Abstract Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2023, this article investigates the ecological commitment of progressive Catholics in Brazil. After retracing the historical environmental record of the Brazilian Church, it focuses on organizational and ideological aspects of Catholic environmentalism today. Subsequently, it deals with the personal profiles of activists and the challenges they face in the context of serious threats directed against environmental defenders. I also consider Liberation Theology’s role in the movement’s development. Finally, I list four assets that allowed the Brazilian Church to assume a leading position in environmental defense, and I conclude by examining its weaknesses. The study aims to contribute to empirical assessment of the role the Catholic Church might play in achieving a just and sustainable global ecological transition, with an eye to the obstacles that limit its action.
In the context of contemporary Western societies, the intersection of religion and politics reveals a polarised sphere. In the particular case of Brazil, Christian actors (Catholic and Protestant) and identitarian ideological movements play a fundamental role in mediating relationships, in both the public and private spheres (from a Jürgen Habermas-inspired perspective), among the State, civil society, and historically marginalized minority groups. From a sociological perspective, this article aims to analyse the close interrelationship between religion, politics, and identitarianism in Brazilian public life. This qualitative study is theoretically grounded in the interpretative sociology of Max Weber, which emphasizes the comprehension of the subjective meanings underlying social action rather than merely observing external behaviour. This approach aligns with interpretive perspectives in cultural and religious studies, which prioritize understanding meaning within its social, cultural, and religious-symbolic contexts. The principal conclusion is that the Brazilian public sphere constitutes a contested arena in which religion and politics are not monolithic but rather fragmented and dynamic, shaped by external global influences (particularly from the United States and Europe) as well as shifting local and national sociopolitical and religious alliances.
One of the most recurring iconographic representations in the kichwa aboriginal cultures of Ecuador and Andean countries is the Chakana, or Andean cross. It is a existing symbol that is still used today in the cultures of various peoples. It represents fundamental Andean ideas such as complementarity, duality, reciprocity, correspondence, and relationality. As part of the activities of the Loja International Festival of Living Arts (FIAVL 2025), an immersive version of the Chakana was created in collaboration with sages of the Kichwa Saraguro people, with the aim of providing visitors with a transformative experience related to their culture. A study was designed to analyze the change in participants’ perceptions and understanding before and after the experience at the inmersive Chakana, highlighting the impact of immersion on their relationship with Andean culture, nature, and spirituality. This study adopted a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design combining pre–post surveys with semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. The findings suggest that the immersive experience strengthened symbolic understanding of the Andean worldview, reinforced affective connections with nature, deepened intercultural appreciation toward Kichwa Saraguro knowledge, and broadened the perception of art as a transformative socio-environmental mediator. The study is situated within a specific contextual scope, particularly in relation to the number of interviewees. It aligns with principles of community action research, emphasizing the active participation of the Saraguro community through collaborative dialogue, co-creation, and collective validation, ensuring that the knowledge generated through interaction with participants enhanced the understanding of the Andean indigenous cultural context.
This article examines whether municipal religious composition is associated with electoral support for two radical-right candidacies in Chile’s 2025 presidential first round: José Antonio Kast and Johannes Kaiser. Using an ecological design, we combine municipal electoral returns with census-based religious composition, socioeconomic indicators, demographic controls, and a measure of confrontational robbery victims. We estimate revised fractional logit models that treat the no-religion share as the omitted compositional reference category and complement the main equations with stacked candidate models, electoral baselines, regional fixed effects, and Conley spatial HAC standard errors. The results show that both the evangelical/protestant and Catholic municipal shares are positively associated with Kast’s vote, while neither religious variable is robustly associated with Kaiser’s. A formal stacked comparison confirms that the religious association is significantly stronger for Kast than for Kaiser, and the intrabloc model shows that more religious municipalities tilt toward Kast within the radical-right bloc itself. These patterns survive controls for prior electoral geography and spatial dependence, although they attenuate once past conservative voting is introduced. The findings support the distinction between a moral-religious authoritarian subtype and a more anti-establishment radical-right subtype, and are consistent with the hypothesis that churches may operate as political mediators in weakly mediated territorial contexts.
This text aims to present an analysis of the presence of Catholicism in Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, through the study of the interactions between Catholicism and politics – evidenced in the analysis of the articulation process for the creation of the Catholic Electoral League in the State of Mato Grosso in 1932.This process was carried out through hierarchical relations and networks of sociability between leaders of the Catholic Church and members of the Catholic intellectual elite. Special attention will be given to the actions of Cardinal Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra, the intellectual Alceu Amoroso Lima, and Archbishop Francisco de Aquino Corrêa. The hypothesis investigated is that the nature of Catholicism’s presence in the Brazilian public sphere during this period unfolded within a rhythm specific to the form of modernity present in Brazil, in which secularization, secularity, and religion coexisted in a tense and contradictory process, with particular emphasis on its repercussions in the state of Mato Grosso.
This paper chronologically reviews non-Catholic church membership growth in Honduras, using a new country church growth protocol that was developed from an earlier church growth model for Guatemala. Analytical, background, and church membership data come from three editions of the World Christian Encyclopedia, seven editions of Operation World, local surveys, and the website cumorah.com. From the 1960s to the 1980s, both Protestants and Latter-day Saints had high compound average annual growth rates from 9
This theoretical paper examines how Spanish-speaking Muslims of Latin American descent occupy a unique position as potential interfaith bridge-builders between Jewish and Muslim communities in contemporary Miami. Drawing on scholarship across Latino Muslim studies, Jewish–Muslim interfaith relations, conversion theory, diaspora studies, and lived religion frameworks, I argue that existing research has treated these fields in isolation, missing the theoretical significance of Latino Muslims’ hybrid positionality in polarized contexts. Latino Muslims navigate what Homi Bhabha terms a “third space” at the intersection of Latino cultural heritage, Muslim religious identity, and American civic belonging—a position that generates distinctive capacity for cross-cultural translation and interfaith mediation. Miami’s exceptional demographic composition—a Hispanic-majority city hosting both one of the world’s largest Jewish populations and ethnically diverse Muslim communities—provides an ideal site for theorizing this bridge-building potential. However, the October 7, 2023 attacks and subsequent regional tensions have intensified American political polarization, constraining the interfaith space within which Latino Muslims might exercise their mediating role. This paper synthesizes fragmented literatures to develop a theoretical framework for understanding Latino Muslims as “bridge communities,” analyzing how sectarian variation (Sunni, Shia, Ahmadi), conversion narratives emphasizing “reversion,” and embodied practices of cultural hybridity shape interfaith engagement. By bringing diaspora theory, performativity, and contact hypothesis into conversation with religious studies frameworks of lived religion and positionality, this analysis reveals both the possibilities and limitations of identity-based bridge-building in an era of deepening polarization. The paper concludes by identifying implications for interfaith praxis and proposing directions for empirical research on Latino Muslim interfaith engagement in South Florida and beyond.
This article examines baptism and marriage in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries) as sacramental celebrations central to the production of a missionary Christian social order. Drawing on missionary chronicles, the Cartas Anuas, and internal normative texts of the Society of Jesus, it argues that these sacraments operated not merely as doctrinal rites but as public ritual events endowed with strong social visibility. Through their collective and solemn administration—often accompanied by music, processions, ornamentation, and communal gatherings—baptism and marriage structured the Christian life cycle, reorganized kinship relations, and reinforced moral normativity within Indigenous communities. By analyzing their ritual staging and regulatory framework, the article demonstrates how sacramental practice functioned as a technology of spiritual governance that integrated evangelization, sociability, and social discipline. In doing so, it proposes broadening the concept of festivity in the reductions to include sacramental practices that, although not formally part of the liturgical calendar, played a decisive role in shaping the ritual and social universe of missionary life.
This article examines the identifications and forms of public participation of Muslim women in Costa Rica, challenging dominant media representations that depict them as passive, oppressed, or absent from public life (Rodríguez, 2024). Drawing on participant observation and qualitative interviews with Muslim women—both converts and women raised within the faith—the study analyzes the tensions between external discourses produced by the media and broader Western narratives, and the women’s own self-perceptions. The findings reveal that, despite facing discrimination, exclusion, and prejudicial narratives that at times result in violations of their human rights, Muslim women in Costa Rica actively engage in processes of religious education, leadership, and community organization. Through activities of da‘wa, participation in public events, and the strategic use of social media, these women occupy and resignify public spaces, exercising forms of political agency (Spivak 1988) rooted in the religious sphere but with broader social and public implications. The article argues that these practices constitute alternative forms of political action that contest Orientalist and Islamophobic representations, enabling a transition from invisibility imposed by external actors toward the emergence of Muslim women as visible subjects of political and social agency within the Costa Rican context.
This article examines how compulsive eating is interpreted through religious frameworks in Brazil and what GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Mounjaro®) reveal about the relationships among body, agency, and meaning. Drawing on phenomenology, material religion, and Brazilian minimal religiosity, the analysis contrasts three widely available religious repertoires: Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, and Neo-Pentecostalism. Each offers a distinct lens for experiences of contested agency. The article argues that the spread of biomedical language around these drugs intensifies a dispute over how to interpret bodily experiences involving intrusive thoughts and loss of control. It proposes three analytical tools: a model of religious translations of compulsive eating; a typology of biomedicine-religion relationships (displacement, integration, adaptation); and the notion of pharmacological asceticism—a heuristic for examining contemporary forms of desire regulation. By placing pharmaceutical interventions within broader shifts in subjectivity, the article contributes to Latin American debates on religion, health, and the body, and outlines a research agenda at the crossroads of pharmacology, spirituality, and embodied experience.
In Rio Grande do Sul, a Brazilian state where Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda are the most expressive forms of Afro-Brazilian religious practices, there has been a noticeable emergence, especially since 2010, of media companies focused on the Afro-religious public, commonly called Produtoras Afro. These companies produce videos, photographs, podcasts, documentaries, live streams, and other services commonly published on social media. This article analyzes the activities of four companies in 2019 and 2023, periods marked by the rearrangements and transformations in the Afro-Gaucho field resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul. The research is based on data on rituals photographed and published on Facebook by the companies Grande Axé, Kizomba, Planeta África, and Afro Mídia, considering the dates of the rituals, location, Afro-religious modality (Batuque, Quimbanda, or Umbanda), type of event, and deities involved. It argues that each of the three religious modalities and their respective entities/deities relates differently to the production/sharing of images and to the media companies, and that these interaction patterns reveal significant differences in visibility and exposure regimes, pointing to recent transformations in the Afro-Gaucho religious field.
In the context of Brazil and Colombia, this article examines a specific form of Islamic conversion among (Afro-)Latin Americans that differs from doctrinal or institutionally driven pathways. Rather than emerging primarily from formal religious study or missionary encounters, these conversions are shaped by cultural influences that orient individuals toward Islam and structure their engagement with the faith in contexts where sustained practice is often difficult. The article focuses on two interrelated influences. First, hip-hop and its Black political ethos provide a cultural and ethical framework through which young Afro-descendants articulate identity, social justice, and belonging. Second, engagement with African memory—mediated through diasporic histories of the transatlantic slave trade and symbolic figures such as Malcolm X—offers a lens for reinterpreting personal and collective histories. Drawing on qualitative research, the article addresses two questions: what cultural, historical, and social factors shape these pathways to Islam, and how do converts navigate the challenges of maintaining religious practice, including partial or complete disengagement? The analysis conceptualizes conversion as a form of cultural and identity work rather than a simple adoption of belief. It approaches conversion as a process of subjectivation and moral reorientation, situating these trajectories within Black Atlantic frameworks of memory and diaspora. Hip-hop emerges as a key cultural mediator, functioning both as a site of political expression and as a gateway through which religious and ethical selves are formed.
In the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, members of the Imam-e-Zaman Mission (IZM) gather each year to mournfully commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam in the Shiʿi Islamic tradition. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE catalyzed a rich constellation of ritual traditions across time and space, extending from the Middle East through Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent. These ritual traditions have also taken root in the Caribbean, where South Asian and Afrodescendant Muslims have adapted them to local landscapes. Based on fieldwork conducted over the past decade, this article explores the historical, cultural and political dimensions of Afro-Trinidadian Muslim devotion to Imam Husayn. I argue that these devotional traditions provide IZM members with discursive and affective space to meaningfully engage with their collective past while also reinforcing their political solidarities and cultural identities.
This article examines the economic sustainability of Zen Buddhist communities in Brazil, focusing on sanghas linked to the Sōtōshu and led by Brazilian monks. Starting from the premise that the performance of funeral rites and the merit economy, characteristic of Japanese Buddhism, do not find sociocultural support in the Brazilian context, two models of financial maintenance are investigated: [1] the independent, market-oriented model, associated with so-called "pop Buddhism," which monetizes goods and services through social networks, and [2] the public–private partnership model, which enables socio-environmental and cultural projects through agreements and sponsorships. The comparative analysis shows that both arrangements responded to the absence of traditional sustainability practices, but present distinct challenges regarding the preservation of religious ethos and institutional management.
This article analyses Torín—a non-lethal form of bullfighting associated with patron-saint festivities in the Department of Paraguarí, Paraguay—as a dynamic instance of Latin American vernacular religion. Moving beyond frameworks that view such events merely as contested heritage or residual folklore, the study situates Torín at the intersection of Guaraní cosmologies, Jesuit mission history, and contemporary lived Catholicism. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork (2011–2024) and archival research, I argue that Torín constitutes a "contact zone" (Pratt, Profession 91:33–40, 1991) in which diverse ontologies meet and are negotiated. The analysis focuses on three dimensions. First, it examines the material theology of pyporé (sacred footprints) attributed to the syncretic figure of Saint Thomas/Pa'i Sumé and shows how these traces anchor an apostolic history in the Paraguayan landscape (Cadogan, 1959; Combès, Anthropos 106:99–114, 2011); González Torres, 2003). Second, it explores the ontological status of the bull not as a passive victim but as a co-celebrant and spiritual agent, whose presence activates a logic of conviviality rather than sacrificial death (Descola Lloyd, 2013; Marvin, 1994); Mitchell, 1991); Viveiros de Castro, J R Anthropol Inst 4:469–488, 1998)). Third, it interprets the ritual arena as a site of "corporal prayer" in which bodily risk functions as a non-lethal sacrificial offering embedded in conditions of rural precarity and popular Catholic economies of vow and exchange (Parker, 1996. By reframing Torín through the lenses of material religion (Meyer, 2010), the ontological turn, and lived religion (Orsi, J Sci Study Relig 42:169–174, 2003), the article shows how rural communities actively appropriate Christian narratives to assert a distinctive, autochthonous relationship with the divine and the nonhuman world. The Paraguayan case invites a rethinking of how animals, landscapes, and saints co-produce religious life and complicates simple oppositions between tradition and modernity, cruelty and devotion. The article also attends to the gendered distribution of participation and clarifies the analytic use of "agency" by distinguishing local attributions from the conceptual vocabulary of animism and nonhuman agency debates.
There are 34 thousand children living in institutions in Brazil, a context that poses a risk to mental health, raising the need to investigate protective factors. Objective: investigate the prevalence of religiosity/spirituality and mental health (depressive and anxiety symptoms, hope, and happiness) in children and adolescents in institutions. Method: A cross-sectional quantitative study that invited all children aged 7 to 17 years in institutional care in Juiz de Fora (MG). A sociodemographic questionnaire, BMMRS (Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiosity/Spirituality), Subjective Happiness Scale, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), and Herth Hope Scale were used. Results: The sample consisted of 43 subjects (28 males), with a mean age of 13 years (± 2 SD). Most of the sample had moderate anxiety and indicative depressive symptoms. In addition, they had below-average happiness scores and high hope. There was a high prevalence of religion and spirituality. The mean scores were: 11 (± 5) for anxiety, with 56
For a long time, the effective management of Argentina’s national territory was largely due to the expansion of Catholicism into previously inhospitable areas. Here, priests played a significant role, as they would travel through their territory instead of confining themselves to their parish office. This article focuses on two concrete and representative examples of these phenomena in Argentina: the priest Brochero, who worked in the province of Córdoba between the 1870s and 1910s, and the priest Vázquez, who worked in Catamarca between the 1930s and 1970s. This paper aims to show that the processes of mytho-practical cultural creativity gave rise in both cases to narratives, both native and institutional, that construct them as civilizing “founding fathers”, their respective regions in contexts where the nation-state was virtually absent. The methodological strategy combines the analysis of data from our ethnographic research with documentary sources obtained from local archives.
This article examines how excessive alcohol consumption among the Pastos people of Gran Cumbal, in southern Colombia, reveals that drinking is not merely a physiological problem but a relational and moral process shaped by ancestral cosmologies, Catholic spirituality, and everyday community life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how the body becomes a site where suffering, guilt, and care are negotiated. Healing, prayer, and relapse intertwine within moral grammars that aim to restore social harmony and balance rather than achieve definitive recovery.
