Distinguished Lecture in Religion & Politics | Manuel Vasquez

Dr. Manuel A. Vásquez: Toward a Transnational, Post-Colonial Phenomenology of the Spirit: Pneumatic Religions in the Americas

Thursday, March 27, 2014
6–8 pm

Professor Vásquez examined the explosive diversification and expansion of “pneumatic” religions in the Americas. From Pentecostalism to the Catholic Charismatic Movement, from African–based religions such as Candomblé, Umbanda, and Santería to Spiritism, Curanderismo, and neo-Shamanism, religions that work with and through multiple types of spiritual agents have gained great visibility, the claims of the secularization thesis notwithstanding. In this lecture, Dr. Vásquez will analyze the sources, morphologies, and socio-political implications of these phenomena. He argued that the vitality and proliferation of pneumatic religions call for a rethinking of the traditional ways in which religion has been studied in the hemisphere, suggesting approaches that foreground performance, power, embodiment, materiality, and the dialectics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Manuel A. Vásquez is a Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at the University of Florida. Among his books are More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford, 2011) and The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998). He also co-authored Living ‘Illegal’: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration (New Press, 2011; updated and expanded 2nd edition 2013), and Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (Rutgers, 2003).

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003

This event is free and open to the public. A photo ID is required to enter NYU buildings.