Author: Peter S. Cahn
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292783485
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Since the 1960s, evangelical Christian denominations have made converts throughout much of Roman Catholic Latin America, causing clashes of faith that sometimes escalate to violence. Yet in one Mexican town, Tzintzuntzan, the appearance of new churches has provoked only harmony. Catholics and evangelicals alike profess that "all religions are good," a sentiment not far removed from "here we are all equal," which was commonly spoken in the community before evangelicals arrived. In this paradigm-challenging study, Peter Cahn investigates why the coming of evangelical churches to Tzintzuntzan has produced neither the interfaith clashes nor the economic prosperity that evangelical conversion has brought to other communities in Mexico and Latin America. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, he demonstrates that the evangelicals' energetic brand of faith has not erupted into violence because converts continue to participate in communal life, while Catholics, in turn, participate in evangelical practices. He also underscores how Tzintzuntzan's integration into global economic networks strongly motivates the preservation of community identity and encourages this mutual borrowing. At the same time, however, Cahn concludes that the suppression of religious difference undermines the revolutionary potential of religion.
Author: Dinorah B. Méndez
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9789052014333
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
Hymns as a potential tool of theological contextualisation have never been fully explored. This study looks at this function of hymnody in relation to Mexican culture. A sample of hymnody used by evangelicals of different traditions was selected to examine its theology and to compare which kind of hymns or songs were more reliable and appropriate to communicate the evangelical faith in the Mexican context.
Author: Jonathan E. Calvillo
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190097795
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This book takes readers into the Mexican-majority neighborhoods of Santa Ana, California, a city once dubbed the hardest place to live in the U.S. Jonathan E. Calvillo explores the challenges faced by Mexican immigrants in this working-class city, highlighting how faith practices are central to social interactions and community building. How does faith shape residents' sense of ethnic identity? Drawing on five years of participant observation and in-depthinterviews, The Saints of Santa Ana offers a rich portrait of a fascinating American community.
Author: Mary I. O'Connor
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607324245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Mixtec Evangelicals is a comparative ethnography of four Mixtec communities in Oaxaca, detailing the process by which economic migration and religious conversion combine to change the social and cultural makeup of predominantly folk-Catholic communities. The book describes the effects on the home communities of the Mixtecs who travel to northern Mexico and the United States in search of wage labor and return having converted from their rural Catholic roots to Evangelical Protestant religions. O’Connor identifies globalization as the root cause of this process. She demonstrates the ways that neoliberal policies have forced Mixtecs to migrate and how migration provides the contexts for conversion. Converts challenge the set of customs governing their Mixtec villages by refusing to participate in the Catholic ceremonies and social gatherings that are at the center of traditional village life. The home communities have responded in a number of ways—ranging from expulsion of converts to partial acceptance and adjustments within the village—depending on the circumstances of conversion and number of converts returning. Presenting data and case studies resulting from O’Connor’s ethnographic field research in Oaxaca and various migrant settlements in Mexico and the United States, Mixtec Evangelicals explores this phenomenon of globalization and observes how ancient communities are changed by their own emissaries to the outside world. Students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, and religion will find much in this book to inform their understanding of globalization, modernity, indigeneity, and religious change.
Author: Brett Hendrickson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000441520
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Mexican American Religions is a concise introduction to the religious life of Mexican American people in the United States. This accessible volume uses historical narrative to explore the complex religious experiences and practices that have shaped Mexican American life in North America. It addresses the religious impact of U.S. imperial expansion into formerly Mexican territory and examines how religion intertwines with Mexican and Mexican American migration into and within the United States. This book also delves into the particularities and challenges faced by Mexican American Catholics in the United States, the development and spread of Mexican American Protestantism and Pentecostalism, and a growing religious diversity. Topics covered include: Mesoamerican religions Iberian religion and colonial evangelization of New Spain The Colonial era Religion in the Mexican period The U.S.-Mexican War and the racialization of Mexican American religion Mexican migration and the Catholic Church Mexican American Protestants Mexican American Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity Mexican American Catholics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Curanderismo Religion and Mexican American civil rights Pilgrimage and borderland connections Mexican American Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, and Secularism Mexican American Religions provides an overview of this incredibly diverse community and its ongoing cultural contribution. Ideal for students and scholars approaching the topic for the first time, the book includes sections in each chapter that focus on Mexican American religion in practice.
Author: Hugo G. Nutini
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292744129
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Evangelical Christianity is Mexico's fastest-growing religious movement, with about ten million adherents today. Most belong to Protestant denominations introduced from the United States (e.g., Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists), but perhaps as many as 800,000 are members of homegrown, "native" evangelical sects. These native Mexican sects share much with the American denominations of which they are spinoffs. For instance, they are Trinitarian, Anabaptist, and Millenarian; they emphasize a personal relationship with God, totally rejecting intermediation by saints; and they insist that they are the only true Christians. Beyond that, each native sect has its distinctive characteristics. This book focuses on two sharply contrastive native evangelical sects in Central Mexico: Amistad y Vida (Friendship and Life) and La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World). The former, founded in 1982, now has perhaps 120,000 adherents nationwide. It is nonhierarchical, extremely egalitarian, and has no dogmatic directives. It is a cheerful religion that emphasizes charity, community service, and personal kindness as the path to salvation. It attracts new members, mainly from the urban middle class, through personal example rather than proselytizing. La Luz del Mundo, founded in 1926, now has about 350,000 members in Mexico and perhaps one million in the hemisphere. It is hierarchically organized and demands total devotion to the sect's founder and his son, who are seen as direct links to Jesus on Earth. It is a proselytizing sect that recruits mainly among the urban poor by providing economic benefits within the congregations, but does no community service as such. Based on ten years of fieldwork (1996–2006) and contextualized by nearly fifty years of anthropological study in the region, Native Evangelism in Central Mexico presents the first ethnography of Mexico's native evangelical congregations.
Author: Arthur Bonner
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 9781581128642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
The power of the Bible to transform lives and societies has seldom been demonstrated more vividly than in Chiapas in southern Mexico. Beginning in the early 1940s, young men and women of the Summer Institute of Linguistics devised written scripts and then translated the Bible into the languages of the most neglected and most oppressed of indigenous peoples: the Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Chols and Tojolabals. A major part of this book is the narrations of indigenous people who experienced the Bible's power to heal bodies and create loving families. They became apostles, seeding new congregations. They refused to accept what they saw as idols made by human hands and rejected the cults of village saints. For this, they were, like the first Christians, persecuted and driven from their lands and homes, yet they never lost faith. They staked their lives on the Bible's promises. One pastor vowed, "We shall not be stopped." As evidence of such faith and determination, evangelical churches are growing stronger and more numerous. Simultaneously, the Catholic Church in Chiapas taught the "option for the poor" of the Theology of Liberation. Marxist revolutionaries from northern Mexico took advantage of this structure, leading to the Zapatista revolt of subcommander Marcos. When the revolt failed, what had been hailed as a "Revolt of the Indians" deteriorated into a deadly political struggle of "Indians against Indians," with defenseless villagers caught in the middle.
Author: Kurt Derek Bowen
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773513792
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
In Evangelism and Apostasy, the first sociological survey of Evangelicals in present-day Mexico, Kurt Bowen evaluates the appeal, character, and future growth of the Evangelical community.
Author: Jonathan E. Calvillo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190097817
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Catholicism has long been the dominant religion among ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. Recent shifts, however, have challenged the traditional association between Mexican ethnicity and Catholicism. Evangelical Protestantism has emerged as a notable alternative of ethnic identity expression for ethnic Mexicans. This book takes readers into the thriving Mexican-majority neighborhoods of Santa Ana, California, a city once dubbed the hardest place to live in the U.S. There, Jonathan E. Calvillo explores how religious practices permeate the fabric of everyday social interactions for Mexican immigrants. How does faith shape these immigrants' sense of ethnic identity? To answer this question, The Saints of Santa Ana compares the experiences of Catholic and Evangelical Mexican immigrants-the two largest religious groupings in the city. Drawing on five years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, this book argues that religious affiliations set Catholics and Evangelicals along diverging trajectories with regard to ethnic identity. In particular, Calvillo argues, Catholics and Evangelicals have differing perspectives on collective memory and ethnic community. The Saints of Santa Ana offers a rich portrait of a fascinating American community.
Author: Daniel Vaca
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674243978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century. Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.
