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This volume provides an overview of church-state relations in Mexico, how these have changed in recent years and how they might affect the Mexican political system.
This nuanced book considers the role of religion and religiosity in modern Mexico, breaking new ground with an emphasis on popular religion and its relationship to politics. The contributors highlight the multifaceted role of religion, illuminating the ways that religion and religious devotion have persisted and changed since Mexican independence. They explore such themes as the relationship between church and state, the resurgence of religiosity and religious societies in the post-reform period, the religious values of the liberals of the 1850s, and the ways that popular expressions of religion often trumped formal and universal proscriptions. Focusing on individual stories and vignettes and on local elements of religion, the contributors show that despite efforts to secularize society, religion continues to be a strong component of Mexican culture. Portraying the complexity of religiosity in Mexico in the context of an increasingly secular state, this book will be invaluable for all those interested in Latin American history and religion. Contributions by: Silvia Marina Arrom, Adrian Bantjes, Alejandro Cortázar, Jason Dormady, Martin Austin Nesvig, Matthew D. O'Hara, Daniela Traffano, Paul J. Vanderwood, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Pamela Voekel, and Edward Wright-Rios
Mexico's Reforma, the mid-nineteenth-century liberal revolution, decisively shaped the country by disestablishing the Catholic Church, secularizing public affairs, and laying the foundations of a truly national economy and culture. The Lawyer of the Church is an examination of the Mexican clergy's response to the Reforma through a study of the life and works of Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía (1810-68), one of the most influential yet least-known figures of the period. By analyzing how Munguía responded to changing political and intellectual scenarios in defense of the clergy's legal prerogatives and social role, Pablo Mijangos y González argues that the Catholic Church opposed the liberal revolution not because of its supposed attachment to a bygone past but rather because of its efforts to supersede colonial tradition and refashion itself within a liberal yet confessional state. With an eye on the international influences and dimensions of the Mexican church-state conflict, The Lawyer of the Church also explores how Mexican bishops gradually tightened their relationship with the Holy See and simultaneously managed to incorporate the papacy into their local affairs, thus paving the way for the eventual "Romanization" of Mexican Catholicism during the later decades of the century.
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants--young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written, finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an "authentic" femininity--one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of "the Call"--and their choices in answering it--as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds, friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves, Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's "technology of embodiment" on multiple levels--from the phenomenological to the political.
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.
The 30th volume of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion consists of two special sections, as well as two separate empirical studies on attachment and daily spiritual practices. The first special section deals with the social scientific study of religion in Indonesia. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country whose history and contemporary involvement in the study of religion is explored from both sociological and psychological perspectives. The second special section is on the Pope Francis effect: the challenges of modernization in the Catholic church and the global impact of Pope Francis. While its focus is mainly on the Catholic religion, the internal dynamics and geopolitics explored apply more broadly.
While Mexico's spiritual history after the 1910 Revolution is often essentialized as a church-state power struggle, this book reveals the complexity of interactions between revolution and religion. Looking at anticlericalism, indigenous cults and Catholic pilgrimage, these authors reveal that the Revolution was a period of genuine religious change, as well as social upheaval.
Ron Austin first wandered purposefully into Mexico more than fifty years ago, when he produced a documentary on Mexican history for American television. Over the next decades, as his acquaintance with Mexico deepened, so too did his appreciation for the rich and contradictory impulses of Mexican culture and for the beauty of its people and their expressions of faith. At once guidebook, history, memoir, and tribute, Austin s Peregrino engagingly explores the spiritual and cultural heart of Catholic Mexico. Though once merely a tourist peering in a stranger to this distinctive faith and culture Austin, now a devout Catholic and part-year resident of Mexico, writes with respect, affection, and deep understanding as he invites fellow pilgrims peregrinos to regard both Mexico and their own cultures of faith in a new light.
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.
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.