(Un)Making Christianity

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-119
Author(s):  
Rachel Sarah O'Toole
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Black People ◽  
Modern World ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Church Structures

This chapter argues that although colonial authorities and church officials in the Iberian Americas limited Afro-Latin American participation in Catholic religious practices, men and women of the African Diaspora shaped colonial Latin American Catholicism. The Iberian Crowns, as well as early modern colonial clerics, profited from the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. As a major financial and political institution of the early modern world, the Catholic Church participated in and developed the idea that black people could be sold and purchased because of their racial identity. Furthermore, early modern clerics, as well as the Spanish Crown, engaged in a Foucauldian governmentality of incorporation and control that included Afro-Latin Americans, enslaved and free, as Catholic subjects. Nevertheless, men and women of the African Diaspora in colonial Latin America employed Church structures to organize their communities. Africans and their descendants placed the worship of black saints at the center of colonial municipal celebrations and called on Iberian ecclesiastical courts to defend their families against the definitions of property by slaveholders. As a result, Afro-Latin Americans played a central role in the formation and development of Latin American Catholicism.

scholarly journals LATINO MIGRATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF U.S.A. CATHOLICISM: FRAMING THE QUESTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (128) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Allan Figueroa Deck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Youth Ministry ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Dynamic Vision ◽  
Latino Migration

Este ensaio estuda a relação entre a migração latino-americana em direção ao Norte e as mudanças que estão tendo lugar no catolicismo estadunidense. A parte principal do artigo concentra-se na profunda e histórica experiência religiosa que os latinos trazem à Igreja nos Estados Unidos, herança marcadamente diferente da anglo-americana. Ao pano de fundo colonial, entretanto, devem ser acrescentadas as profundas mudanças que aconteceram no catolicismo latino-americano no período posterior ao Concilio Vaticano II. Os latinos têm sido um canal para comunicar a visão dinâmica de Medellín e Aparecida à Igreja católica estadunidense mais focada na conservação que na missão. A seção final trata das contribuições específicas do catolicismo latino à vida da Igreja estadunidense contemporânea através dos métodos pastorais renovados, da opção pelos pobres e da teologia da libertação, assim como no âmbito da oração, do culto e da espiritualidade, a preocupação pela justiça social, a religiosidade popular e a pastoral juvenil – para mencionar apenas algumas poucas. A eleição do Papa Francisco, o primeiro papa latino-americano, destaca a influência emergente do catolicismo latino-americano na cena mundial e não apenas nos Estados Unidos.ABSTRACT: This essay explores the link between Latin American migration northward and changes taking place in U.S. Catholicism. A major part of the article focuses on the deep and historic religious background that Latinos bring to the Church in the United States, a heritage markedly different from that of Anglo America. To the colonial background, however, must be added the profound changes that have taken place in Latin American Catholicism in the period after the Second Vatican Council. Latinos have been a conduit for communicating the dynamic vision of Medellín and Aparecida to a U.S. Catholic Church focused more on maintenance than mission. A final section looks at specific contributions of Latino Catholicism to the U.S. Church’s contemporary life through renewed pastoral methods, the option for the poor, and Liberation Theology as well as in the area of prayer, worship and spirituality, concern for social justice, popular piety, and youth ministry—to name just a few. The election of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, highlights the emerging influence of Latin American Catholicism on the world stage and not only in the United States.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Quintessential Maroon: Toward an African Diasporic Epistemology

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-141
Author(s):  
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Transnational Community

This essay engages Vanessa K. Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. It traces Valdés’s main contributions and notes that her work invites readers to expand their views of Schomburg’s Afro-Caribbean/Latinx/Latin American identity and his complex personality, as well as his relentless but gentle commitment to advancing black liberation. Following Saidiya Hartman’s strategy of “critical fabulation” to highlight previously silenced Afro-Epistemes, the author dwells on Schomburg’s childhood, life commitment, and legacies. Part of the essay’s purpose is to sketch the transnational community of formerly enslaved and free men and women from whom Schomburg inherited what the author calls his Maroon political consciousness. The essay also emphasizes how Valdés invites African diaspora scholars, activists, educators, artists, and so on to reflect on and trouble preconceived ideas about Maroon subjectivity, marronage, and Africa. It concludes by imagining ways Schomburg would engage our present.

Continuities in Colombia

1985 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel H. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Constant Change ◽  
Innovation And Change ◽  
The Catholic Church

Lately we have become accustomed to look for change in Latin American Catholicism. Indeed, expectations of innovation and change have largely replaced the norms of continuity which once governed both scholarly and popular outlooks on the Catholic Church in the region. Constant change is now commonly anticipated in the ideas and structures of the churches, in their relation to social movements, and in the form and content of the churches' projections into society and politics as a whole.

Conclusion and Epilogue

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Strasser
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Site

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of this book’s exploration of the transgenerational and transregional Jesuit chain of influence in the early modern world. It stresses the simultaneously mimetic and individualistic manifestations of missionary masculinity and the role of media in reproducing it. While Jesuit masculinity left traces on societies around the world, the men and women whom the missionaries believed to have converted in turn also reformed European Catholicism. An epilogue takes the story to today’s US-controlled Guam where Chamorro Catholicism provides a site for anti-imperial critique and identity-formation, reflecting a process that began with the events narrated in this book. Notably, twenty-first-century Chamorro death customs still show vestiges of early modern matrilineal traditions and indigenous women’s agency.

Transition to a New Era

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
New Era ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
A Minor

We have already noted among the crosscurrents of the postwar decade assimilative tendencies that ran counter to a key impulse of the Catholic Revival— the drive to build a distinctive Catholic culture and thereby “to redeem all things in Christ.” Here we look more systematically at the most significant of those countervailing tendencies from the late 1940s, when they were still a minor theme, to the early 1960s when they merged with the forces unleashed by the Second Vatican Council. We begin with a development in American Catholic historical scholarship—research devoted to the Americanist controversy of the 1890s. The results of this research began to appear during the war; over the next fifteen years, books and articles on the subject assumed the proportions of a small flood. Taken as a whole, the new scholarship reinforced midcentury Catholic liberalism and helped prepare the way for the deeper changes of the 1960s. At bottom, the late nineteenth-century controversy arose from policy differences over how the Catholic church should respond to social and intellectual changes accompanying the onset of what we have been calling modernity. As pointed out in the Introduction, the Catholic University of America was a storm center of conflict; moreover, papal condemnations of Americanism in 1899 and of Modernism in 1907 played a crucial role in establishing the ideological framework within which Catholic higher education developed in the twentieth century. That framework involved a firm rejection of modernity, but the historical recovery of the Americanist episode indirectly nurtured a more positive attitude toward the modern world. The fact that Catholic historians of the generation immediately following the controversy studiously avoided investigating it shows how sensitive the issues remained for almost half a century. Theodore Maynard, who devoted a chapter to “The American Heresy” in his popular Story of American Catholicism (1941), observed that few Catholics had ever heard of such a thing and those who tried to learn more about it would soon find themselves at a dead end.

Missions and Renewal in Latin-American Catholicism

1987 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Escobar
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Initial Exploration ◽  
Christian Message

Not enough attention has been paid to the impact of Catholic North American and European missionary work on the contemporary state of Christianity in Latin America. Another important aspect of recent missionary history is the effect of the Protestant missionary presence in Latin America on the Catholic Church there. This article makes an initial exploration into these processes, examining especially how Latin-American Catholicism is experiencing a change in three areas: a self-critical redefinition of the meaning of being a Christian, a fresh understanding of the Christian message in which the Bible plays a vital role, and a change of pastoral methodologies more relevant to the situation of the continent.

Liberation Theology and Christian Radicalism in Contemporary Latin America

1979 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dodson
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
National Politics ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
American Catholic

For the past decade and a half, Latin American Catholicism has been a focal point of extraordinary religious change and political activism. Although the first visible signs of religious renewal in the traditionally conservative Latin American church did not appear until the early 1960s, a mere decade later, in 1972, Christians for Socialism had held an international meeting of radical Christians in Santiago, Chile. Today, Latin American bishops and Christian base communities throughout the continent are deeply involved in the struggle to preserve human rights against the encroachments of authoritarian regimes. One of the most controversial aspects of the changing Latin American church has been the emergence of organized movements of Christian radicals who sought to use religion as a base from which to transform society through political action. Sizeable priest movements of the left appeared in such countries as Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, where they had a notable impact on national politics. Acting from the premise that Christian faith must be linked to social action to be meaningful, radicalized Christians joined a dialogue with Marxism, denounced social injustices, provided leadership to politically marginal groups and struggled to change the very nature of the Latin American Catholic Church. The rationale and justification of such action was provided in the collection of writings known as the theology of liberation.

Introduction: Missionary Encounters in the Atlantic World

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Gerbner ◽  
Karin Vélez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the African diaspora, and the history of capitalism. While missionary sources are used widely, most scholarship on the encounters themselves focuses on either a particular denomination or a particular region. Rarely is the surprisingly cohesive barrier between Protestant and Catholic missions breached within single volumes or monographs. This special issue seeks to break down these divides. By making inter-denominational and inter-imperial connections, this volume asks new questions about the meaning of missionary encounters in the early modern world.

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