Book review: How the Charismatic movement spread in Taiwan
What is Charismatic, or Pentecostal, Christianity? If you want an answer to this and thousands of other related questions you could do no better than consult Diarmaid MacCulloch’s amazingly comprehensive and eye-opening book A History of Christianity (2009). There we read that “charisma” means a gift of grace, something associated with what MacCulloch calls the Trinity’s “Cinderella,” the Holy Spirit, and manifested in the direct expression of religious emotion by its adherents (calling out, rolling on the floor and spontaneous singing). “The rise of Pentecostalism and its Chari...