This paper tries to distinguish between religious movements which transform religious life and others which do so to a small or insignificant extent, using the contrast between conformism and dissidence – and emphatically avoiding quasi-political metaphors such as ‘progressive’ and conservative’. In outlining the contrast, drawing principally on Brazilian and North American examples, the paper relies on the dialectic between popular and…
It is becoming commonplace to refer to the global character of charismatic and fundamentalist religious movements. At its most elementary this simply means that their doctrines and their organizations tend to possess ‘global reach’. But theexpression ‘global’ in this context also refers to their propensity to borrow, imitate and project images of themselves and of others, onto themselves and others, across frontiers…
In recent years the rise of a relatively new brand of Pentecostalism has made religion a battlefield of political and cultural dispute in Brazil. This neo-Pentecostalism, as it is often described, is observed worldwide, but its effects in Brazil are of particular interest because this is a country otherwise noted for religious tolerance, for a history of multiple and multi-levelled symbolic and…
Britain enjoyed close financial links with Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (thanks to which the major libraries are well stocked: the Public Records Office is a rich source for research on that period), and produced a distinguished list of English and Scottish travel writers in the nineteenth century and even earlier. Yet by the mid-twentieth century the UK…
One reasonable response to the vast enterprise of comparing religions, their institutions and the behaviour of their followers is a nagging doubt: after all this, is there much difference among the world religions, or indeed between the world religions on one hand, and the innumerable polytheistic and pagan forms across the planet? Recent work in cognitive psychology applied to religion, especially that…
Casa-grande e senzala was published when Freyre, born in 1900, was only thirty-three years old. This precocious book dealt with a vast range of themes and a variety of sources, and its largely non-Brazilian intellectual precursors were beyond the physical and even intellectual range of Freyre’s contemporaries, few of whom had traveled to the United States or even to Europe, as Freyre…
Among the many paradoxes of Israeli politics, there are the strategies of political inclusion used by organizations and parties representing groups that reject the universalism which Israeli democracy is heir to. This paper develops a model of ‘political inclusion Israeli-style’, illustrated by one party, Shas, which since 1984 proclaims itself the voice of the socially and culturally excluded Sephardi population of north…
The growth in the numbers and influence of ultra-Orthodoxy – the haredim – since the SecondWorldWar has changed Judaism worldwide, even though it remains a minority culture. Growth has occurred through the maximization of family size and through the movement of t’shuva (‘‘return’’), and it has benefited from state and private subsidies to the institutions of Torah learning (yeshivot and schooling generally),…
