{"id":1823,"date":"2011-01-26T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2011\/01\/26\/the-charismatic-impulse\/"},"modified":"2011-01-26T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T03:00:00","slug":"the-charismatic-impulse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2011\/01\/26\/the-charismatic-impulse\/","title":{"rendered":"the charismatic impulse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have observed that the desire for experience manifests itself in many different ways. In some circles, there is a lot of hooting and hollering (in the vernacular, hootin\u2019 and hollerin\u2019), shouts of \u2018Amen!\u2019, emotion laden sermons that tell sob-stories to invoke an emotional response, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>There is another kind of push for emotionalism that finds expression in terms like these, \u201cintensely\u201d, \u201cintentional\u201d, \u201crelentless\u201d, \u201cpassionate\u201d, \u201csaturated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What drives this desire for experience? I am not advocating that we become as expressionless as Heimie the robot on the old <em>Get Smart<\/em> series (my all-time favorite which seriously dates me\u2026), but why do we see such a desire for emotion in religion? Has it always been this way?<\/p>\n<p>If we look back in history, we see the rise of charismatism since the 1970s, the Pentecostal movement in the 60 years preceding that, the camp-meeting\/revivalist emphasis (especially rural) in the 19th century, and the Pietist movement before that. I wonder if what we are seeing today is an <em>increase<\/em> in the desire for experience or if it is the <em>norm<\/em>. I wonder if it is the product of popular culture: music, movies, television, video games, etc. or if it is simply the natural expression of most humans (stick-in-the-muds like me as exceptions).<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if it is good or bad. I kinda think bad, but, then, maybe that\u2019s just me.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display: inline\" title=\"don_sig2\" alt=\"don_sig2\" src=\"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/don_sig211.png\" width=\"150\" height=\"50\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have observed that the desire for experience manifests itself in many different ways. In some circles, there is a lot of hooting and hollering (in the vernacular, hootin\u2019 and hollerin\u2019), shouts of \u2018Amen!\u2019, emotion laden sermons that tell sob-stories to invoke an emotional response, and so on. There is another kind of push for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[84,71],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-tp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}