The essays included in this volume provide both an assessment of key areas and current trends in sociology, specifically with regard to contemporary sociology in Latin America, as well as a collection of innovative empirical studies. The volume serves as an effective bridge of communication allowing sociological academies to mobilize and disseminate research dynamics from Latin America to the rest of the world.
The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America covers religious history in Latin America from pre-Conquest times until the present. This publication is important; first, because of the historical and contemporary centrality of religion in the life of Latin America; second, for the rapid process of religious change which the region is undergoing; and third, for the region's religious distinctiveness in global comparative terms, which contributes to its importance for debates over religion, globalization, and modernity. Reflecting recent currents of scholarship, this volume addresses the breadth of Latin American religion, including religions of the African diaspora, indigenous spiritual expressions, non-Christian traditions, new religious movements, alternative spiritualities, and secularizing tendencies.
This book presents revealing reflections on historical, socio-political, and legal aspects, as well as their contexts, in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Further, it includes theoretical and empirical analyses that identify the connections between religion and politics that characterize Latin American countries in general. The individual chapters are based on a dialogue between regional and international approaches, renewing them and taking them to their limits by incorporating the Latin American experience. The book reflects the current intensification of research on religion in Latin America, the resulting reassessment of previous approaches, and the strengthening of empirical studies. It provides vital insight into the ways in which politics regulates the religious sphere, as well as how religion modulates and intervenes in politics in Latin America. In doing so it builds a bridge between the findings of researchers in the region on the one hand and the English-speaking academic public on the other, contributing to a dialogue that enriches comparative perspectives.
This volume explores several notable themes related to social, political, and religious movements in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional, and global issues from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. This volume’s collected chapters focus on the Latin American society and are divided into three sections. The first section, Social, presents some cultural, demographic, and urban changes that have occurred with increasing frequency in Latin America from the early twentieth century onward. The second section, Political, shows migratory, political, and identity movements that in recent decades have re-emerged with force. Finally, the third section, Religious, analyzes various Latin American religious visions with their particular characteristics. From the religious hegemony of Catholicism, a change in the religious panorama in the last decades can be seen intermingled with politics, history, and society.
Latin America plays an increasingly important role in the development of modern Christianity yet it has been underrepresented in current scholarship on religion and science. In this first book on the subject, contributors explore the different ways that religion and science relate to each other.
This intriguing three-volume set explores the ways in which religion is bound to the practice of daily life and how daily life is bound to religion. In Religion and Everyday Life and Culture, 36 international scholars describe the impact of religious practices around the world, using rich examples drawn from personal observation. Instead of repeating generalizations about what religion should mean, these volumes examine how religions actually influence our public and private lives "on the ground," on a day-to-day basis. Volume one introduces regional histories of the world's religions and discusses major ritual practices, such as the Catholic Mass and the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Volume two examines themes that will help readers understand how religions interact with the practices of public life, describing the ways religions influence government, education, criminal justice, economy, technology, and the environment. Volume three takes up themes that are central to how religions are realized in the practices of individuals. In these essays, readers meet a shaman healer in South Africa, laugh with Buddhist monks, sing with Bob Dylan, cheer for Australian rugby, and explore Chicana and Iranian art.
This book is at the crossroads where a New Age sensibility, advancing like an ecumen of worldwide spirituality without national, cultural, or ecclesiastical frontiers, meets Latin America's syncretic religions, practiced by groups of people wiht African or indigenous roots or developed from the tradition of popular Catholicism. The Syncretic character of the two sensibilities makes both the New Age and popular religion behave like two, syncretizing and syncreticizable matrices of meaning. This book opens up a rich vein of debate with new dilemmas and discussions, that will provide a framework for a new field of study in anthropology. What new ways of signifying living and experiencing religion is the New Age generating in Latin America? What are its limits? Contributors are: Alejandra Aguilar Ros, Santiago Bastos, Lizette Campechano, Sylvie Pédron Colombani, Alejandro Frigerio, Jacques Galinier, Silas Guerriero, Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga,Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet, José Guilherme C.Magnani, Antoinette Molinié, María Teresa Rodríguez, Deis Siqueira, Carlos Alberto Steil, Engel Tally, Renée de la Torre, and Marcelo Zamora.
Latin America is undergoing a period of intense religious transformation and upheaval. This book analyzes some of the more important new discoveries about religious movements in the region. It examines important shifts such as the expansion and politicization of Protestantism, the ongoing transformation of the Catholic church, the growth of Afro-Brazilian religions, and the genuine pluralization of faith.
This series offers a comparative perspective on a critical issue - the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. This volume considers the case of Latin America, where evengelical Protestantism is increasingly challenging the historical Catholic hegemony.
Based on extensive empirical research, and utilizing predominately Latin American scholarly literature, this book examines connections between Argentine popular and pentecostal worldviews. It proposes that there is a major connection between the two rooted in cosmological assumptions of spiritual power.
