SOUTH AMERICA, LUTHERANISM IN

A short history of mainline Protestant traditions in Latin America from the colonial era to the present with a focus on the development of Protestantism as a vital, native force rooted in the region's concerns and cultures

International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2023

What is the task of the theologian who seeks to find a voice in the nexus between imagination and institution, living faith and struggling church? What is the mission of the church, which faces up to its history of coercion, finds its feet in service and activism, yet opens a space to receive and share words of divine revelation? What is the rightful and wrongful use of power, whether that of the church or the theologian? What is the liberating power of the God whose power is made perfect in weakness? I suggest that these questions set the agenda for Vítor Westhelle’s essays translated under the title Liberating Luther. Dating from the late 1970s to 90s, the collection represents Westhelle’s creative work for the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil within the emergence of liberation theologies across denominations in Latin America.

The Ecumenical Review, World Council of Churches, vol. 69, núm. 2, julio de 2017, pp. 249-261. The political effects of the 16th-century religious reformations have never been in doubt. What is debatable, however, is how these effects have been felt in different contexts. In what is now Latin America, their influence was kept at a distance to avoid the changes in Europe from taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. This article examines Latin American writers to demonstrate how, in the different cultural and geographical contexts of the sub-continent, the social and political imprint of the Reformation and its emancipating and libertarian emphasis has been perceived. " Every free human being should have hanging on the wall a portrait of Martin Luther as redeemer. " – Jos e Mart ı Distant Yet Complementary Worlds Although we are apparently dealing with two contrasting situations, the relationship is closer than has been perceived in the past between the major religious changes brought about by the various movements in 16th-century Europe and in Latin America, regarded as encompassing all of the new countries emerging from the independence struggles of the first half of the 19th century. Certainly, the ideological and doctrinal attitudes that Roman Catholics and Protestants brought with them to the new

A brief update on the state of worldwide Lutheranism at the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Logia XXVII-3 PRINT pages 3, 5 - 14; Trinity 2018

2009

International migration is initiating myriad processes of religious change from the level of individual conversion to the institutional transformation of religious structures and practices. An approach combining a transnational perspective and the concept of diaspora space facilitates the analysis of the different scales, agents, and actions involved in migration-caused religious change. The article analyzes the broadening of Lutheranism to incorporate Latino Catholic culture into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (elca) in Madison, Wisconsin. Under the leadership of their pastor, Latin American immigrants in Madison are agents redefining the understanding of the category Lutheran through the incorporation of popular Catholicism. Though strongly contested by the Roman Catholic Church, the elca accepts these processes due to its institutional interest in the recruitment of new Latino worshippers. Resumen Las migraciones internacionales causan varios procesos de cambio religi...

In the last half of the twentieth century, many people in Mexico and Central Amer-ica turned to Protestantism as a new religion. In this paper, I examine the scope of the turn and look at some of the theories that explain why it happened. The scopeof the increase in Protestantism was wide, involving both urban and rural cultures.The available statistics show that it was dramatic and made even more dramaticby the common idea that Latin America was solidly Catholic

This article critically reviews recent contributions to religious research in Latin America. Social scientists have long considered religion to be a struc-turing feature of culture and local society. Owing to the centrality of Catholicism in Latin America, early studies privileged the political influences of the Catholic Church with respect to the state and society at large. The " other-ness " of native folk religions received less attention, with scholars undervalu-ing the presence of indigenous and African religiosities. In Latin America, religions are currently experiencing a diversification and reconfiguration, owing in part to the growing influence of different Christian denominations , particularly Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Religious change is also occurring at the margins of institutional churches through New Age, neo-pagan, neo-Indian, neo-esoteric, and self-styled religiosities, as well as through popular religious syncretisms, indicating new experiments with what is considered sacred. This dynamism poses theoretical and conceptual challenges to scholars analyzing religious diversity and the renewed role that religions play in contemporary societies with respect to secularization, syn-cretism, and hybridization as well as the emergence of alternative identities (gender, sexual, ideological and political).

Latin American Research Review

2018

Religion has been one of the driving forces in Latin America from preColumbian times to the present. As Rene de la Pedraja illustrates in Chapter 3, the Europeans who came to the New World with crosses and swords found religion and politics similarly intertwined in the indigenous civilizations. Since then, religious beliefs have been influenced by multifaceted encounters between divergent cultures. And, as Richard S. Hillman introduces in Chapter 1, these interactions shaped enduring legacies that have been modified over time. Since the earliest conquest, European conquistadores (conquerors) established the Catholic Church as an official institution of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and suppresse d indigenous religions-many of which were grounded in highly sophisticate d civilizations. The significant role of the church continued after independence in the early 1800s and into the twentieth century. Even today, a substantial majority of the citizens of contemporary Latin America...

Ciências da Religião: História e Sociedade , 2006