532 SC~IOLOGY OF RELIGION Central to this collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the atea of Anabaptist studies is the vohme's historical, theoretical and philosophical emphases. The first tire chapters represent essays examining topics sucia as "Power and Religion in the Westem Intellectual Tradition," UThe Anabaptist Revolt and Political and geligious Power," and "Power and Authority in Men- nonite Theological Development. ~ These essays provoke the reader's scholarly interest asa review of the westem canon on power and authority in religion, anda narrative of Anabaptist emergence and selective history from the sixteenth through the earb/twenti- eth centuries. However, there is little in these essays to inform the present strand of inquiry into changing Amish/Mennonite social and cultural norms as represented by the works of scholars such as Kraybill, Nolt, Kniss and Dorsten. Indeed, it is a category of this modem movement gedekop and gedekop do not mention at first m that of the "Mennonite culture wars ~ as Stephen Ainlay names his essay n that the book has its greatest rele- vance for sociologists interested in study of current Anabaptist communities. The histori- cal and philosophical essays provide a neces- sary common background for the discussions in the remaining four chapters. These inchde not only the modemist-fundamentalist con- troversies of American Mennonites, but also a discussion of Anabaptist ecclesiology from a feminist perspective, the difficulties of HIV/ AIDS infection in a "Plain ~ family, and the transformation of power and authority models in the Mennonite communities of the Ukraine flora the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth. The "paradox of Ambaptism and power" (p. xii) for Redekop and Redekop is caught up in understanding "the early stages of under- standing the exercise of power, authority, and domination within the Christian tradition as a whole" (p. xi). In his concluding essay, Calvin Redekop reminds readers that to con- sider the problem of controlling power's corrupting influence as solved in the AnabaptŸ faith traditiom is to ignore the example of power and its abuse documented in the book's preceding essays. Jacob Loewen and Wesley Prieb write from an historical perspective about the abuse of power among Mennonites in nineteenth cen- tury Ukraine. Joel Harman writes about the unnecessary infection of a woman and child with HIV/AIDS due to the "power~ of tradi- tion and maintenance of authority. Dorothy Yoder Nyce and Lynda Nyce provide the feminist perspective emphasizing the need for women leaders to grasp power "through full ministry within the free church tradition" and rejection of a gender-based inequality mimicking the secuhr status quo. The senior Redekop acknowledges the limitations of power and authority in the Anabaptist tradi- tion demonstrated in these and his other more generalized examples. However, in the end he restates the opening argument that Anabaptists were historically a primary source of a new paradigm for power and authority in Westem Society. It is the promise still held open by this incomplete transformation the authors and editors in this volume wish to highlight as the legacy of the Anabaptist tradition in a new miUennium. Barbara J. Denison Harrisburg Atea Communit~College Personal Knowhdgeand Beyond: Reshaping ethnography of religion, by JAMES SPIC~gD, J. SaAwN L~aqDRES, and MEREDITH MO3UIRE (editors). New York: New York University Press. 2002, 284 pp. $60.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper). For me, one of the most moving accounts in post-modem anthropological ethnography is Barbara Myerhoffs study of the Orthodox Jewish community in Los Angeles. As she was undergoing chemo- therapy for the breast cancer that was m kill