Like in the book, a nice piece of historical work and sociological analysis on the Vineyard movement. Some quotes from the piece:
Yet her questions about native American religion of the modern period are, in fact, similar to what anthropologists have been asking about non-Western cultures since the beginning of the discipline. How can normally functioning people think that God or the spirits communicate with them personally? Is it possible to analyze the cultural and social factors that give such beliefs taken-for-granted plausibility? And why do such believers continue in those beliefs when other powerful forces in their environments discount their reality?
The triumph of When God Talks Back is its virtuosic display of sophisticated social scientific expertise combined with an unusual degree of interpretive modesty that allows both skeptics and believers to read the book as reinforcing their own views. Luhrmann’s own interpretation begins by pointing out that the plausibility structures of the new evangelicalism do not depend primarily on intellectual demonstration, sacramental efficiency, or intuitive morality—though intellectual, sacramental, and moral elements remain important to some degree. Rather, they rest on the firm conviction that individual believers can actually experience a personal relationship with God. The Vineyard and similar churches offer a warm environment of fellowship in which those who have experienced God in this tangible way are the primary teachers and role models. They also provide skillful, intense training for those who desire to share in those experiences.
As a psychologist, Luhrmann scorns what she calls the “wastebasket diagnoses” of uncurious therapists who treat reports of individuals hearing God’s voice or feeling his touch as “psychosis, no other symptoms.” Her own account features the notion of “absorption,” which she tested empirically in the Spiritual Disciplines Project and surrounds with a rich theoretical discussion. “Absorption,” in her description, “is the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation, and to most imaginative experiences in which the individual becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations.” It is the power, present in all people to some degree but much more developed in others, “that allows what we choose to attend to [to] become more salient than the everyday context in which we are embedded.” Again, in her words, “the capacity to treat what the mind imagines as more real than the world one knows is the capacity at the heart of experience of God.”
Leadingchurch.com 