New Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity

Virginia Garrard is a specialist in twentieth-century political and religious history who has written extensively on Guatemala. In New Faces of God in Latin America she has set out to write an overarching history of the present for Latin America that situates the region in the academic literature on world Christianity. This is an ambitious task, and Garrard states clearly from the outset that this study will not be in any way exhaustive. It privileges the analysis of Protestantism over Catholicism, particularly Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches and movements. This focus leads her to Guatemala (chapter 2), Mexico (chapter 3), Haiti (chapter 4), and Brazil and Colombia (chapter 5), but she moves nimbly between a nation-centric view of what she terms vernacular religion and a dynamic transnational understanding of the cases. This comparative lens also leads her frequently to the United States but also to Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Korea, to...