The Church And The Latin American Social Revolution

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The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America

Author : John Frederick Schwaller
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814783600
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America by : John Frederick Schwaller

Download or read book The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America written by John Frederick Schwaller and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America offers a concise yet far-reaching synthesis of this institution’s role from the earliest contact between the Spanish and native tribes until the modern day, the first such historical overview available in English. John Frederick Schwaller looks broadly at the forces which formed the Church in Latin America and which caused it to develop in the unique manner in which it did. While the Church is often characterized as monolithic, the author carefully showcases its constituent parts—often in tension with one another—as well as its economic function and its role in the political conflicts within the Latin America republics. Organized in a chronological manner, the volume traces the changing dynamics within the Church as it moved from the period of the Reformation up through twentieth century arguments over Liberation Theology, offering a solid framework to approaching the massive literature on the Catholic Church in Latin America. Through his accessible prose, Schwaller offers a set of guideposts to lead the reader through this complex and fascinating history.

The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America

Author : Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316495280
Total Pages : 995 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (164 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America by : Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America written by Virginia Garrard-Burnett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 995 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America covers religious history in Latin America from pre-Conquest times until the present. This publication is important; first, because of the historical and contemporary centrality of religion in the life of Latin America; second, for the rapid process of religious change which the region is undergoing; and third, for the region's religious distinctiveness in global comparative terms, which contributes to its importance for debates over religion, globalization, and modernity. Reflecting recent currents of scholarship, this volume addresses the breadth of Latin American religion, including religions of the African diaspora, indigenous spiritual expressions, non-Christian traditions, new religious movements, alternative spiritualities, and secularizing tendencies.

The Church in Colonial Latin America

Author : John F. Schwaller
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN 13 : 0742573427
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (425 download)

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Book Synopsis The Church in Colonial Latin America by : John F. Schwaller

Download or read book The Church in Colonial Latin America written by John F. Schwaller and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Church in Colonial Latin America is a collection of essays that include classic articles and pieces based on more modern research. Containing essays that explore the Catholic Church's active social and political influence, this volume provides the background necessary for students to grasp the importance of the Catholic Church in Latin America. This text also presents a comprehensive, analytic, and descriptive history of the Church and its development during the colonial period. From the evangelization of the New World by Spanish missionaries to the active influence of the Catholic Church on Latin American culture, this book offers a complete picture of the Church in colonial Latin America. The Church in Colonial Latin America is ideal for courses in the colonial period in Latin American history, as well as courses in religion, church history, and missionary history.

Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City

Author : Patience Alexandra Schell
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 9780816521982
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (219 download)

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Book Synopsis Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City by : Patience Alexandra Schell

Download or read book Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City written by Patience Alexandra Schell and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2003-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolution in Mexico sought to subordinate church to state and push the church out of public life. Nevertheless, state and church shared a concern for the nation's social problems. Until the breakdown of church-state cooperation in 1926, they ignored the political chasm separating them to address those problems through education in order to instill in citizens a new sense of patriotism, a strong work ethic, and adherence to traditional gender roles. This book examines primary, vocational, private, and parochial education in Mexico City from 1917 to 1926 and shows how it was affected by the relations between the revolutionary state and the Roman Catholic Church. One of the first books to look at revolutionary programs in the capital immediately after the Revolution, it shows how government social reform and Catholic social action overlapped and identifies clear points of convergence while also offering vivid descriptions of everyday life in revolutionary Mexico City. Comparing curricula and practice in Catholic and public schools, Patience Schell describes scandals and successes in classrooms throughout Mexico City. Her re-creation of day-to-day schooling shows how teachers, inspectors, volunteers, and priests, even while facing material shortages, struggled to educate Mexico City's residents out of a conviction that they were transforming society. She also reviews broader federal and Catholic social action programs such as films, unionization projects, and libraries that sought to instill a new morality in the working class. Finally, she situates education among larger issues that eventually divided church and state and examines the impact of the restrictions placed on Catholic education in 1926. Schell sheds new light on the common cause between revolutionary state education and Catholic tradition and provides new insight into the wider issue of the relationship between the revolutionary state and civil society. As the presidency of Vicente Fox revives questions of church involvement in Mexican public life, her study provides a solid foundation for understanding the tenor and tenure of that age-old relationship.

A History of the Church in Latin America

Author : Enrique Dussel
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780802821317
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (213 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of the Church in Latin America by : Enrique Dussel

Download or read book A History of the Church in Latin America written by Enrique Dussel and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1981 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive history of the church in Latin America, with its emphasis on theology, will help historians and theologians to better understand the formation and continuity of the Latin American tradition.

Contemporary Latin American Revolutions

Author : Marc Becker
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538163748
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (381 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary Latin American Revolutions by : Marc Becker

Download or read book Contemporary Latin American Revolutions written by Marc Becker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutions are a commonly studied but only vaguely understood historical phenomenon. Now updated to include the perspectives of grassroots revolutionary movements and biographies of often marginalized voices, this clear and concise text extends our understanding with a critical narrative analysis of key case studies: the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution; the 1944–1954 Guatemalan Spring; the 1952–1964 MNR-led revolution in Bolivia; the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959; the 1970–1973 Chilean path to socialism; the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in power from 1979–1990; failed guerrilla movements in Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru; and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela after Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998. Historian Marc Becker opens with a theoretical introduction to revolutionary movements, including a definition of what “revolution” means and an examination of factors necessary for a revolution to succeed. He analyzes revolutions through the lens of those who participated and explores the sociopolitical conditions that led to a revolutionary situation, the differing responses to those conditions, and the outcomes of those political changes. Each case study provides an interpretive explanation of the historical context in which each movement emerged, its main goals and achievements, its shortcomings, its outcome, and its legacy. The book concludes with an analysis of how elected leftist governments in the twenty-first century continue to struggle with issues that revolutionaries confronted throughout the twentieth century.

Liberation Theology and the Others

Author : Christian Büschges
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793633649
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Liberation Theology and the Others by : Christian Büschges

Download or read book Liberation Theology and the Others written by Christian Büschges and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking beyond prominent figures or major ecclesial events, Liberation Theology and the Others offers a fresh historical perspective on Latin American liberation theology. Thirteen case studies, from Mexico to Uruguay, depict a vivid picture of religious and lay activism that shaped the profile of the Latin American Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. Stressing the transnational character of Catholic activism and its intersections with prevalent discourses of citizenship, ethnicity or development, scholars from Latin America, the US, and Europe, analyze how pastoral renewal was debated and embraced in multiple local and culturally diverse contexts. Contributors explore the connections between Latin American liberation theology and anthropology in Peru, armed revolutionaries in highland Guatemala, and the implementation of neoliberalism in Bolivia. They identify conceptions of the popular church, indigenous religiosity, women’s leadership, and student activism that circulated among Latin American religious and lay activists between the 1960s and the 1980s. By revisiting the multifaceted and oftentimes contingent nature of church reforms, this edited volume provides fascinating new insights into one of the most controversial religious movements of the 20th century.

Guatemala's Catholic Revolution

Author : Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268104441
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Guatemala's Catholic Revolution by : Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval

Download or read book Guatemala's Catholic Revolution written by Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution is an account of the resurgence of Guatemalan Catholicism during the twentieth century. By the late 1960s, an increasing number of Mayan peasants had emerged as religious and social leaders in rural Guatemala. They assumed central roles within the Catholic Church: teaching the catechism, preaching the Gospel, and promoting Church-directed social projects. Influenced by their daily religious and social realities, the development initiatives of the Cold War, and the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), they became part of Latin America’s burgeoning progressive Catholic spirit. Hernández Sandoval examines the origins of this progressive trajectory in his fascinating new book. After researching previously untapped church archives in Guatemala and Vatican City, as well as mission records found in the United States, Hernández Sandoval analyzes popular visions of the Church, the interaction between indigenous Mayan communities and clerics, and the connection between religious and socioeconomic change. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, the Guatemalan Catholic Church began to resurface as an institutional force after being greatly diminished by the anticlerical reforms of the nineteenth century. This revival, fueled by papal power, an increase in church-sponsored lay organizations, and the immigration of missionaries from the United States, prompted seismic changes within the rural church by the 1950s. The projects begun and developed by the missionaries with the support of Mayan parishioners, originally meant to expand sacramentalism, eventually became part of a national and international program of development that uplifted underdeveloped rural communities. Thus, by the end of the 1960s, these rural Catholic communities had become part of a “Catholic revolution,” a reformist, or progressive, trajectory whose proponents promoted rural development and the formation of a new generation of Mayan community leaders. This book will be of special interest to scholars of transnational Catholicism, popular religion, and religion and society during the Cold War in Latin America.

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

Author : Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1461639670
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (616 download)

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Book Synopsis On Earth as It Is in Heaven by : Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Download or read book On Earth as It Is in Heaven written by Virginia Garrard-Burnett and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1999-12-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America has long been strongly identified with the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the face of religion is changing in the region, as is evidenced by new landmarks that now appear on the social and geographic landscape. To date, most books on major religions in Latin America are specific to one religion only, and do not offer a comparative analysis. On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Religion in Modern Latin America not only examines the region's religious mÈlange, but also gives equal coverage to other religious variations. The nine articles in this volume examine the variety of religious expression in Latin America, focusing upon Catholicism, popular Indian and African religious forms, and new elements such as Protestantism and Mormonism. Offering a comprehensive focus on one of the most prevalent social institutions in Latin American society, On Earth as It Is in Heaven is an excellent text for courses in Latin American history, religion, anthropology, sociology, and political science.

New Worlds

Author : John Lynch
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300183747
Total Pages : 582 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis New Worlds by : John Lynch

Download or read book New Worlds written by John Lynch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American history, John Lynch sets out to explore the reception of Christianity by native peoples and how it influenced their social and religious lives as the centuries passed. As attentive to modern times as to the colonial period, Lynch also explores the extent to which Indian religion and ancestral ways survived within the new Christian culture.The book follows the development of religious culture over time by focusing on peak periods of change: the response of religion to the Enlightenment, the emergence of the Church from the wars of independence, the Romanization of Latin American religion as the papacy overtook the Spanish crown in effective control of the Church, the growing challenge of liberalism and the secular state, and in the twentieth century, military dictators' assaults on human rights. Throughout the narrative, Lynch develops a number of special themes and topics. Among these are the Spanish struggle for justice for Indians, the Church's position on slavery, the concept of popular religion as distinct from official religion, and the development of liberation theology.

Revolution and Independence in Latin America

Author : Meredith Day
Publisher : Encyclopaedia Britannica
ISBN 13 : 1680480316
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution and Independence in Latin America by : Meredith Day

Download or read book Revolution and Independence in Latin America written by Meredith Day and published by Encyclopaedia Britannica. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1808 and 1826, all of mainland Latin America became independent from Spain and Portugal, the colonial powers that had ruled the region for three centuries. Undesirable economic restrictions and a caste system that favored those born in Europe made the conditions for revolution ripe in the Americas. Combined with the actions of insightful leaders-most notably Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin-Latin American independence was all but guaranteed. This title explores the revolutions, their historical causes, and the new nations' ensuing struggles, providing invaluable context for understanding the culture, politics, and social identity of the region today."

Brown Church

Author : Robert Chao Romero
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
ISBN 13 : 0830853952
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis Brown Church by : Robert Chao Romero

Download or read book Brown Church written by Robert Chao Romero and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Latina/o culture and identity have long been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo. Robert Chao Romero explores the "Brown Church" and how this movement appeals to the vision for redemption that includes not only heavenly promises but also the transformation of our lives and the world.

Global 1968

Author : A. James McAdams
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268200556
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis Global 1968 by : A. James McAdams

Download or read book Global 1968 written by A. James McAdams and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global 1968 is a unique study of the similarities and differences in the 1968 cultural revolutions in Europe and Latin America. The late 1960s was a time of revolutionary ferment throughout the world. Yet so much was in flux during these years that it is often difficult to make sense of the period. In this volume, distinguished historians, filmmakers, musicologists, literary scholars, and novelists address this challenge by exploring a specific issue—the extent to which the period that we associate with the year 1968 constituted a cultural revolution. They approach this topic by comparing the different manifestations of this transformational era in Europe and Latin America. The contributors show in vivid detail how new social mores, innovative forms of artistic expression, and cultural, religious, and political resistance were debated and tested on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, the desire to confront traditional beliefs and conventions had been percolating under the surface for years. Yet they also find that the impulse to overturn the status quo was fueled by the interplay of a host of factors that converged at the end of the 1960s and accelerated the transition from one generation to the next. These factors included new thinking about education and work, dramatic changes in the self-presentation of the Roman Catholic Church, government repression in both the Soviet Bloc and Latin America, and universal disillusionment with the United States. The contributors demonstrate that the short- and long-term effects of the cultural revolution of 1968 varied from country to country, but the period’s defining legacy was a lasting shift in values, beliefs, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities. Contributors: A. James McAdams, Volker Schlöndorff, Massimo De Giuseppe, Eric Drott, Eric Zolov, William Collins Donahue, Valeria Manzano, Timothy W. Ryback, Vania Markarian, Belinda Davis, J. Patrice McSherry, Michael Seidman, Willem Melching, Jaime M. Pensado, Patrick Barr-Melej, Carmen-Helena Téllez, Alonso Cueto, and Ignacio Walker.

In Search of Christ in Latin America

Author : Samuel Escobar
Publisher : Langham Publishing
ISBN 13 : 178368660X
Total Pages : 439 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (836 download)

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Book Synopsis In Search of Christ in Latin America by : Samuel Escobar

Download or read book In Search of Christ in Latin America written by Samuel Escobar and published by Langham Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-30 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted theologian Samuel Escobar offers a magisterial survey and study of Christology in Latin America. In Search of Christ in Latin America examines the figure of Jesus Christ in the context of Latin American culture, starting with the first Spanish influence in the sixteenth century and moving through popular religiosity and liberationist themes in Catholic and Protestant thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, culminating in an important description of the work of the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (FTL). Escobar provides theological, historical, and cultural analysis of Latin American understandings of Christ and places liberation theology within its social and revolutionary context. This book is an important step toward a rich understanding of the spiritual reality and powerful message of Jesus.

Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism

Author : Edward Wright-Rios
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822392283
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism by : Edward Wright-Rios

Download or read book Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism written by Edward Wright-Rios and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s. Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.

Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America

Author : Angel D. Santiago-Vendrell
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1498272657
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (982 download)

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Book Synopsis Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America by : Angel D. Santiago-Vendrell

Download or read book Contextual Theology and Revolutionary Transformation in Latin America written by Angel D. Santiago-Vendrell and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. audiences know Latin American liberation theologies largely through translations of Latin American Catholics from the 1970s and beyond. Most of the few known Protestant authors were students of Richard Shaull, whose critical thinking on social change, prophetic Christianity, and dialogue with Marxism and Christian use of Marxist analysis precedes the emergence of the formal schools of liberation theology by two decades. His own education at Princeton, and the education he provided in Brazil, charts the course of Protestant influences into this stream of theological reflection that became a global phenomenon in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Also, Shaull's career roughly parallels the emergence of the World Council of Churches and the engagement of the Catholic Church--in Latin America and around the world--after the Second Vatican Council. He himself was engaged, and became the flash point, in some of the major conferences, movements, and institutions of the 1960s and beyond. Santiago-Vendrell documents the entrance of the ecumenical movement in Brazil, among the most dramatic transformations in Catholic-Protestant relations around the globe, as well as Shaull's role in that development. Along the way he notes Shaull's prophetic and destabilizing role in the worldwide student movement in the 60s and 70s, charting decisions that mark the ecumenical movement. Shaull's contributions are important for an understanding of the ethical debates in the worldwide, ecumenical Protestant and Orthodox communities. Santiago-Vendrell examines primary, secondary, and historical documents that shine a light on Shaull's transformation into a contextual theologian of the poor. He offers a definitive view of this North American Protestant missionary who wrote extensively on Latin American liberation theology, the base Christian communities, and how conversion to solidarity with the poor offers transforming possibilities for the mainline churches' theological identity and practical faith.

Silver, Sword, and Stone

Author : Marie Arana
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501105019
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Silver, Sword, and Stone by : Marie Arana

Download or read book Silver, Sword, and Stone written by Marie Arana and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, American Library Association Booklist’s Top of the List, 2019 Adult Nonfiction Acclaimed writer Marie Arana delivers a cultural history of Latin America and the three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). “Meticulously researched, [this] book’s greatest strengths are the power of its epic narrative, the beauty of its prose, and its rich portrayals of character…Marvelous” (The Washington Post). Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, just as then, a miner’s survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places. Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His story echoes the violence that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day. Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America—sometimes for good, sometimes not. In this “timely and excellent volume” (NPR) Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. Silver, Sword, and Stone combines “learned historical analysis with in-depth reporting and political commentary...[and] an informed and authoritative voice, one that deserves a wide audience” (The New York Times Book Review).