Combining historical and ethnographic research methods, along with a thorough review of existing literature on the study of Latin American Christianity, New Faces of God in Latin America addresses the important question of how global religion and local culture interact, situating the experience of Latin American Christianity in the broader conversations in the field of world Christianity, particularly with respect to the growing understanding of Christianity as a non-Western religion. Through case studies of different Pentecostal experiences in Latin America, Virginia Garrard explores cross-pollination and interaction with indigenous religions and cultures, finding widely varied responses to the material and spiritual needs of Latin Americans. The author locates Latin American religious experience within a field known as the "history of non-Western Christianity." This focuses on the experience, perceptions, and adaptations of those who adopt Christianity outside the context of Western missionary or other colonizing projects. The book engages with the intersection of culture and spirit-filled religion, with an eye to how those interactions help frame an alternative religious modernity. Throughout the book, the author uses culture as both a heuristic lens and as a variable within the equation. She argues that culture helps us understand how people engage with and reconfigure global religious flows within their own imaginations and for their own parochial uses.

Combining historical and ethnographic research methods, along with a thorough review of existing literature on the study of Latin American Christianity, New Faces of God in Latin America addresses the important question of how global religion and local culture interact, situating the experience of Latin American Christianity in the broader conversations in the field of world Christianity, particularly with respect to the growing understanding of Christianity as a non-Western religion. Through case studies of different Pentecostal experiences in Latin America, Virginia Garrard explores cross-pollination and interaction with indigenous religions and cultures, finding widely varied responses to the material and spiritual needs of Latin Americans. The author locates Latin American religious experience within a field known as the "history of non-Western Christianity." This focuses on the experience, perceptions, and adaptations of those who adopt Christianity outside the context of Western missionary or other colonizing projects. The book engages with the intersection of culture and spirit-filled religion, with an eye to how those interactions help frame an alternative religious modernity. Throughout the book, the author uses culture as both a heuristic lens and as a variable within the equation. She argues that culture helps us understand how people engage with and reconfigure global religious flows within their own imaginations and for their own parochial uses.

Named one of the top religion books of 2002 by USA Today, Philip Jenkins's phenomenally successful The Next Christendom permanently changed the way people think about the future of Christianity. In that volume, Jenkins called the world's attention to the little noticed fact that Christianity's center of gravity was moving inexorably southward, to the point that Africa may soon be home to the world's largest Christian populations. Now, in this brilliant sequel, Jenkins takes a much closer look at Christianity in the global South, revealing what it is like, and what it means for the future.The faith of the South, Jenkins finds, is first and foremost a biblical faith. Indeed, in the global South, many Christians identify powerfully with the world portrayed in the New Testament--an agricultural world very much like their own, marked by famine and plague, poverty and exile, until very recently a society of peasants, farmers, and small craftsmen. In the global South, as in the biblical world, belief in spirits and witchcraft are commonplace, and in many places--such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Sudan--Christians are persecuted just as early Christians were. Thus the Bible speaks to the global South with a vividness and authenticity simply unavailable to most believers in the industrialized North.More important, Jenkins shows that throughout the global South, believers are reading the Bible with fresh eyes, and coming away with new and sometimes startling interpretations. Some of their conclusions are distinctly fundamentalist, but Jenkins finds an intriguing paradox, for they are also finding ideas in the Bible that are socially liberating, especially with respect to women's rights. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, such Christians are social activists in the forefront of a wide range of liberation movements.It's hard to overstate how interesting, how eye-opening, how frequently surprising (and sometimes disturbing) Jenkins' findings are. Anyone interested in the implications of these trends for the major denominations, for Muslim-Christian conflict, and for global politics will find The New Faces of Christianity provocative and incisive--and indispensable.

Latin America, where 90% of the population is Christian and where nearly 40% of the world's Catholics reside, has its own unique brand of Christianity. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity offers a survey of Latin American Christianity from thirty-three leading scholars. The volume systematically introduces and examines dramatic shifts in Catholic and Protestant Christianity over the course of several centuries. Its four sections explore the emergence of colonial Christianity, its institutional and popular evolution, and its dynamic role the region's contemporary developments.

Social forms of religion - the ways in which individuals and groups coordinate religious practice - produce community at the same time as they enable individual religious experiences. A mix of group, organization, market exchange, network, event, and/or other forms characterizes different traditions. Shifts in dominant social forms within a religious tradition are catalysts and expressions of religious transformation alike. The contributions to the volume test this argument by presenting Catholic, Protestant, Charismatic/Pentecostal, Orthodox, and Mormon case studies from Europe and the Americas.

This book offers an historical and comparative profile of classical pentecostal movements in Brazil and the United States in view of their migratory beginnings and transnational expansion. Pentecostalism’s inception in the early twentieth century, particularly in its global South permutations, was defined by its grassroots character. In contrast to the top-down, hierarchical structure typical of Western forms of Christianity, the emergence of Latin American Pentecostalism embodied stability from the bottom up—among the common people. While the rise to prominence of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, the Western hemisphere’s largest (non-Catholic) denomination, demanded structure akin to mainline contexts, classical pentecostals such as the Christian Congregation movement cling to their grassroots identity. Comparing the migratory and missional flow of movements with similar European and US roots, this book considers the prospects for classical Brazilian pentecostals with an eye on the problems of church growth and polity, gender, politics, and ethnic identity.

How and why is Christianity's center of gravity shifting to the developing world? To understand this rapidly growing phenomenon, Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori spent four years traveling the globe conducting extensive on-the-ground research in twenty different countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The result is this vividly detailed book which provides the most comprehensive information available on Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing religion in the world. Rich with scenes from everyday life, the book dispel many stereotypes about this religion as they build a wide-ranging, nuanced portrait of a major new social movement.

Vodou, the folk religion of Haiti, is a by-product of the contact between Roman Catholicism and African and Amerindian traditional religions. In this book, Leslie Desmangles analyzes the mythology and rituals of Vodou, focusing particularly on the inclusion of West African and European elements in Vodouisants' beliefs and practices. Desmangles sees Vodou not simply as a grafting of European religious traditions onto African stock, but as a true creole phenomenon, born out of the oppressive conditions of slavery and the necessary adaptation of slaves to a New World environment. Desmangles uses Haitian history to explain this phenomenon, paying particular attention to the role of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maroon communities in preserving African traditions and the attempts by the Catholic, educated elite to suppress African-based "superstitions." The result is a society in which one religion, Catholicism, is visible and official; the other, Vodou, is unofficial and largely secretive.

Predominantly Catholic for centuries, Latin America is still largely Catholic today, but the religious continuity in the region masks great changes that have taken place in the past five decades. In fact, it would be fair to say that Latin American Christianity has been transformed definitively in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Religious change has not been obvious because its transformation has not been the sudden and massive growth of a new religion, as in Africa and Asia. It has been rather a simultaneous revitalization and fragmentation that threatened, awakened, and ultimately brought to a greater maturity a dormant and parochial Christianity. New challenges from modernity, especially in the form of Protestantism and Marxism, ultimately brought forth new life. In The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity, Todd Hartch examines the changes that have swept across Latin America in the last fifty years, and situates them in the context of the growth of Christianity in the global South.

The contributors to New Face of the Church in Latin America provide firsthand accounts and insider perspectives on such issues as Protestant evangelism and base communities, Catholic renewal efforts, Native American inculturation, and new developments in liberation theology.