City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala / Edition 1

by Kevin Lewis O'Neill

Overview

In Guatemala City today, Christianity isn't just a belief system—it is a counterinsurgency. Amidst postwar efforts at democratization, multinational mega-churches have conquered street corners and kitchen tables, guiding the faithful to build a sanctified city brick by brick. Drawing on rich interviews and extensive fieldwork, Kevin Lewis O'Neill tracks the culture and politics of one such church, looking at how neo-Pentecostal Christian practices have become acts of citizenship in a new, politically relevant era for Protestantism. Focusing on everyday practices—praying for Guatemala, speaking in tongues for the soul of the nation, organizing prayer campaigns to combat unprecedented levels of crime—O'Neill finds that Christian citizenship has re-politicized the faithful as they struggle to understand what it means to be a believer in a desperately violent Central American city. Innovative, imaginative, conceptually rich, City of God reaches across disciplinary borders as it illuminates the highly charged, evolving relationship between religion, democracy, and the state in Latin America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520260634
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/22/2009
Series:	The Anthropology of Christianity , #7
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kevin Lewis O'Neill is Assistant Professor in the University of Toronto's Department and Centre for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. He is coeditor, with Alex Laban Hinton, of Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
City of God: An Introduction

1. Shouldering the Weight: The Promise of Citizenship
2. Policing the Soul: The Cellular Construction of Christian Citizenship
3. Onward, Christian Soldier: Solitary Responsibility and Spiritual Warfare
4 .The Founding Fathers: The Problem of Fatherhood and the Generational Imagination
5. Hands of Love: Christian Charity and the Place of the Indigenous
6 .Cities of God: International Theologies of Citizenship

Disappointment: A Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"City of God [is] an important contribution that is provocative, engaging, and challenging all at once."

Anthony Shenodan Ethnologist

Provides a rich perspective on the diversity of Christian conceptualizations of citizenship.

Missiology

O’Neill has a fine eye for urban Guatemalan existence.

The Americas - David Stoll

"City of God [is] an important contribution that is provocative, engaging, and challenging all at once."

American Ethnologist - Anthony Shenoda