Hinson, Glenn, Fire in my bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American gospel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000, Pp. x + 408. Pb. $24.95.

Extract

Glenn Hinson, in Fire in my bones, creatively and accurately captures the essence of Holy Spirit influence on belief and experience among members of the “spirit-filled” or “sanctified” African American community. Much ethnographic work tends to highlight researchers' analytical and supposedly “objective” reports of observed behavior; Hinson, however, takes an ingenious phenomenological approach in which the lived selves of sanctified members are presented through their own individual voices. To the author's credit, attempts to “shape” or refine participants' expressions, observations, analyses, summaries, and so on do not appear in this work.