City of God Kevin Lewis O’Neill
11/2009, Letnik:
7
eBook
In Guatemala City today, Christianity isn't just a belief system--it is a counterinsurgency. Amidst postwar efforts at democratization, multinational mega-churches have conquered street corners and ...kitchen tables, guiding the faithful to build a sanctified city brick by brick. Drawing on rich interviews and extensive fieldwork, Kevin Lewis O'Neill tracks the culture and politics of one such church, looking at how neo-Pentecostal Christian practices have become acts of citizenship in a new, politically relevant era for Protestantism. Focusing on everyday practices--praying for Guatemala, speaking in tongues for the soul of the nation, organizing prayer campaigns to combat unprecedented levels of crime--O'Neill finds that Christian citizenship has re-politicized the faithful as they struggle to understand what it means to be a believer in a desperately violent Central American city. Innovative, imaginative, conceptually rich,City of Godreaches across disciplinary borders as it illuminates the highly charged, evolving relationship between religion, democracy, and the state in Latin America.
For over five centuries, the History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China , written by Spanish missionary Juan González de Mendoza and published in 1585 in Rome, has captured the interest of the ...international academic community. However, scholarship has primarily focused on Mendoza’s depiction of China as rich and powerful, potentially overlooking the evangelical purpose of his narrative and failing to explain the correlation between the positive Chinese image and the author’s evangelical intention. This study aims to clarify the image of China presented by the Spanish author through a detailed textual analysis, concluding that Mendoza portrayed China as a rich and great nation that also had misguided beliefs and was open to evangelization. The Spanish author’s identity as an Augustinian preacher and ambassador of King Philip II of Spain to the Ming dynasty of China, as well as the global and evangelistic social context in which he lived, significantly influenced his perceptions of China. Furthermore, his hybrid profile of China was accepted in Europe at the time and became a collective memory because it embodied the spiritual context shared by the European community in the 16th century. This spiritual purpose was achieved through the idealized imagination, which serves as an affective medium in the formation of collective memory.
After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had ...evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems.
Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival.Communities of the Convertedengages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.
Entre 1526 y 1565, el conjunto conventual de Tzintzuntzan fue la sede religiosa más importante de la orden franciscana en la Custodia de San Pedro y San Pablo de Michoacán y Jalisco, ya que desde ahí ...se organizaba la evangelización y el adoctrinamiento de los indios en todo el occidente de la Nueva España. (1) En este periodo el convento fue habitado por destacados religiosos, como fray Martín de la Coruña, fray Maturino Gilberti, fray Jacobo Daciano, fray Juan Focher, fray Pedro de Pila y fray Diego Muñoz. Luego de ceder el mando de la provincia al convento de Valladolid, y que las autoridades virreinales y de la orden se ocuparon más de las fundaciones al norte del río Lerma, el conjunto conventual perdió jerarquía y entró en un periodo de crisis económica. Sin embargo, hasta antes de la secularización de la doctrina, en 1766, seguía siendo el corazón de Tzintzuntzan, donde se llevaban a cabo numerosas prácticas sociales y culturales. Así mismo, los religiosos tuvieron un rol fundamental en la vida de los pueblos a su cargo, ya que participaban prácticamente en todas las decisiones de trascendencia.
Founded in the 1860s and 1870s as a set of missions, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan may be considered the most politically active Christian Church in Taiwan today. The church's political profile ...became public since the 1970s, and it aimed to defend human rights and the right to self-determination of the island and its inhabitants. This article problematizes the historical narratives that trace the church's defense of self-determination back to the nineteenth-century Presbyterian missions' purported autonomy. Firstly, the missions' autonomy is described as one of the main strategies of a network of missionary Protestant churches that sought to materialize the global expansion of Christianity. Secondly, the missions' independence is qualified as one that required external supervision and relied on utilitarian operating mechanisms. Thirdly, it is argued that evangelization by the Presbyterian missionaries and the missions' eventual autonomy required the creation and operation of problematic yet functional "Others". The manuscrIPT highlights the need for critical studies that approach the missions as sites traversed by extra-institutional and inter-subjective governmental dynamics.
This essay deals with the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in today's Micronesia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. In order to understand the Jesuits' evangelization project of ...gathering souls in the Oceanic archipelagos, it is important to place them into the broader context of Philippine politics.
