Revitalization movements, social change, and justice: brazil's toca de assis in global perspective

Forthcoming in Steven O’Malley, ed., Interpretive Trends in Christian Revitalization for the Early Twenty First Century. Lexington, Kentucky, USA: Emeth Press. ISBN 978-1-60947-018-0.

Revitalization Movements, Social Change, and Justice: Brazil's Toca de Assis in Global Perspective Sílvia R.A. Fernandes Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Bryan T. Froehle Saint Thomas University, Miami, USA

Studying trends among Pentecostals, Reformation-based traditions, Catholics, and other major groupings of world Christianity can no longer be done in isolation. This is particularly true with regard to Christian revitalization. While the end of modernity may spell the demise of expectations for a single global metanarrative, the fragmentation, hybridity, and globalization characteristic of postmodernity meld previously disparate stories and trajectories. Borders have become more porous, and the story of one region or Christian confession has become more parallel and overlapping. Today more than ever, revitalization studies of any single case in any one context offer insight for cases embedded in other contexts, including other Christian traditions. This chapter explores world Catholicism in light of a particular Catholic revitalization movement in order to explore broader interpretive trends tied to questions of social change and justice in world Christian revitalization. A Common Global Reality World Christian Revitalization The rise of the global south within contemporary Christianity may be ascribed to demographic trends and colonial legacies, buts its effects are world historical, broadly transformative in nature. Any emerging understanding of world Christian revitalization must now be global and comparative. In the case of world Catholicism, the shift to the global south is clear. Within the past 50 years, the proportion of Catholics in Africa increased four-fold, from 3 percent to 12 percent of all Catholics
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worldwide.