The Shadows and Lights of Waco
eBook - PDF

The Shadows and Lights of Waco

Millennialism Today

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Shadows and Lights of Waco

Millennialism Today

About this book

When James Faubion visited the site of the Branch Davidian compound after its conflagration, what he found surprised him. Though the popular imagination had relegated the site's millennialist denizens to the radical fringe, Faubion found not psychopathology but a sturdy and comprehensive system for understanding the world. He also found, in the person of Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a fascinating spokeswoman for that system.


Based on more than five years of fieldwork, including extensive life-history interviews with Roden, Faubion interprets millennialism as a ''master-pedagogy.'' He reveals it as simultaneously a poetics, a rhetoric, a physics, an approach to history, a course of training, a gnosis, and an ethics. Millennialism resists the categories that both academic and popular analysts use to discuss religion by melding the sacred and secular, the spiritual and political, and the transcendental and commonsensical. In this respect, and in others, millennialism is a premodern pedagogy that has grown resolutely counter-modern. Yet, mainstream culture sees in it not a critique of modernity but dangerous lunacy.


This disjunction prompts Faubion to investigate how the mainstream came to confine religion to an inner and other-worldly faith--an inquiry that allows him to account for the irrationalization of millennialism. Against this historical background, we can discern the genealogy of Adventist millennialism and make sense of contemporary religious events, including the actions of a small group in the central Texas prairie.

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Yes, you can access The Shadows and Lights of Waco by James D. Faubion in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Tilte Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Prolegomena
  7. Part One: A Conversion
  8. Part Two: A Gnosis
  9. Part Three: An Ethics
  10. Part Four: A Colonization
  11. Notes
  12. References
  13. Index