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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."