"The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" presented by The Connaught Global Challenge Initiative 'Connecting the Books' series
When and Where
Speakers
Description
The Connaught Global Challenge Initiative, Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil is pleased to present a new, online series for the upcoming Winter 2021 semester: Connecting the Books
"The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" by Maria José de Abreu
Monday, February 28, 2022
12:00 - 2:00 pm
Book Description:
In The Charismatic Gymnasium, Maria José de Abreu examines how Charismatic Catholicism in contemporary Brazil produces a new form of total power through a concatenation of the breathing body, theology, and electronic mass media. De Abreu documents a vast religious respiratory program of revival popularly branded as “the aerobics of Jesus.” Pneuma—the Greek term for air, breath, and spirit—is central to this aerobic program, whose goal is to labor on the athletic elasticity of spirit. Tracing the rhetoric, gestures, and spaces that together constitute this new theological community, de Abreu exposes the articulating forces among evangelical Christianity, neoliberal logics, and the rise of right-wing politics. By calling attention to how an ethics of pauperism vitally intersects with the neoliberal ethos of flexibility, de Abreu shows how paradoxes do not hinder but expand the Charismatic gymnasium. The result, de Abreu demonstrates, is the production of a fluid form of totalitarianism and Christianity in Brazil and beyond.
Maria José de Abreu is assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Her work engages with a range of anthropological, philosophical and literary debates about temporality, personhood, the human senses, and their technological extension.
The format of these events will include a brief introduction by an advanced graduate student, foregrounding the themes of Holy Infrastructures in relation to the respective ethnography, followed by a brief presentation by the author. General discussion and question-answer period to follow.
Since these are in-conversation events we ask that attendees read the respective ethnographies or part of them, which can be found in the University of Toronto online catalogue.