City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala
About: This article is published in Social Sciences and Missions.The article was published on 2011-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 53 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Citizenship & History of religions.
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Dissertation•
17 Dec 2012
TL;DR: The authors explored the ways in which progressive Christian churches in Canada adopt biblical criticism and popular theology and argued that the form of biblical criticism that they employ, along with entrenched concerns about the origins of the Christian faith ultimately leads to a rejection of the biblical narrative.
Abstract: This dissertation investigates the development of progressive Christianity. It explores the ways in which progressive Christian churches in Canada adopt biblical criticism and popular theology. Contributing to the anthropology of Christianity, this study is primarily an ethnographic and linguistic analysis that juxtaposes contemporary conflicts over notions of the Christian self into the intersecting contexts of public discourse, contending notions of the secular and congregational dynamics. Methodologically, it is based upon two-and-a-half years of in-depth participant observation research at five churches and distinguishes itself as the first scholarly study of progressive Christianity in North America. I begin this study by outlining the historical context of skepticism in Canadian Protestantism and arguing that skepticism and doubt serve as profoundly religious experiences, which provide a fuller framework than secularization in understanding the experiences of Canadian Protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, I draw parallels between the ways that historical and contemporary North American Christians negotiate the tensions between their faith and biblical criticism, scientific empiricism and liberal morality. Chapter Two seeks to describe the religious, cultural and socio-economic worlds inhabited by the progressive Christians featured in this study. It focuses on the worldviews that emerge out of participation in what are primarily white, middle-class, liberal communities and considers how these identity-markers affect the development and lived experiences of progressive Christians. My next three chapters explore the ways that certain engagements with text and the performance or ritualization of language enable the development of a distinctly progressive Christian modality. Chapter Three investigates progressive Christian textual ideologies and argues that the form of biblical criticism that they employ, along with entrenched concerns about the origins of the Christian faith ultimately, leads to a rejection of the biblical narrative. Chapter Four examines the ways in which progressive Christians understand individual 'deconversion' narratives as contributing to a shared experience or way of being Christian that purposefully departs from evangelical Christianity. The final chapter analyses rhetoric of the future and argues that progressive Christians employ eschatological language that directs progressive Christians towards an ultimate dissolution.%%%%PhD
53 citations
TL;DR: In a postsecular world, interrogating religion, secularity, and politics together enables us better to understand the complex construction of democratic citizenship and the dynamism of Latin America's multiple modernities.
Abstract: In this introduction we present the concepts of “lived religion” and “lived citizenship” as tools for understanding the ways in which religious and political meanings and practices are constituted in social movements and locations of poverty and exclusion in Latin America. We first develop the idea of “zones of crisis” as a context in which struggles for rights, recognition, and survival are enacted. We then challenge reified distinctions between the secular and the religious, emphasizing religion’s embodiment and emplacement in daily life and politics. Reviewing the empirical findings of the articles in this special issue, we discuss the multiple imbrications of religion and citizenship with regard to democratic politics, geographies of conflict, and safe spaces, as well as selfhood, identity, and agency. In a postsecular world, interrogating religion, secularity, and politics together enables us better to understand the complex construction of democratic citizenship and the dynamism of Latin America’s multiple modernities. RESUMEN: En esta introduccion presentamos los conceptos de la religion vivida y la ciudadania vivida como herramientas para entender las maneras en las cuales las practicas y significados religiosos y politicos estan constituidos en los movimientos sociales y en las zonas de pobreza y exclusion en America Latina. Primero desarrolla-mos la idea de las zonas de crisis como contextos en los cuales toman lugar las luchas por derechos, reconocimiento y sobrevivencia. Luego cuestionamos las distinciones cosificadas entre lo secular y lo religioso, enfatizando el caracter encarnado y situado de la religion en la vida diaria y politica. Resenando los hallazgos empiricos de los articulos de este numero especial de LARR , discutimos las multiples imbricaciones de la religion y la ciudadania con respecto a los espacios seguros, la politica democratica, geografias de conflicto, la identidad y la capacidad de accion. En un mundo possecular, interrogando juntos lo religioso, lo secular y lo politico nos ubica para en-tender la compleja construccion de la ciudadania democratica y el dinamismo de las multiples modernidades latinoamericanas.
46 citations
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2016
TL;DR: For Fernanda and for Gloria, all of these practices of consumption were revelatory of God's abundant love for them, from the basic level of survival to the brazen level of a down payment on a house as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: force. It is changing concrete conditions of labour in China when mediated through exchange processes in relative space time that transforms value as a social relation in such a way as to bring the concrete labour process in Mexico to closure” (Harvey 2006, p. 144). 4.5 Decolonizing Prosperity For Fernanda and for Gloria, all of these practices of consumption—from the basic level of survival to the brazen level of a down payment on a house—were revelatory of God’s abundant love for them. The practices of prosperity became central to Fernanda’s engagement with the MCI and Gloria’s involvement with a local micro-credit NGO. At the MCI, congregants consume the dozens of books written by lead Pastor Castellanos and his wife, Claudia, as well as the other tomes by evangelists and pastors from around the world, such as Benny Hinn, David Yonggi Cho, and Joel Osteen. The “Commercial Center” at the church was constantly abuzz with women and men contemplating the new jewelry collections that came weekly, CDs and DVDs of the local celebrity church music group, Generación 12, clothing, stationary, and all other manner of products not only attracted the consuming habits of an upwardly mobile congregation, but indeed branding them as a particular kind of Christian in the streets of Bogotá. Youth proudly sport their G12 backpacks and notebooks, while the women recognize each other’s jewelry and umbrellas, and the gentlemen compare Bibles. These acts of consumption proudly announce inclusion into the institution of the MCI. They also betray a purchasing power made possible by an increasingly affluent and also indebted urban population in Bogotá. This conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1918; Mason 1981; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Schui 2014) marks the faithful as fully included in the MCI, and proud of it.
45 citations
Cites background or methods from "City of God: Christian Citizenship ..."
...I parse my ethnographic evidence with the “kind of individual responsibility that structural adjustment seems to demand” (O’Neill 2010, p. xxiv) in order to participate in debates in theorization of financialization and finance capital....
[...]
...In part, this responds to Kevin O’Neill’s call for a study of neo-Pentecostal Christianity and its connection to the “culture of free trade, privatization, and decentralization” (O’Neill 2010, p. xxiv)....
[...]
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto, which employs Victor and Edith Turner's theory of liminality as both prompt and foil.
Abstract: This dissertation draws on twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto. It pays particular attention to the shelter’s thirty-two workers, to their efforts to be both “the best shelter in the city” and to “befriend the poor.” The story told here employs Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality as both prompt and foil. The understanding of the liminal it employs and the rationale for deploying it in relation to the Gateway are the subject of Part I. Aspects of the liminal (in-between) stage/state have been paired with various aspects of shelter life – certain repertoires, objects, ideas. There are eighteen such pairings, each provoking a short, ethnographically driven chapter. The interplay between the shelter and the liminal is at times illuminating, ironic, even incomplete. The chapters are clustered according to four themes – also called the coefficients of life at the shelter: stuckedness, subjunctivity, immaturity, irony. These four are simultaneously plotted in such a way as to lead the reader deeper into Gateway life. Part II Stuckedness, discusses contexts that surround the Gateway and hold it in place. Part III Subjunctivity, enters the shelter by way of the workers’ own ideas, desires, and intentions for the way the Gateway operates, especially its friendliness. Part IV Immaturity, tells the story of any-given day at the Gateway in order to consider its ambient youthfulness, and the significance of such for the
44 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic approach attuned to what this article understands as the subject of prevention, that is, the individual imagined and acted upon by the imperative to prevent, is presented.
Abstract: In North Carolina, a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization facilitates a child sponsorship program that connects North American evangelical Christians with at-risk children in one of postwar Guatemala City's most violent neighborhoods: La Paloma. Pitched in the name of gang prevention, child sponsors help create a context in which these Guatemalan kids might choose God over gangs. Based on fieldwork in North Carolina and in Guatemala, with both sponsors and the sponsored, this article explores how child sponsorship makes the work of gang prevention dependent on the work of self-cultivation. It is an ethnographic approach attuned to what this article understands as the subject of prevention, that is, the individual imagined and acted upon by the imperative to prevent. This includes at-risk youths, in all their racialized otherness, but also (and increasingly so) North American evangelicals who self-consciously craft their subjectivities through their participation in gang prevention. The subject of prevention's observable outcome is a kind of segregation with its own spatial logic. The practice of evangelical gang prevention ultimately produces an observable kind of inequality that says something about the surgically selective nature of Central American security today. Some Guatemalan youth connect with North Americans. Others get left behind.
39 citations
References
More filters
Dissertation•
17 Dec 2012
TL;DR: The authors explored the ways in which progressive Christian churches in Canada adopt biblical criticism and popular theology and argued that the form of biblical criticism that they employ, along with entrenched concerns about the origins of the Christian faith ultimately leads to a rejection of the biblical narrative.
Abstract: This dissertation investigates the development of progressive Christianity. It explores the ways in which progressive Christian churches in Canada adopt biblical criticism and popular theology. Contributing to the anthropology of Christianity, this study is primarily an ethnographic and linguistic analysis that juxtaposes contemporary conflicts over notions of the Christian self into the intersecting contexts of public discourse, contending notions of the secular and congregational dynamics. Methodologically, it is based upon two-and-a-half years of in-depth participant observation research at five churches and distinguishes itself as the first scholarly study of progressive Christianity in North America. I begin this study by outlining the historical context of skepticism in Canadian Protestantism and arguing that skepticism and doubt serve as profoundly religious experiences, which provide a fuller framework than secularization in understanding the experiences of Canadian Protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, I draw parallels between the ways that historical and contemporary North American Christians negotiate the tensions between their faith and biblical criticism, scientific empiricism and liberal morality. Chapter Two seeks to describe the religious, cultural and socio-economic worlds inhabited by the progressive Christians featured in this study. It focuses on the worldviews that emerge out of participation in what are primarily white, middle-class, liberal communities and considers how these identity-markers affect the development and lived experiences of progressive Christians. My next three chapters explore the ways that certain engagements with text and the performance or ritualization of language enable the development of a distinctly progressive Christian modality. Chapter Three investigates progressive Christian textual ideologies and argues that the form of biblical criticism that they employ, along with entrenched concerns about the origins of the Christian faith ultimately, leads to a rejection of the biblical narrative. Chapter Four examines the ways in which progressive Christians understand individual 'deconversion' narratives as contributing to a shared experience or way of being Christian that purposefully departs from evangelical Christianity. The final chapter analyses rhetoric of the future and argues that progressive Christians employ eschatological language that directs progressive Christians towards an ultimate dissolution.%%%%PhD
53 citations
TL;DR: In a postsecular world, interrogating religion, secularity, and politics together enables us better to understand the complex construction of democratic citizenship and the dynamism of Latin America's multiple modernities.
Abstract: In this introduction we present the concepts of “lived religion” and “lived citizenship” as tools for understanding the ways in which religious and political meanings and practices are constituted in social movements and locations of poverty and exclusion in Latin America. We first develop the idea of “zones of crisis” as a context in which struggles for rights, recognition, and survival are enacted. We then challenge reified distinctions between the secular and the religious, emphasizing religion’s embodiment and emplacement in daily life and politics. Reviewing the empirical findings of the articles in this special issue, we discuss the multiple imbrications of religion and citizenship with regard to democratic politics, geographies of conflict, and safe spaces, as well as selfhood, identity, and agency. In a postsecular world, interrogating religion, secularity, and politics together enables us better to understand the complex construction of democratic citizenship and the dynamism of Latin America’s multiple modernities. RESUMEN: En esta introduccion presentamos los conceptos de la religion vivida y la ciudadania vivida como herramientas para entender las maneras en las cuales las practicas y significados religiosos y politicos estan constituidos en los movimientos sociales y en las zonas de pobreza y exclusion en America Latina. Primero desarrolla-mos la idea de las zonas de crisis como contextos en los cuales toman lugar las luchas por derechos, reconocimiento y sobrevivencia. Luego cuestionamos las distinciones cosificadas entre lo secular y lo religioso, enfatizando el caracter encarnado y situado de la religion en la vida diaria y politica. Resenando los hallazgos empiricos de los articulos de este numero especial de LARR , discutimos las multiples imbricaciones de la religion y la ciudadania con respecto a los espacios seguros, la politica democratica, geografias de conflicto, la identidad y la capacidad de accion. En un mundo possecular, interrogando juntos lo religioso, lo secular y lo politico nos ubica para en-tender la compleja construccion de la ciudadania democratica y el dinamismo de las multiples modernidades latinoamericanas.
46 citations
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2016
TL;DR: For Fernanda and for Gloria, all of these practices of consumption were revelatory of God's abundant love for them, from the basic level of survival to the brazen level of a down payment on a house as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: force. It is changing concrete conditions of labour in China when mediated through exchange processes in relative space time that transforms value as a social relation in such a way as to bring the concrete labour process in Mexico to closure” (Harvey 2006, p. 144). 4.5 Decolonizing Prosperity For Fernanda and for Gloria, all of these practices of consumption—from the basic level of survival to the brazen level of a down payment on a house—were revelatory of God’s abundant love for them. The practices of prosperity became central to Fernanda’s engagement with the MCI and Gloria’s involvement with a local micro-credit NGO. At the MCI, congregants consume the dozens of books written by lead Pastor Castellanos and his wife, Claudia, as well as the other tomes by evangelists and pastors from around the world, such as Benny Hinn, David Yonggi Cho, and Joel Osteen. The “Commercial Center” at the church was constantly abuzz with women and men contemplating the new jewelry collections that came weekly, CDs and DVDs of the local celebrity church music group, Generación 12, clothing, stationary, and all other manner of products not only attracted the consuming habits of an upwardly mobile congregation, but indeed branding them as a particular kind of Christian in the streets of Bogotá. Youth proudly sport their G12 backpacks and notebooks, while the women recognize each other’s jewelry and umbrellas, and the gentlemen compare Bibles. These acts of consumption proudly announce inclusion into the institution of the MCI. They also betray a purchasing power made possible by an increasingly affluent and also indebted urban population in Bogotá. This conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1918; Mason 1981; Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Schui 2014) marks the faithful as fully included in the MCI, and proud of it.
45 citations
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto, which employs Victor and Edith Turner's theory of liminality as both prompt and foil.
Abstract: This dissertation draws on twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto. It pays particular attention to the shelter’s thirty-two workers, to their efforts to be both “the best shelter in the city” and to “befriend the poor.” The story told here employs Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality as both prompt and foil. The understanding of the liminal it employs and the rationale for deploying it in relation to the Gateway are the subject of Part I. Aspects of the liminal (in-between) stage/state have been paired with various aspects of shelter life – certain repertoires, objects, ideas. There are eighteen such pairings, each provoking a short, ethnographically driven chapter. The interplay between the shelter and the liminal is at times illuminating, ironic, even incomplete. The chapters are clustered according to four themes – also called the coefficients of life at the shelter: stuckedness, subjunctivity, immaturity, irony. These four are simultaneously plotted in such a way as to lead the reader deeper into Gateway life. Part II Stuckedness, discusses contexts that surround the Gateway and hold it in place. Part III Subjunctivity, enters the shelter by way of the workers’ own ideas, desires, and intentions for the way the Gateway operates, especially its friendliness. Part IV Immaturity, tells the story of any-given day at the Gateway in order to consider its ambient youthfulness, and the significance of such for the
44 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic approach attuned to what this article understands as the subject of prevention, that is, the individual imagined and acted upon by the imperative to prevent, is presented.
Abstract: In North Carolina, a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization facilitates a child sponsorship program that connects North American evangelical Christians with at-risk children in one of postwar Guatemala City's most violent neighborhoods: La Paloma. Pitched in the name of gang prevention, child sponsors help create a context in which these Guatemalan kids might choose God over gangs. Based on fieldwork in North Carolina and in Guatemala, with both sponsors and the sponsored, this article explores how child sponsorship makes the work of gang prevention dependent on the work of self-cultivation. It is an ethnographic approach attuned to what this article understands as the subject of prevention, that is, the individual imagined and acted upon by the imperative to prevent. This includes at-risk youths, in all their racialized otherness, but also (and increasingly so) North American evangelicals who self-consciously craft their subjectivities through their participation in gang prevention. The subject of prevention's observable outcome is a kind of segregation with its own spatial logic. The practice of evangelical gang prevention ultimately produces an observable kind of inequality that says something about the surgically selective nature of Central American security today. Some Guatemalan youth connect with North Americans. Others get left behind.
39 citations