Raimundo C Barreto

This article critically inquires into world Christianity discourse and its
methodological tools from a Latin American perspective. It argues that since world Christianity’s initial concepts and theories derived to a large extent from the African experience and from a pronounced Anglo-Saxon perspective, its methodological tools may not automatically apply to Latin America. Given the interdisciplinary and intercontextual nature of the field, world Christianity scholarship requires the use of a variety of methods and approaches that take seriously the reality and location of peoples, communities, and discourses with whom scholars partner for the production of knowledge. With a focuson Latin America, the author brings world Christianity discourse into conversation with Latin American decolonial theory. The backdrop of this conversation is the revitalization of indigenous communities and religions in Latin America, and their contribution to a fresh view of interculturality as a language for a life betwixt and between in the region.

Brazil is home for the largest African diaspora. In spite of that, until the end of the twentieth century, Brazil's Africanness tended to be hidden under the Eurocentric construct of a colour-blind national identity and the myth of racial democracy. Since the 1990s, Brazil's negritude or blackness has emerged as an important source of culture, knowledge, identity and public policy. Such a reconfiguration of Brazilian identity and culture to privilege black agency challenges common assumptions in the study of the religions of Brazil, including Christianity. This article examines the impact of Afro-Brazilian spirituality and religions upon Brazilian Christianity, shedding new light on Afro-Brazilian contributions to the formation of Brazil's cultural and religious mosaic. It highlights the often-overlooked agency of Afro-Brazilians as social, religious and cultural actors who have not only resisted colonial and neocolonial efforts to whitewash Brazilian culture, but have also positively contributed to the production of culture, knowledge and identities through a dynamic relation with their African roots. Finally, focusing on Afro-Brazilian spirituality as an important shaper of Brazilian Christianity, this article advances a decolonial perspective that draws attention to the ways Brazil's black Christianity contributes to the production of counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge and knowing.

By questioning universalist claims in discursive articulations of human rights, this article promotes the need to make human rights more meaningful and effective for the lives of those who are impoverished, oppressed, excluded or discriminated against in different cultures and contexts. Taking into account the current scenario ambiguously marked by globalization and plurality, as well as the rise of postcolonial Africa and Asia, in addition to Latin American decolonial discourses, the article advances an intercultural approach to human rights that considers more fully different voices, un-derstandings and interpretations, as well as power structures and relations that play a role in eclipsing and obstructing the freedom of postcolonial discourses. In contrast to a top-down imposition of an abstract discourse on the universalization of human rights, this paper proposes a bottom-up approach to human rights that takes seriously the multiplicity of traditions and cultures that inform people's worldviews and everyday life.

This article argues that in order to think about a Latin American Protestant social ethics one needs to understand the ethos in which it emerges. Such an ethos shapes the development of Protestant social thought in Latin America. This article revisits 5 important moments in the formation of this Protestant social thinking in the region in the course of the 20th century.  First, the awareness of Latin American Protestantism is identified as the starting point for the formation of a Protestant social thought in the continent. In a second moment, the search for autonomy among Latin American Protestants stands out. The next moment highlights the rupture of some Protestant social movements with a reformist vision. Some Protestant activists  embrace, then, a more radical project. The fourth moment presents a brief theological evangelical response in the context of the  understanding of mision integral. Finally, current challenges in a context marked by indigeneity and Pentecostality are briefly discussed.

This article examines the dynamics of the interpretation of the book of Mark with regard to the social location of the interpreter. On one hand, the original meaning of a text is irremediably unreachable, on the other, the text can only have any meaning through its readers, and it changes with them. These dynamics allow for the infinite translatability of the Gospel, which makes possible for it to be 'at home' in different cultures and social contexts. The Latin American movement of biblical popular reading exemplifies the attempt to make such a translation. It seeks to position common people again as themain interpreters of the biblical text, thereby preventing both the danger of developing a pastoral action without biblical foundations as well as the danger of developing biblical exegesis without any pastoral orientation. In relation specifically to Mark, this interpretive practice produces a reading that does not strip the Gospel of Mark from its political contents, that highlights the viewpoint of the victims of the Empire, that fosters a certain identification between the 'third-world' contemporary audiences and the content of the Gospel. Two major themes treated in Mark come to the fore: the Kingdom of God and resistance to the Empire, which continue to represent alternative orders.

This article presents a perspective on the changes that marked the development of Rubem Alves’s thought throughout his life. In the process of identifying the factors that contributed to those changes in Alves’s intellectual work, it argues that the situation of exile was a key motif in his work and one of the reasons he was never fully understood and appreciated in the U.S. Contrary to perspectives that stress radical ruptures in his thought, it sustains that Rubem Alves underwent an ongoing distancing from the restrictions imposed by the academy, an irreversible return home in his intellectual life.

Presents a dialogue between the Christian Realism and Latin American Theology of Liberation, with the aim of emphasizing the similarities and differences between these two important theological schools. The article shows how the Christian Realism of Niebuhr is widely recognized as one of the most influential theories in the field of Christian social ethics and political philosophy in the twentieth century. A Theology of Liberation had a surprising impact not only on Latin America, but also about other peoples poor and disinherited around the globe. The theology of liberation can, in some ways, be considered a type of Christian Realism, still showing clear differences with the Christian Realism of Niebuhr. The main differences between the two types of Christian Realism are different views on power, as well as their expectations about the possibilities of human beings in history - that is, its eschatological perspective. However, both approaches share a concern with social justice and the structural nature of sin, a strong pragmatism and a serious reading of reality as a starting point. These characteristics make the two theological schools closer to each other than many adimit.