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Born Again in Brazil

The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty

by R. Andrew Chesnut

Paperback

$40.95

Quantity

Price:: $40.95
ISBN:: 9780813524061
Published:: Aug 01, 1997

Release Date:: 1st August 1997
Publisher:: Rutgers University Press
Imprint:: Rutgers University Press
Pages:: 218

Description
Praise
Contents
Authors

A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor. He augments his analysis of the economic and political factors with extensive interview material to capture his informants' conversion experience. In doing so, he presents both a historical framework for a broad understanding of Pentecostalism in Latin America and insight into the personal motivations and beliefs of the crentes themselves.

Professor Chesnut's succinct study should be required reading for all scholars of comparative religion, intellectual and social history, and Latin American culture. The fruit of an intensive field period of field research in the early 1990s...this volume manages in clear, unredundant, and highly readable style to synthesize the twentieth century history of four of the main Pentecostal denominations...of Brazil as well as exploring in depth the infrastructure and external politics of the largest of these denominations.
---Luso-Brazilian Review

This study makes a distinctive contribution to the understanding of these Pentecostal congregations, their members, and their leaders. Although the focus of this study is Betim, Brazil, the dynamic it describes and analyzes is pertinent to similar groups condemned to poverty throughout Latin America.
---Journal of Church and State

An exciting and provocative book! Without sensationalizing, Chesnut brings us to an understanding of the spiritual and emotional profundity of conversion.
- Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas, Austin

An engaging case study of one of the most successful Pentecostal bodies in Latin America. Importantly, it focuses on what most Latin American Pentecostals doùpersonal healing.
- David Stoll, author of Is Latin America Turning Protestant?

Acknowledgments
Part I. The Spirit of Brazil
1. A Prophetic History
Part II. Exorcising the Demons of Poverty
2. The Preconversion World of Illness
3. Conversion: Crisis, Cure, and Affiliation
4. Health Maintenance: Spiritual Ecstasy and Mutual Aid
5. Health Maintenance through Ideology and Morality
Part III. The Church as Institution
6. Authoritarian Assembly: Church Organization
7. From the Assembly of Saints to the Legislative Assembly: Pentecostal Politics in Para
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

R. ANDREW CHESNUT received his Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently a lecturer there.

Related topics: History / Latin America, Religion / Christianity