Messy, Heterogeneous, and Distinct: Lived Religion in Latin America Today

The presentation explores the interaction of religion and modernity. The thesis proposed here is simple: There is an interaction between modernity and religion in Latin America, but the result has not been religion diminishment, but its transformation. The difficulty in assessing religiosity as it exists in Latin America is due in part to the continuing use of categories that were not designed for religious cultures outside the North Atlantic world. Those categories point us toward a different kind of dynamics, which in fact obscure Latin American religious dynamics. If we look at religion from Latin America and from the people who practice it, we will find a different definition and different conceptual tools for understanding the religious experience of Latin American people, and perhaps it helps us to look at religion in a different way.