BOOKS
Embracing Our Roots: Rediscovering the Value of Faith, Family, and Tradition (Wipf and Stock, 2021)
Drawing from Palma’s background as an Italian American evangelical, Embracing Our Roots considers the significance of rediscovering our ancestral history in a society where many are forced to repress, ignore, or reject their heritage. A nation of immigrants, every American is, in some sense, an “ethnic” American and stands to gain from considering how the people and places they come from make them unique.
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Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity. Routledge Studies in Religion series, 2020.
While many established forms of Christianity have seen significant decline in recent decades, Pentecostals are currently one of the fastest growing religious groups across the world. This book examines the roots, inception, and expansion of Pentecostalism among Italian Americans to demonstrate how Pentecostalism moves so freely through widely varying cultures.
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Grassroots Pentecostalism in Brazil and the United States: Migrations, Missions, and Mobility. Christianity and Renewal – Interdisciplinary Studies series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Now available via preorder at amazon.com.
This book offers an historical and comparative profile of classical pentecostal movements in Brazil and the United States in view of their migratory beginnings and transnational expansion. Pentecostalism’s inception in the early twentieth century, particularly in its global South permutations, was defined by its grassroots character. In contrast to the top-down, hierarchical structure typical of Western forms of Christianity, the emergence of Latin American Pentecostalism embodied stability from the bottom up―among the common people. While the rise to prominence of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, the Western hemisphere’s largest (non-Catholic) denomination, demanded structure akin to mainline contexts, classical pentecostals such as the Christian Congregation movement cling to their grassroots identity. Comparing the migratory and missional flow of movements with similar European and US roots, this book considers the prospects for classical Brazilian pentecostals with an eye on the problems of church growth and polity, gender, politics, and ethnic identity.
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** For a complete list of publications, see my CV.
Paul J. Palma 