The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media

This article explores the vertical aspects of the Jesuit confraternity system in the thirty community towns under Span-ish rule (1609−1767) designated as " Missions " or " Reductions " in the Río de la Plata region of South America. The principal documents analyzed are the cartas anuas, the annual reports of the Jesuits. The chronological analysis is carried out with a view to tracing the process of integrating the Guaraní Indians into the Spanish colonial regime by means of the religious congregation founded in each Mission town. As a supplementary issue, we deal with the significance of the Spanish word policía (civility) used as a criterion to ascertain the level of culture attained by the Amer-indians. Normally the Jesuits considered members of indigenous confraternities to be endowed with policía, so they used confrater-nities to transplant Christian civility among the Guaraní Indians in the Spanish overseas colony.

American Political Science Review, 2000

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 1995

Gruziuski, Serge (1993), The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries, trans. E. Corrigan, Polity Press (Cambridge). viii + 336 pp. f 14.99 pbk. Mills, Kenneth (1994), An Evil Lost to View? An Investigation of Postevangelisation Andean Religion in Mid-colonial Peru, Monograph Series, No. 18, Institute of Latin American Studies (Liverpool). 147 pp. f 12.00.

F or more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life. While scholars such as Robert Ricard in the 1930s once posited a one-way " spiritual conquest " that cast native peoples as passive receptacles for Catholicism and European culture, such a view is no longer tenable, for several reasons. 1 First, since then scholars have demonstrated how the durability of indigenous cultural systems influenced the acceptance, rejection, or modification of Catholic teachings to form new kinds of syncretic and hybrid belief structures. Second, scholars have come to recognize the ways in which the " local " and idiosyncratic flavor of Spanish Catholicism also contributed to this hybridity, as did the missionaries' adaptation of their teachings through the use of indigenous languages and local forms of ritual expression. 2 Finally, recent scholarship has also begun to explore the contested nature of power within the missions and the larger spiritual economy that connected the missions, the missionaries, and native societies to the broader political and cultural terrain.

The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History

For more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life.

Journal of Jesuit Studies

The history of religion in Latin America is a complex one, tied to the themes of cultural contact, conquest, outside political and economic domination, and cultural assimilation and social change that have defined the history of the region. Religion played a defining role in the Spanish view of the subjugation of the American natives. The Spanish rationale for conquest was conversion of the Indians to Catholicism. Missionaries became agents of pacification as well as transmitters of religious truth, and saw themselves as the Indians' defenders against exploitive conquistadors. The church was an international institution under control of the Spanish state through royal patronage, but by the end of the colonial period it had secured its position as a powerful political, economic, and religious institution, playing a dominant role in education. In the post-independence era, the Catholic Church came under attack by liberals who sought to diminish its influence in government and education by promoting separation of church and state. The tensions of church-state relations became more profound, continuing into the twentieth century when liberation theology edged into political activism on the part of some members of religious orders, particularly Jesuits and members of the Maryknoll order. Religion in Latin America had never been monolithic or unitary. Varieties of popular or folk Catholicism and syncretic practice provided a multiplicity of religious experience that challenged orthodoxy. In the twentieth century, religious diversity in Latin America increased as Protestant churches, particularly evangelical ones, began successful proselytization. Increasing secularism also challenged the position of the church and Catholic belief. The editors of the Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America have produced an encyclopedic volume that undertakes the telling of this long and complex history. Its forty-nine chapters are written by specialists in the fields of religious studies and history, and provide an overview of various topics. Each is followed by a useful short bibliography and suggested readings. The chapters cover topics that range from pre-contact religion in Europe and in the New World to non-Catholic religions in modern-day Latin America. There are chapters that cover topics in the study of religion, such as "Messianic and Revitalization Movements," "Marianism in Latin America," or "The Baroque Church," interspersed with chapters that focus on historical events, such as "The Church and Latin American Independence" or "Catholicism and Political

Hispanic American Historical Review , 2020

larger claims that dissent, political rivalry, moral compromise, and self-seeking were the prevailing themes of the early history of the church in Michoacán. A short review can't do justice to the rich portraits of the sadists, weirdos, losers, and cranks that Nesvig has unearthed in the archives and resurrected in chapters 3 through 6. What is most notable about these chapters is that Nesvig keeps examining these people long after most others would have passed a harsh judgment on them, bringing their complexities and unexpectedly sympathetic traits, the tragedies and ironies of their life stories, into view. In this sense the book brings to mind essays from Bernard Bailyn's Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (1990), which found affecting human drama in the lives of obscure men. Some may object to Nesvig's lively translation of the blasphemies that he found in the archives. But translating an insult as "thieving, knavish traitor, highway bandit, punkass bitch" serves the same purpose as Nesvig's meticulous research, lucid prose, and careful contextualization: it brings the subjects closer to us and brings them alive while respecting the profound alienness of their cultures and times (p. 92). Scholars of colonial Mexico, the Spanish empire, and comparative borderlands should read Promiscuous Power and assign it to students at all levels.

Ines G. Županov (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)

This chapter aims to analyze the Jesuit missionaries and their missions in colonial America (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries) based on the categories of globalness (the global) and mundanity (the local) through three historical frameworks: first, the missionary expansion of the Society of Jesus from the viceroyalty of Peru and its ties to Rome and the Iberian monarchy in the sixteenth century; second, presenting the defensive war project implemented on Chile’s southern border between 1612 and 1626 as a missionary and political mechanism of territorial and spiritual “reduction”; and third, changes in missionary identity in the eighteenth century. The first two frameworks are based on case studies that give a view of the local dimension while at the same time allowing one to understand the global dynamics of the Society of Jesus in other colonial spaces. The third framework is based on broader geographical travel.

Confluenze Rivista Di Studi Iberoamericani, 2012

This paper presents an analysis of the narratives produced by secular chroniclers and missionaries that circulated or acted in the Jesuitic Province of Paraguay, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will focus on the effects of the experience -derived from the intercultural contact -in records about Guarani, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis of these narratives reveals the concern that secular as well as religious people had in defining the favourable inclinations and the natural incompetence of the indigenous, and, also, in justifying their utilization or eradication for the success of the civilization and evangelization project.