The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)

This study explores one of the most dramatic contemporary interactions between religion and politics: the development of progressive Catholicism in Latin America. From the late 1960s this religious movement sought to transform the church and society. In the 1980s, however, the popular appeal of liberation theology was threatened. Focusing on a Brazilian community, Manuel Vásquez' incisive book examines the fate of progressive Catholicism amid changes in the Vatican and in the economy, and a wider crisis of modernity and humanistic thought.