Struggle for the spirit
Subtitle: religious transformation and popular culture in Brazil and Latin America
By: David Lehmann.
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Cambridge [England]; Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
Subjects: Catholic Church -- Relations -- Pentecostal churches.; Pentecostalism -- Brazil.; Pentecostalism -- LatinAmerica.; Brazil -- Church history.; Latin America -- Church history.
Description: "Sophisticated study of religion and political culture compares rhetoric of 'the people' in the practices of Catholic Christian Base Communities and Pentecostal or Neo-Pentecostal congregations. Concludes that basista communities build small but powerful dissident elites among the poor, understandable in traditional terms of the relation between elite and popular culture, while crente congregations lead masses of the poor to break radically with what is rhetorically 'popular' and thus with familiar Brazilian political bargains"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-239) and index.