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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two distinct modulations of prayerful embodiment in Christian contexts in Ireland, the testimonial and the sacramental. The paper argues that both modulations embody the rhetoric of hesitancy, through invitation and response, to mediate temporal frames of recommitment to faith.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines rhetorical bodily practices in two Irish faith communities. I pay particular attention to the retention in prayerful bodily modulations of distinct moments of commitment and hesitancy in testimonies - how do people remember belief bodily, particularly those threshold moments where they had previously stopped not-believing and entered states of religious flow? Such moments are characteristic of Pentecostal testimonies and are often carried into faith practice and relived in prayer as moments of grace, moments where hesitation was replaced with faith. Catholics similarly seek recourse to new prayerful contexts, in the wake of an institutional church structure that has largely left them down, as evidenced not only in the scandals of Ireland's recent past, but also in the recently modified liturgy that, far from standardizing sacramental worship as intended, has at least for the moment left congregations feeling hesitant and acting hesitantly. How can the shock of this new prayerfulness be addressed in bodies already disciplined? How are testimony and sacrament relearnt and revisited to recover key moments of hesitancy through the body as medium and archive?