Anna Strhan, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Kent

Anna Strhan is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Her research interests lie in the interrelations between religion, ethics, meaning, and modernity, both historically and in contemporary cultures. She is the author of Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility.

"This is an outstanding book. Well-written, accessible and thought-provoking, it needs to be read not only by students and scholars of contemporary evangelical Christianity but by all those interested in contemporary (un)settlements of religion and the city." - Paul-François Tremlett, Culture and Religion

"Both ethnographically rich and theoretically rigorous, this is an important book that speaks to multiple concerns and disciplines." - Jon Bialecki, Theology

"Aliens and Strangers? compels us to reconsider positions we may have held, and to reconcile competing narratives of what it means to be religious in a secular and cosmopolitan environment. In essence, Strhan invites us to struggle along with her and her participants to make sense of religious life." - Katie Gaddini, The British Journal of Sociology

"Aliens and strangers? is a book significantly and creatively engaged with work in the anthropology of Christianity focused on materiality, language, embodiment, values, and morality. But its profound reckoning with the Simmelian themes of fragmentation and the quest for coherence is genuinely novel within that literature, and the ring of ethnographic truth these themes achieve in this study of St Johnâs recommends them strongly as topics for further investigation." - Joel Robbins, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"This is a fantastic book. Anna Strhan brings us, through her wonderful ethnography, into the heart of a Christian congregation in the belly of the City of London. Her observations of the ways in which these Christians navigate work and faith, Church and culture, are deeply revealing of the fault lines and fissures in secular modernity. But what really sweeps the reader away is her theoretical sophistication, her ability to bring the sociological theory, the anthropology of Christianity, and urban studies into a distinctive configuration. Strhan is a major new voice in the sociology of religion. Aliens and Strangers? Lucky us. We'll be reading it for a long time to come" - Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics

"If you read only one book about evangelicalism, make it this one. No other scholar has accessed the ways this movement provides specific epistemological resources to survive in everyday modernity. Strhan does this, developing a richly human portrait of the ways certain evangelical metaphors, social relations, and interpretive systems offer usable hermeneutic tools for people trying to reckon with the contradictions of capitalist desire and the inevitability of physical, material, and emotional suffering. This is a book that doesn't apply theory to individual lives, but instead discerns how individuals theoretically reason between many competing concepts of self and society. Anna Strhan is an impeccable ethnographer, but even more: in this book, she shines as an incomparable humanist" - Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

"This is a wonderful book that leads us into some unexpected places. The everyday lives of conservative evangelicals in London are portrayed with immense subtlety. We learn about faith but also doubt, triumph but also shame, religious subjectivity alongside metropolitan sensibility. By the end, we have to reconsider what we thought we knew about religious coherence-and about conservatism itself" - Simon Coleman, University of Toronto