Updates, Events, and Publications
ATS PROFESSOR DR. STEPHEN OFFUTT PUBLISHES A NEW BOOK
Dr. Offutt recently wrote Blood Entanglements: Evangelicals and Gangs in El Salvador. This work was . The blurb from Amazon offers a nice summary.
In many low-income neighborhoods in El Salvador, two groups have significant influence over the public sphere: gangs and evangelical churches. Members of both groups often belong to the same families, use similar organizational strategies, and engage each other in local marketplaces. Pastors and gang leaders compete for power within communities while informally sharing community governance. Entanglements even occur within formal organizations: Gang members can be found in churches and faith-based organizations, while an evangelical presence exists within prisons and other gang-controlled spaces.
Blood Entanglements聽shows the importance of religion in gang-controlled neighborhoods in El Salvador through extensive empirical data and the personal stories of people who live there. Stephen Offutt uses the notion of “entanglement” to explain how and why evangelicals have such frequent and often intimate interactions with gangs, which are groups that many evangelicals believe are evil. Entanglement, he shows, also sheds light on how evangelicals engage with Latin American society and social problems more generally. The book concludes with policy recommendations for reducing gang prevalence and violence in areas with a prominent evangelical presence.
For more information, or to purchase the book, see .
NEW ISSUE OF THE ASBURY JOURNAL
The Spring 2024 issue of The Asbury Journal is now available. It is available at this link:
Here is the aim of The Asbury Journal, according to : The Asbury Journal聽publishes scholarly essays and book reviews written from a Wesleyan perspective. The Journal鈥檚 authors and audience reflect the global reality of the Christian church, the holistic nature of Wesleyan thought, and the importance of both theory and practice in addressing the current issues of the day. Authors include Wesleyan scholars, scholars of Wesleyanism/ Methodism, and scholars writing on issues of theological and theological education importance.
Leave a Reply