the salvation of a drunk

This article examines a spectacular cultural event—the religious conversion of a drunken man at a Pentecostal worship service in Bermuda. The statements and actions of the congregation reveal both an empirical awareness of the man's profuse vomiting and a religious understanding of his symptoms as the manifestation of a dramatic struggle between Jesus and Satan. The playful aspects of Pentecostal ritual throw light on how these two orders of meaning are phenomenologically related and provide the basis of a hermeneutic analysis that allows generalization and comparison.