I did a double-take upon spying a sharply dressed female skeleton raising a shiny sickle with her right hand. Positioned center stage on the altar of St. Rupert’s Church in Eben, Austria, the impeccably tailored skeletal saint appears to be Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte, but she is not. Saint Death’s Austrian doppleganger is St. Notburga, a peasant woman who lived in the Tyrolian region of Austria from 1265 to 1313 and because of her acts of charity with the... Read more
The man who will very likely be elected the next president of Mexico in Sunday’s vote is not only a political populist but also a religious one. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, like nearly 90% of Mexicans born in the mid-twentieth century, was raised Catholic, even serving as an altar boy at his parish church in the southern state of Tabasco. Although his own Christian denominational affiliation is unclear, he has wrapped himself in the cloak of Guadalupismo... Read more
By David Metcalfe* “If understanding followed no rule at all, there would be no good in the understanding nor in the matter understood, and to remain in ignorance would be the greatest good.” – Ramon Llull as cited in Margaret A. Boden’s Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. Vol 1. p. 56 (Oxford University Press, 2006) With the furious pace the media sets in announcing today’s innovations in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning it’s easy to forget... Read more
By Dr. Kate Kingsbury† and Debra Van Neste* Since time immemorial religions have been born from the random rencounters of disparate doxa that have syncretically intertwined to create new modes of believing, belonging and being in our world. Vodou is one such religion, whose roots are an entangled skein of myriad origins. Primarily the faith’s principal provenance may be traced to Africa, yet Vodou has also been critically contoured by Catholicism. Only once we understand how cocktails of convictions create new... Read more
By Dr. Jakob Egeris Thorsen* The Pew Forum has published a report focusing on the role of Christianity in Western Europe. The overall results show a region that is ‘non-practicing Christian’ with low levels of church attendance and adherence to key Christian beliefs and doctrine. Furthermore, both church-going and ‘cultural’ Christians are more skeptical than ‘nones’ toward migrants and Islam, which is the dominant religion among recent migrants. In this commentary, I will focus on the some of the survey... Read more
This piece was supposed to be about the Virgin of Montserrat, the Black Matroness of Catalonia whose majestic shrine I visited last week. But just as Mexican skeleton saint, Santa Muerte, seduced me into contemplating her instead of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the ‘Kiss of Death’ diverted my attention away from the Black Madonna. El Petó de la Mort (Kiss of Death in Catalan) is a stunningly gorgeous marble statue of a winged skeletal Angel of Death embracing and kissing... Read more
By Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, Wilmington The Catholic Church is well known among scholars of religion for its syncretism, that is, its ability to meld indigenous and local religious practices, as well as gods and goddesses, with its own saints and devotions. Intentional or not, this strategy is successful and there are hundreds of cases of indigenous deities that carry on the tradition of pre-Christian religious practices... Read more
Co-authored by Dr. Andrew Chesnut and Dr. Kate Kingsbury* Guatemalan folk saint Rey Pascual’s foundation myth is a fascinating account of Catholic and Mayan syncretism in which the original Spanish saint, Pascual Bailón, morphs into the skeletal folk saint who is venerated today in Olintepeque and also Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. A canonized saint whose feast day is May 17, Pascual Bailón was a Franciscan friar from Aragón who lived during the second half of... Read more
Surpassed only by Syria in the number of violent deaths in the past decade, Mexico is a country where supernatural protection is in great demand. Now in its second decade the drug war has claimed most of the lives of the more than 200,000 Mexicans who have suffered violent deaths over the past ten years. If leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is nearing a double-digit lead over his rivals it is in part due to rejection of... Read more
Co-authored by Dr. Kate Kingsbury* and Dr. Andrew Chesnut Recent figures reveal that the Catholic Church is losing followers in Latin America at an accelerated rate. Contrary to pundits’ predictions, Pope Francis rather than proving popular and precipitating a proliferation in numbers of the faithful is losing support. What explains the shrinking Latin American flock? And what can the Catholic Church do to conciliate and captivate their congregants in Latin America anew? Bad Publicity Many assumed that a Latin American... Read more
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