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The issues of gender, sexuality and reproduction have gained a strong public presence in Latin America in recent years. Political agendas have begun gradually to include topics related to LGBTI rights and access of people "especially women " to reproductive justice. In some cases, these processes have generated policies, laws and judgments favorable to women and LGBTI movements?s demands. For example, in recent years, countries as diverse as Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil allowed same-sex marriage, whether through the adoption of laws or by favorable rulings, after broad political and social debates. Other countries, including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Chile, still do not recognize same-sex marriage, but have allowed civil unions. Argentina and Bolivia also adopted laws of gender identity which, among other things, guarantee the right to recognition of self-perceived identity over the one assigned at birth. Moreover, in recent years, Uruguay and the Federal District of Mexico have legalized abortion under a trimester-based system, while other countries have expanded the decriminalized grounds for terminating a pregnancy voluntarily, despite maintaining the illegality of abortion.However, the successful expansion of rights with respect to gender, sexuality and reproduction, is not a linear process or free from controversy and backlashes. In 1997, for example, El Salvador banned abortion without exception, a decision emulated by Nicaragua in 2007. In 2015, the Peruvian Congress rejected the adoption of a civil union law. In addition, since at least 1998 Latin America has seen a wave of litigation and legislative processes against emergency contraception (Peñas Defago and Morán Faúndes, 2014). Some of these have been reversed. In Chile, a law was passed in 2010 during Michelle Bachelet?s first administration (2006-2010) allowing the public health system to provide emergency contraception, which reversed an unfavorable ruling of the Constitutional Court in 2008. In Honduras and elsewhere, however, bans on emergency contraception remain.Considering the ongoing and often public controversy around these issues, it is necessary to develop and deepen the frames through which we understand how these dynamics unfold in the region. To this end, the contributors to this special issue understand gender and sexuality as public and political fields characterized by tensions, disputes and struggles over power, including state power.

"This book explores the history and evolution of Inochentism, a controversial new religious movement that emerged in the Russian and Romanian borderlands of what is now Moldova and Ukraine in the context of the Russian revolutionary period. It centres around the charismatic preaching of Inochentie, a monk of the Orthodox Church, who inspired an apocalyptic movement that was soon labelled heretical by the Orthodox Church and persecuted as socially and politically subversive by Soviet and Romanian state authorities. Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity charts the emergence and development of Inochentism through the twentieth century based on hagiographies, oral testimonies, press reports, state legislation and a wealth of previously unstudied police and secret police archival material. Focusing on the role that religious persecution and social marginalization played in the transformation of this understudied and much vilified group, the author explores a series of counter-narratives that challenge the mainstream historiography of the movement and highlight the significance of the concept of 'liminality' in relation to the study of new religious movements and Orthodoxy. This book constitutes a systematic historical study of an Eastern European 'home-grown' religious movement taking a 'grass-roots' approach to the problem of minority religious identities in twentieth century Eastern Europe. Consequently, it will be of great interest to scholars of new religions movements, religious history and Russian and Eastern European studies" --

Both geographically and historically, schizophrenia may have emerged from a psychosis that was more florid, affective, labile, shorter lived and with a better prognosis. It is conjectured that this has occurred with a reflexive self-consciousness in Western and globalising societies, a development whose roots lie in Christianity. Every theology also presents a psychology. Six novel aspects of Christianity may be significant for the emergence of schizophrenia—an omniscient deity, a decontexualised self, ambiguous agency, a downplaying of immediate sensory data, and a scrutiny of the self and its reconstitution in conversion.

The history of community is best understood as an archive of collective memory. The history of Christianity in Kerala—the Southernmost state of India, where Christians belonging to different castes/sects constitute around twenty percent of the total population—has unfolded in an ensemble of multiple narratives about community. Nonetheless, caste and sectarianism have been the vantage points for the historiographical analysis of the Christian community in Kerala. As a result, experiences of a "minor" community, with its heterogeneous genealogies, has often been translated into the homogenous language of the colonial and nationalistic discourses of Hindu majoritarian "secular" nation-state. There has been little space for narratives that explicate community as a subjective experience, based on ontology and belief. This study, hence, explores textual universes of Christianity in Kerala, as an experiential category to engage with communities in transition. In doing so, the analysis problematizes the existing archive as that which identifies a faith community as a historically available category and re-reads and extends this archive to enable new interpretations of Christian subjectivity in the region. We re-read historical narratives in an attempt to destabilize the ways in which the history of communities is perceived as a chronologically evolved structure of events. The paper proceeds by critically analyzing various contemporary Malayalam texts that offer new narratives of Christianity, which, foreground heterogeneous genealogies of a community-in-the-becoming. These narratives of Christianity are identifiably at loggerheads with both the canonical and historical understanding of Christianity in Kerala. The community's history is unfolded in these texts as an experiential category with political implications for the imagination of Christianity in the region, and in doing so offer an analytical frame to identify community within its discursive formations. The paper argues that Christianity in Kerala manifests an ...

The book, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala, by Amy L. Sherman, is reviewed.

Whether picketing outside abortion clinics, speaking out at school board meetings, or attending anti-death penalty vigils, many Americans have publicly opposed local, state, or federal government policies on the basis of their religious convictions. In this book, Jason Bivins examines the growing phenomenon of Christian protest against civil authority and political order in the United States. He argues that since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of religious activism against what the protesters perceive as government's excessive power and lack of moral principle. Calling this phenomenon "Christian antiliberalism," Bivins finds at its center a belief that American politics is based on a liberal tradition that threatens the practice of a religious life and gives government too much social and economic influence. Focusing on the Catholic pacifism of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the Jonah House resistance community, the Christian Right's homeschooling movement, and the evangelical Sojourners community, Bivins combines religious studies with political theory to explore the common ground shared by these disparate groups. Despite their vast ideological and institutional differences, these activists justify their actions in overtly religious terms based on a rejection of basic tenets of the American political system. Analyzing the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional forms of political identity and affiliation that characterize American civic life today, this book sheds light on the complex relations between religion and democratic society