Choice Review

Psychology professors Hood (Univ. of Tennessee, Chattanooga) and Williamson (Henderson State Univ.) were participant-observers for 15 years among Pentecostal believers who "take up serpents" in obedience to the literal reading of Mark 16:17-18. Drawing from their large database of interviews and videotapes of serpent handlers in Appalachian churches, the authors reject the sensationalism of the media, and other scholars, and examine as social scientists the cultural context of serpent handling. They allow believers to testify for themselves to an encounter in worship that produces a sense of empowerment and spiritual victory. The Pentecostal movement at the turn of the 20th century occasionally included serpent handling, together with speaking in tongues, as signs of the Holy Spirit, but handling was subsequently marginalized and rejected by sects that were becoming denominations. Beginning in 1940, laws were passed against a practice considered both bizarre and dangerous. Handling has continued to the present, however, among a fourth generation in small independent churches, often with strong family connections. The authors, though not believers themselves, empathetically regard practitioners as sincerely expressing their faith by their interpretation of a scriptural command. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. W. B. Bedford Crown College