I'm saved, but I still feel empty. Am I doing something wrong? The question was directed at Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club, "but it s a variation on an anxiety that American Christians have felt since colonial times. In this book, the historian of religion John Corrigan demonstrates that Christianity in America has systematically promoted the feeling of emptiness as a core component of being Christian. Christian groups, he shows, have fostered emptiness through bodily exercises, material culture, literary images, and ...
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I'm saved, but I still feel empty. Am I doing something wrong? The question was directed at Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club, "but it s a variation on an anxiety that American Christians have felt since colonial times. In this book, the historian of religion John Corrigan demonstrates that Christianity in America has systematically promoted the feeling of emptiness as a core component of being Christian. Christian groups, he shows, have fostered emptiness through bodily exercises, material culture, literary images, and reasoned argument. Corrigan argues, furthermore, that the cultivation of the feeling of emptiness by Christian groups is closely connected to the ways these groups distinguish themselves from each other, and has historically fed contentious relationships among them. Corrigan examines many different kinds of religious emptiness: the emptiness of deep longing, the emptying of the body through fasting or weeping, the emptiness of religiously significant spaces (such as the wilderness and The Great Desert), and the emptiness of historical time itself. The result is a significant and potentially controversial study proposing that Christianity in America is not entirely what it seems to be."
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