Customer Reviews

Recognizing The Latino Resurgence In U.s. Religion: The Emmaus Paradigm (Explorations - Contemporary Perspectives on Religion)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a "must read" for all serious students of the contemporary Latino/a religious, cultural, and political experience in the United States. The authors bring assorted research skills and first-hand knowledge of many of the individuals and movements they describe in filling in a complex picture of social change in churches and society. In so doing, they provide an important overview of Latino religious experience (both Protestant and Catholic). This is a story that has been told in a largely piecemeal fashion up to this point. Profs. Stevens-Arroyo and Diaz-Stevens also rightly call social scientists to task for a general neglect of the varieties and vicissitudes of Latino religion. Their book provides much needed clarification of the term "Latino," along with an array of contemporary social and census data on Latinos in the United States. This study also provides valuable insights into the dynamics of organizational change and the role of individual leadership in turning (or, in some cases, failing to turn) religious instititions to the advantage of a group in the form of social, cultural and political movements. Most significantly, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion illuminates the dangers of entangling the Latino experience--religious and otherwise--with that of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans, or of naively assuming that Latinos are following the assimilationist model of the Euro-American experience. The American penchant for thinking along racial rather than colonialist lines is also subjected to a much need critique vis-a-vis the Latino experience. The text is dense at points, but always engaging and filled with provocative insights into the ever-changing dynamics of religion and culture in American society. This book is highly relevant to a variety of topics as diverse as ethnic and intergroup relations, the theology of popular religiosity, Latino religion(s), social change, organizational dynamics, studies of identity formation, multicultural pluralism and the complex role of faith experience in American political and social life.

Professors Diaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo have done both the academic and the religious community a great service by both describing and analyzing Latino/a religion in the United States. They bring current concepts from sociology, culture theory, and theology to what is a too-often overlooked topic -- the ways in which growing Latino/a populations are changing the United States, as well as being changed by them. The book has a developed historical focus, and also makes suggestions about the future of scholarship on American religion. Obviously this is a necessary book for those interested in Hispanic Americans and for those interested in American religion. But it is also helpful to those who want to get a firmer grasp on the directions in which the United States is heading at the beginning of the new century.