No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Popular religion, Catholicism and religious dissent are part of the same triangle, unavoidable in any analysis of the religious life of Latin America. A conceptual frame has not yet been established, however, to explain, from the point of view of the region's own religious experience, the specific forms taken by this religious life and how they relate to other similar expressions worldwide, as well as to general processes, such as secularization. The paradigm of modernity seems to resist as long as it follows the guidelines of the gestation of a secularization process which translates into the strengthening of individual conscience, the debilitation of ecclesiastical control and the formation of freedom spaces for those who do not think like the group of believers. However, the paradigm does not find its parallel in the European model of Protestantism in the consolidation of a class or social group that feeds and explains this dissenting religious thought. Consequently, it is necessary, from our point of view, to question the centrality or pertinence of the modernity paradigm. Most of all, because the modernity paradigm results in an Eurocentrist paradigm, too oriented towards a set concept of socioeconomic development and, therefore, of religious `evolution'.

No abstract