The intimate, personal experience of faith is one scholars in various fields have long struggled to articulate. Belief resists both soaring, grand social theory and intimate-but-universalizing psychological approaches. Phenomenological models have yielded more insight while rightly acknowledging the impossibility of adequately conveying, in analytic terms, the full complexity of religious experience.

Focusing on the phenomenology of prayer and faith healing, Hittin’ the Prayer Bones is an informative look at devotional practices among charismatic Christians in southern Appalachia. The title, a reference to the practice of falling down on one’s knees in prayer, points to the central themes of oral and spiritual communication, tactile experience, and sound. Tracing the history of charismatic worship in the United States and its local expression in a single Pentecostal parish, Anderson Blanton pays special attention to the technologies employed by preachers and the faithful in the daily exercise of religious belief. Combining archival work with two years of ethnography among believers based in a parish in Richlands, Virginia, Blanton gives an overview of the faith healing practices of Pentecostal Christians, with special emphasis on the technology of the radio and broadcast worship services.

In the book’s four chapters, Blanton moves from the history of faith healing, through the creation and circulation of “prayer cloths,” to the unique practices of breath and voice associated with Pentecostal preaching. The chapters are interspersed with transcripts of sermons by Blanton’s informants, painstakingly rendered to preserve the Appalachian accent and unique breathing patterns that characterize these performances. Chapters 1 and 4, which probe the history of Pentecostal faith healing and particularly the ministry and healing practices of Oral Roberts, are especially useful references for the study of vernacular belief in the United States. Chapter 3, which focuses on preaching practices and vocal/breathing techniques, will be of interest to scholars engaged with the ethnography of speaking.

Blanton’s emphasis on the mediation of faith by/through technology is the major contribution of this work, and the singular relationship of American charismatic healing practices to radio technology which he outlines is especially fascinating. “The performance of healing prayer is intimately and crucially linked to a frenetic drive to tactility,” he tells us. “In this way, the contagious potentiality of the Holy Spirit could become communicated through tactile contact with the radio loudspeaker” (22). Here Blanton is referring to what he describes as “radio tactility,” the practice of placing a hand on the radio during a charismatic sermon broadcast in order to receive healing through the power of the Holy Ghost. In exploring both the history of faith healing in the US and the relationship of various spiritual practices to communicative technologies, Blanton not only highlights the creative strategies by which people adapt traditional beliefs to a rapidly changing social world, but also vividly illustrates one way in which technology is not just a mediating factor in the dialectics and performance of belief, but actually a direct conduit for the transmission of (unmediated) spiritual power.

In light of Blanton's focus on the experience of inspired speech and the communication of divine healing power, the work of folklorists in closely related areas—notably David Hufford, as well as Leonard Primiano, Elaine Lawless, and Diane Goldstein—is conspicuous by its absence. In fairness, Blanton's bibliography is not completely devoid of folklorists: Jeff Todd Titon’s work with Appalachian Baptists (1988) appears there, as do works by such scholars as Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston. But given the volume of folkloristic literature in the areas of vernacular religion, supernatural experience, and ethnopoetics, Blanton seems to have missed an important opportunity for cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Though occasionally weighed down by florid prose, Hittin’ the Prayer Bones is a well-researched examination of a unique vernacular religious tradition and has important implications for scholars working in a range of fields including linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of religion, folklore, communication studies, and religious studies. The book offers a valuable look at a spiritual tradition that remains vibrant and (perhaps increasingly) relevant in our now thoroughly technologized world.

Work Cited

Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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[Review length: 687 words • Review posted on January 27, 2016]