a theoretical expansion of the model emphasizing its mechanisms of action. The paper details the composition of the “Interaction‐Commitment” mechanism, operationalized within four submechanisms emanating from Rambo's roles, rituals, rhetoric, and relationships. This longitudinal study shows that most of the hard work toward conversion occurs before any formal interaction with a conversion advocate. Conversion operates most effectively under conditions of cognitive economy wherein the belief path follows a path of least cognitive expenditure.     

Religious Conversion and Personality Change

The question of whether religious conversion causes changes in someone's personality is examined in light of two bodies of literature—the research on personality change and the research on conversion. When the theory and research on personality change is applied to the question of whether conversion causes such change, the answer depends on what level of personality is of concern. Research on the relation between religious conversion and a variety of behavioral, attitudinal, emotional, and lifestyle variables is consistent with this conclusion. Although conversion seems to have minimal effect on elemental functions such as the Big Five traits or temperaments, it can result in profound, life transforming changes in mid-level functions such as goals, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors, and in the more self-defining personality functions such as identity and life meaning. This seems to be so whether the process of conversion is sudden or gradual, active or passive, and to a traditional Western or Eastern religion or to a new religious movement. However, most of the research is retrospective and cross-sectional, and no systematic program of research has ever been sustained. Suggestions for the form of future research are made, and a model for integrating the many factors that must be taken into account and for guiding future research is sketched.     

Issues in the Sociology and Psychology of Religious Conversion

Pastoral Psychology - Religious conversion is the process by which a person commits to the beliefs of a new religious tradition and shifts away from their previously held religious beliefs (Stark...     

Creating an Evangelical self: an analysis of narratives of conversion to Evangelicalism in post-Soviet St Petersburg

In this article I analyse the narratives of conversion to Evangelical churches in St Petersburg by inquiring how Russians engage with the Evangelical churches and how they construct a meaningful conversion identity. My analysis shows how the social and political changes of post-Soviet Russia are experienced in religious terms and whether they have social implications that are reflected in identity-building as both Russian and Evangelical. Individual identity always reflects time and place, and the social and societal context in which an individual lives. Through this route I also broaden the understanding of Russian societal attitudes towards present-day ‘religious dissidents’. My research is based on 19 thematic interviews and participant observations in church meetings in St Petersburg between 2006 and 2009. Most of the interviewees belonged to communities that could be categorised as neo-Pentecostal. The study revealed that both a personal religious quest, especially during the societal turmoil that existed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the influence of friends or relatives were significant impulses for conversion. The resources sustaining the conversion as an ongoing process are communal, but also involve an individual self-improvement project within the construction of a new Evangelical self.     

William James and the Religious Character of the Sick Soul

The scholarly attention lavished on William James’ case study in the “Sick Soul” lecture in The Varieties of Religious Experience of a man disturbed by the vision of an epileptic patient has generally not approached this case as a religious experience. To deepen our understanding of religious experience, I show that this case study can be understood as religious using elements of the theory of religion expounded throughout James’ text. I argue that it can be understood as a stage in the process of conversion James lays out. The omission of a subsequent stage highlights James’ reasons for rejecting healthy-mindedness as a philosophically adequate perspective and illustrates his claim that the strivings of the conscious mind can stunt the conversion process. Drawing on other philosophical, psychological, and literary texts, I argue that the content of the vision James describes points to solitude as a source of religious disquiet.     

The proselytizing of jews: Its history and consequences

Psychologists, sociologists, and others have, for the past century, sought to explain the motivations for religious conversion beyond the simple theological explanation of Divine intervention. Specifically, they have raised the possibility that suggestion, hypnosis, and/or schizoid tendencies, for example, have played decisive roles in the process. Conflict has resulted from the publication of disparate viewpoints, especially between those who accept converts' narratives about their pre-conversion motives at face value and those who question the validity of such recollections.Less often considered, except perhaps in cases of great historical import, are the psychological consequences of conversion. The ripple effects of conversion, as well as the impact on the individual, are examined here. Consideration of psychological antecedents and consequences, in historical and contemporary settings, underlie tentative conclusions regarding today's sudden conversion experiences.Lita Linzer Schwartz and Natalie Isser are co-authors ofProselytization, Conversion, and Commitment, and of several articles and papers focused on historical and contemporary examples of religious conversion.     

Charisma and conversion

The author examines the dynamic process involved in charisma and conversion. Conversion is discussed following Murphy's study of Puritan conversion as identification, introjection, and displacement. Charisma is described as a special power attributed to person(s) by observers. The affect of charisma on the convert in terms of the importance of the leader as the embodiment of faith, i.e., a model, affirmer, teacher, cause of improvement, and public relations person.A version of his article was presented at the conference on Conversion, Coercion, and Commitment sponsored by the Center for the Study of New Religious Movements, Berkeley, CA, in June, 1981.     

Your Body is a Temple: Conversion Narratives in African-Led Eastern European Pentecostalism

The word conversion has a multitude of meanings within religions. For Pentecostal Christianity in particular it is spoken of essentially as an external act of religious change. In Pentecostalism, therefore, to convert is to move to the Christian faith and it usually implies making a personal decision for Jesus Christ. In the Church of the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations, a majority of its members have gone through this transition and in the process presented their human bodies to God as temples within which His Spirit now comes to dwell. The metaphor of the body is particularly strong in Pauline thought and it is one that enables a useful appreciation of conversion in Pentecostal spirituality.     

Digital computer estimation of eye fixations

A method is presented for estimating eye fixations to the degree of accuracy desired. In the process, the quantity of data is greatly reduced so that analysis can be accomplished at the end of each experimental run. The algorithm is particularly suitable for “slow” computers because the analog-to-digital conversion rate can be low and because the data reduction process decreases the number of calculations required to obtain the analytical results.     

A Review of Carolyn Chen’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience</Emphasis>

Carolyn Chen’ Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience examines the impact of immigration on the religious practices of Taiwanese American Christians and Buddhists. In particular, the author studies how recent immigrants from Taiwan either convert to evangelical forms of Christianity or identify as explicit Buddhists as a way to remake the self in a particularly American context. By offering a dual tradition focus, the author provides significant insight into the relationship between gender, religious, and ethnic identities for Taiwanese Americans. Reviewing the centrality of religion in the lives of Taiwanese American Christians and Buddhists and its similar function in the lives of Korean American Buddhists, this review essay addresses how Asian American forms of religion and spirituality are reinterpreted to address the complex renegotiation of identities that take place for recent immigrants. This review essay also examines the process of religious conversion by questioning whether the move from one religious tradition to another can be understood as an additive process rather than a complete transition and addressing the impact of conversion on later generations.     

You say "probable" and I say "likely": improving interpersonal communication with verbal probability phrases

When forecasters and decision makers describe uncertain events using verbal probability terms, there is a risk of miscommunication because people use different probability phrases and interpret them in different ways. In an effort to facilitate the communication process, the authors investigated various ways of converting the forecasters' verbal probabilities to the decision maker's terms. The authors present 3 studies in which participants judged the probabilities of distinct events using both numerical and verbal probabilities. They define several indexes of interindividual coassignment of phrases to the same events and evaluate the conversion methods by comparing the values of these indexes for the converted and the unconverted judgments. In all the cases studied, the conversion methods significantly reduced the error rates in communicating uncertainties.     

The role of sublexical graphemic processing in reading

Dual-route models of reading postulate the existence of two separate mechanisms: The lexical route allows words to be recognized in their holistic form, and the sublexical route proceeds by converting the written sublexical entities of a word or a nonword into their corresponding phonological equivalents. Sublexical reading is assumed to require three stages of processing: graphemic parsing, graphophonemic conversion, and phoneme blending. This study provides evidence in favor of the existence of a graphemic parsing process which occurs prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. A group of normal subjects read nonwords which contained multiletter graphemes significantly more slowly than graphemically simple nonwords. These results, best interpretable in the context of a recent dual-route model of reading, confirm previous data obtained in pathology which suggest the functional independence of this cognitive procedure.     

Conversion to Islam in relation to divorce in Malaysian family law

Malaysia is a multi-religious country that recognizes two types of family law based upon the Law Reform Marriage and Divorce Act 1976 and the Islamic Family Law. The former administers the marriage matters of non-Muslims, and the latter deals with Muslim family affairs. This paper aims to elucidate the matter of the conversion of a non-Muslim spouse to Islam in connection with an application to dissolve a marriage in Malaysia. When both the husband and wife have solemnized and registered their marriage under the Law Reform Marriage and Divorce Act but one of the parties subsequently converts to Islam, Section 51 of the Law Reform Marriage and Divorce Act contains a provision for the dissolution of the marriage. On the other hand, the Islamic Family Law also has certain provisions to be applied in the case of conversion. As a consequence of the conversion, neither party to the marriage continues to be bound by the same family law provision. Thus there arise several issues to be identified and clarified, such as who has the right to file the divorce petition, which court has the jurisdiction to adjudicate the petition, and whether there is any conflict of interest between the parties in the process of dissolving their marriage. This paper attempts to highlight and discuss the issue of conversion, by making a comparative study between the provisions in the Law Reform Marriage and Divorce Act and the Islamic Family Law.