Paper short abstract:

This project introduces the term pragmatic faith to theorize how transcendent aspects of subjects' callings resonate with and counter everyday concerns, specifically about corruption and greed. Pragmatic faith as a concept opens opportunities to examine a Calling as an action and response.

Paper long abstract:

This project introduces the term pragmatic faith to theorize how transcendent aspects of subjects' callings resonate with and counter everyday concerns, specifically about corruption and greed. Pragmatic faith as a concept opens opportunities to examine a Calling as an action and response to what Reinhardt and Landry aptly call 'entanglements of secular and religious grammars in modernity.' The concept also allows that a Calling is delimited by more than traditions and institutions; it is culturally imbued with sense of intuition that does not demand or need proof. That is, by faith. Reflecting on the life and works of a Tanzanian Lutheran Bishop who championed socialist policy and today eschews Pentecostalism, the paper argues that relationships of affinity and consanguinity, and illocutionary acts of promise and forewarning in Lutheran east-central Africa authorize an ethical unmasking of what an episcopacy sees as corrupt and immoral actions and deeds; namely, as examined in this paper, the works of Pentecostalite preachers whom the episcopacy presents (for purposes of speaking to rural and non-English speaking parishes) as auctioning Jesus's blood in the marketplace. Ethnographically the paper overviews how a bishop was called to church vocation; how a calling entailed little separation of a church from state until recently; and how today's Tanzanian episcopacy grounds a Calling in an everyday social fact of being that, We argue, reframes Luther's "Here I stand. I can do no other" as "Here I stand. I can be no other."