A Latin American critical sociology perspective on religion -- Historical context -- Respondents' religious and social landscape -- Latin Americans' god -- Latin Americans' ways of praying -- Religion in Latin America's public sphere.

In Giving Life to the Faith, Joseph Florez offers an account of Pentecostal activism and the search for a new interpretation of Christian social responsibility during the extraordinary circumstances of everyday life during the Chilean dictatorship.

This volume explores the ways in which lived religion encourages and contributes to conflicts, as well as fosters tolerance, in the interlocking rural, urban, and virtual social spheres. Through ten case studies with vast geographical and religious variation, the contributors address some of the shortcomings in analyses of the relationship between religion and (in)tolerance and offers a theoretically and empirically more nuanced understanding of the micro-politics of (in)tolerance and the roles of lived religion in it. The book argues that (in)tolerance and its connection to religion cannot be fully understood unless analyzed from below, which means that the focus needs to be not only on public institutions or religio-political spaces but also on (in)tolerance of ordinary people and their performativity, practices, and interests in non-institutionalized spaces. This showcases the ambiguous interconnectedness of lived religion and (in)tolerance. Lived Religion and the Politics of (In)Tolerance will be of interest to students and scholars interested in lived religion, the relationship between politics and religion, and those working in cross-cultural dialogue and through an anti-racism, and anti-violence lens.

This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.

How can we grasp the complex religious lives of individuals such as Peter, an ordained Protestant minister who has little attachment to any church but centers his highly committed religious practice on peace-and-justice activism? Or Hannah, a devout Jew whose rich spiritual life revolves around her women's spirituality group and the daily practice of meditative dance? Or Laura, who identifies as Catholic but rarely attends Mass, and engages daily in Buddhist-style meditation at her home altar arranged with symbols of Mexican American popular religion? Diverse religious practices such as these have long baffled scholars, whose research often starts with the assumption that individuals commit, or refuse to commit, to an entire institutionally framed package of beliefs and practices. Meredith McGuire points the way forward toward a new way of understanding religion. She argues that scholars must study religion not as it is defined by religious organizations, but as it is actually lived in people's everyday lives. Drawing on her own extensive fieldwork, as well as recent work by others, McGuire explores the many, seemingly mundane, ways that individuals practice their religions and develop their spiritual lives. By examining the many eclectic and creative practices -- of body, mind, emotion, and spirit -- that have been invisible to researchers, she offers a fuller and more nuanced understanding of contemporary religion.

The central theme of this book is the nexus between the self, the social, and the sacred in conversion and recovery. The contributions explore the complex interactions that occur between the person, the sacred, and various recovery situations, which can include prisons, substance abuse recovery settings and domestic violence shelters. With an interdisciplinary approach to the study of conversion, the collection provides an opportunity for a better understanding of lived religion, guilt, shame, hope, forgiveness, narrative identity reconstruction, religious coping, religious conversion and spiritual transformation. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of lived religion, religious conversion, recovery, homelessness, and substance dependence.

"This book introduces a practice based and contextually sensitive approach to studying lived religion, employing cases from diverse disciplines, locations, and traditions and providing accessible guides to students and novice researchers eager to begin their own exploration of religious and spiritual practices"--

"This book is about religion and modernity, how religion interacts with modern culture, and how modernity influences religion. By "modernity" I signify not only the technological developments, but also the dynamics of capitalism, the differentiation of social functions and specialization of spheres of knowledge, and the expansion of human rights. In regard to religion, I mean the cultural practices people use to connect with a supra-human power that they experience influencing their lives. The thesis presented is that in Latin America there is an interaction between modernity and religion, but the result has not been religion diminishment (secularization), but its transformation. Exploring religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, we discovered that there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. The difficulty in assessing religiosity as it exists in Latin America is due in part to the continuing use of categories that were not designed for religious cultures outside the North Atlantic world. Those categories point us toward a different kind of dynamics, which in fact obscure Latin American religious dynamics. If we look at religion from Latin America and from the people who practice it, we will find a different definition and different conceptual tools for understanding the religious experience of Latin American people, and perhaps it helps us to look at religion in a different way"--

This book discusses the ways in which early modern hagiographic sources can be used to study lived religion and everyday life from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. For several decades, saints’ lives, other spiritual biographies, miracle narratives, canonisation processes, iconography, and dramas, have been widely utilised in studies on medieval religious practices and social history. This fruitful material has however been overlooked in studies of the early modern period, despite the fact that it witnessed an unprecedented growth in the volume of hagiographic material. The contributors to this volume address this, and illuminate how early modern hagiographic material can be used for the study of topics such as religious life, the social history of medicine, survival strategies, domestic violence, and the religious experience of slaves.

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.