Religious Studies: A Global View

Emerging issues

Valuable overviews of recent topics and perspectives are available in two

collections published by a group of scholars associated with Manuel Marzal’s

monthly seminars (Marzal et al.2000, 2004). Topics include institutional and

political religion, new urban forms of Pentecostalism, religion and human

rights, religion and health, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, popular Catholic piety in

the Amazon region, and religious belief among university students. In a separate

book, Paulo Barrera Rivera (2001) analyzes a Brazilian Pentecostal movement

(Iglesia Pentecostal Dios es Amor), established in Peru during the 1970s, which

is attracting Peru’s poor. Emphasizing social and cultural factors, he argues

that people from the Andean world, filled with mythical ancestral beings, fit

easily into Pentecostal worship with its emphasis on ‘demons’. Another recent

topic for scholars of religion in Peru is the relationship between evangelical

Christians and politics (Barrera Rivera 2005). Hortensia Muñoz (2001) places

the study of religion and politics in the context of poverty, violence, and social

fragmentation in her study of the difficult but creative coexistence between

Protestants (of various types) and Catholics during the consolidation of a lower-

class barrioon the periphery of Lima.

Studies on gender and religion

in Latin America

The initial momentum for work on women (or gender) and religion in Latin

America emerged from liberation theologians and biblical scholars and among

women committed to working in grassroots base communities. The primary

focus was on issues of gender equity and justice. Previous secular feminist

analyses on the continent had inspired and prefigured this work, and both trends

have been interacting since the early 1980s. Elsa Tamez was a key figure in

finding new inspiration through reading the Bible from the perspective of the

poor and from that of liberation: ‘liberation is taking place in the churches with

the growth of the Ecclesial Base communities. In this new mode of being a

church, women have found a possibility of a new mode of being a woman’

(1983: 41; cf. La Biblia de los Oprimidos). Many others, like Coca Trillini in

Argentina and Mary Judith Ress in Chile (2004), have also claimed the right

of women and the poor to seek in sacred scripture the inspiration for their own

liberation. Concrete efforts towards this end started in the 1970s among women

working marginal areas, both urban and rural. Their formation as ecumenical

theologians, biblical scholars and committed nuns took place within a largely

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