This format offers an opportunity for more substantive conversation about works in progress than the traditional panel presentation. The three authors will share a brief overview of their work for the benefit of the audience and two respondents, who will have read the longer versions of the papers, will share comments and questions designed to stimulate discussion and move the conversation forward. Audience questions and suggestions will follow.
The Spiritist Movement, organized by Allan Kardec in the second half of the 19th century, has seen remarkable involvement of women, both historically and in contemporary Brazil. This article addresses Spiritism's absence of hierarchy, emphasis on charity work, and mediumship nature, which align closely with traits traditionally associated with femininity, making it a feminist religion. Furthermore, millions of women throughout Brazil, victims of all types of violence, are assisted by Spiritist Societies through massive charity work organized mainly through women.
In January of 1932, the military government of El Salvador systematically killed around 30,000 people, mainly Nahua-Pipil, in the Western region of the country over several weeks in massacre called “La Matanza”, or “The Killing/Slaughter.” As El Salvador reckons with violences past and present, Nahua-Pipil communities resist state oppression and call attention to ancestral meanings of justice and dignity for Indigenous communities. In this paper, I highlight the connections between decades of state-sponsored violence including the 1980 assassination of Monseñor Romero. I will also discuss ceremony as an embodied and sacred memory praxis for both liberation theologists and Nahua-Pipil communities in honoring ancestors in the aftermath of massacre, and across space and time. What will be shared about La Matanza of 1932 in this talk details a public commemoration ceremony in Izalco, El Salvador as well as observations from the beatification and canonization of Monseñor Romero.
Some church music scholars have recorded the effervescence of interdenominational, nationalistic, and ecumenical liturgical projects between the 1960s and 1970s (Hawn 2003; Silva Steuernagel 2021). Most trace the influences of the Vatican Second’s liturgical reformation to Latin American liberation theologians (Elias 2021). Few scholars, though, have considered if indigenismo—an early twentieth-century Latin American political and ideological movement that utilized essentialized notions of indigeneity (Nielsen 2020)—plays a role in the theological and musicological debates that led to the Sacrosanctum Concilium. This paper investigates how early Latin American twentieth-century indigenista musical projects influenced projects of Latin American liberation theologians. By providing a historical account of Indigenismo and cross-referencing hymnological literature on early twentieth-century church music, I argue that broader cultural, socio-economical, and political trends, as well as indigenismo, are imbricated with the theological projects articulated in the Sacrosanctum Concilium.