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.
