Reflections on the Mutual Impact of Violence and Religious Change in Latin America

2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel H. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Religious Transformation ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
The Public ◽  
Opting Out ◽  
Pentecostal Churches

Abstract The mutual impact of violence and religious transformation in the recent experience of Latin America has reshaped the public presence of churches (both Catholic and Protestant) and altered their discourse and appeal. Many churches turned to promotion of human rights, protection of victims, and opposition to authoritarian rule. Others allied with repressive regimes in the name of a kind of Christian nationalism. The violence at issue ranges from the massive violence of repression, torture, and revolutionary struggle to the institutionalized violence of poverty, disease, and injustice, which is often accompanied by the violence of daily life and linked with migration, drugs, gangs, and domestic abuse. Religion itself has changed: the Catholic monopoly has been replaced by pluralism, as Protestant and Pentecostal churches reach new populations and offer potential converts a way of opting out of the violence of daily life through rebirth in a new religious community.

scholarly journals Religious Community Responses to the Public Policy of the Indonesian Government Related to the covid-19 Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 273-283
Author(s):  
Amos Sukamto ◽  
S. Panca Parulian
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Government Regulations ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indonesian Government ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Pentecostal Churches

Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze religious responses to the policy of Indonesian government in dealing with the covid-19 pandemic. Article 4 of Government Regulation (PP) No. 21/2020 mentions restrictions on religious activities. The response of the religious community to this government policy was varied. The Council of Indonesian Ulama, Majelis Ulama Indonesia (mui), issued several fatwas containing a ban on worship involving large numbers of people. A small group of fanatic Muslims initially opposed the policy, but eventually followed it. Among Protestants, the mainstream and Pentecostal churches under the Communion of Churches in Indonesia (pgi) are highly coordinated with government regulations. Some Pentecostal churches attempted to continue holding worship together for reasons of holy communion, but eventually they followed government regulations. The Catholic church followed government regulations consistently.

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America

2020 ◽  
pp. 289-307
Author(s):  
Virginia Garrard ◽  
Justin M. Doran
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Military Government ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Renewal Movement

Pentecostalism, a Christian renewal movement that emphasizes ecstatic bodily worship and charismatic practices, transformed Latin American Christianity over the course of the twentieth century. While they were influenced by the disruptive North American Holiness movements from which their piety originated, converts adapted Pentecostal Christianity to local economic and political realities that generated new, Latin American forms of Pentecostalism. This chapter traces the dynamics of Pentecostal transformation in Latin America across two case studies: Guatemala and Brazil. Both countries underwent enormous shifts in religious demographics and practices that reveal similar trends amid substantial diversity in the Pentecostalization of Latin America. Guatemala’s Pentecostal boom occurred through the country’s tumultuous thirty-year conflict between leftist guerrillas and an intractable military government. Pentecostalization crescendoed while military general Efrain Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal, came to power and oversaw the violent deaths of as many as 200,000 civilians who were predominantly indigenous Maya. Vast numbers of conversions to Pentecostalism followed, revealing its power to re-enchant destroyed and seemingly hopeless worlds. Brazilian Pentecostalism maintained a subdued, conservative critical presence within Brazilian society until neo-Pentecostal evangelists asserted themselves in the public sphere, taking on popular African diasporic religions, Spiritism, and established Catholicism in equal measure. After democracy was re-established, neo-Pentecostal churches—magnified by their immense fortunes garnered from prosperity theologies—reshaped the Brazilian relationship between Christian piety, national culture, and secular government. Today, Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches sustain a transnational culture that connects Christians across Latin America, dynamically reshaping both social relations and Latin American Christianity itself.

The elementary forms of digital culture. Knowledge, connections and sociality

2020 ◽  
pp. 316-328
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Susca
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
Dark Web

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit

Modernization, Globalization, Trends, and Convergence in Health Expenditure in Latin America and the Caribbean

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiri Noy ◽  
Patricia A. McManus
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Health Care Systems ◽  
Health Care Financing ◽  
Health Spending ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Care Systems ◽  
Public Private Mix

Are health care systems converging in developing nations? We use the case of health care financing in Latin America between 1995 and 2009 to assess the predictions of modernization theory, competing strands of globalization theory, and accounts of persistent cross-national differences. As predicted by modernization theory, we find convergence in overall health spending. The public share of health spending increased over this time period, with no convergence in the public-private mix. The findings indicate robust heterogeneity of national health care systems and suggest that globalization fosters human investment health policies rather than neoliberal, “race to the bottom” cutbacks in public health expenditures.

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

scholarly journals Alternative Forms of Spirituality and the Socialization of a Self-Enhancing Subjectivity: Features of the Post-Secular Religious Space in Contemporary Romania

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sorin Gog
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
The Self ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Religious Transformation ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Counselling Services ◽  
Distinctive Type ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Development Literature

AbstractMy paper focuses on the shift in religious values in post-socialist Romania and explores the emergence of alternative spiritual beliefs and practices among the younger generations socialized during the post-communist period. It analyses some of the changes that occurred in the wider traditional religious field and looks at the various spiritualized technologies of the self that produce a distinctive type of religious subjectivity and an immanent ethics of authenticity. By departing from the idea of an integrated religious community and from the relational understanding of religious transformation, the field of alternative spiritualities operates a radical break with traditional religion and emphasizes the possibility of spiritual self-realization and self-discovery. It is this process of the individualizing sacralization of the self that constitutes the object of various workshops, blogs, personal and spiritual development literature, courses, spiritual retreats and counselling services. My research looks at how innovative technologies of the self are developed within these spaces that emphasize creativity, wellbeing and a new understanding of subjective interiority that learns how to find in itself the resources it needs to live in a spiritualized ontology of the present.2

RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND THE TIMING OF BAPTISM IN ENGLAND, 1538–1750

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. KITSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Common Prayer

ABSTRACTThe religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

scholarly journals Opening a Path towards Sustainable Corporate Behaviour: Public Participation in Criminal Environmental Proceedings

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7886
Author(s):  
Pavel Kotlán ◽  
Alena Kozlová ◽  
Zuzana Machová
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
The Public ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations

Establishing criminal liability for environmental offences remains daunting, particularly with regard to the ‘no plaintiff—no judge’ element as a result of which the public seems to be ultimately deprived of the possibility to participate in criminal environmental proceedings. While there is arguably a lack of specific instruments at the European Union (EU) level which would prescribe such legal obligation on the part of the State, there has been a shift in understanding the role of the public and its participation in criminal liability cases, namely under the auspices of the so-called effective investigation and the concept of rights of victims in general. Using the example of the Czech Republic as a point of reference, this article aims to assess the relevant legal developments at both EU and Czech levels to illustrate why the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), essentially acting as public agents, should be granted an active role in environmental criminal proceedings. After examining the applicable legal framework and case law development, the article concludes that effective investigation indeed stands as a valid legal basis for human rights protection which incorporates an entitlement to public participation. Despite that, this pro-active shift is far from being applied in practice, implying that the legislation remains silent where it should be the loudest, and causing unsustainable behaviour of companies.

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