Popular Searches
When Princeton Theological Seminary students traveled to Brazil this year, they were prepared for an intensive learning experience: Visits to religious sites, meetings with theologians, and discussions with scholars.
But the two-week trip was also a spiritual journey, one in which students learned about faith through encounters with everyday Brazilians in churches and on the streets of city neighborhoods. Three days after arriving, the 20 students and three faculty members accompanied the Rev. Paulo César Pereira, a beloved Baptist minister, through a poor neighborhood in Olinda, part of the greater Recife metropolitan area. They watched as he interacted with the community in a display of mutual connection and trust.
“He would stop in people’s homes and offer prayers, and then he would turn to us and say: ‘can I get some volunteers from the Seminary students?’’’ recalls Nana Evison, a second-year MDiv student. “And then I’d hear my classmates praying for these people in their homes, and it was so beautiful.
It was also a fitting introduction to “Brazil: Religion and Culture,” a travel course organized by Professor Raimundo César Barreto Jr. that provides a penetrating look into a society where faith is abundant, complex, and wildly diverse in its expression.
A few days after the visit to Recife, the group worshiped at the Church of Our Lady of Rosary of Black Men in the city of Salvador, where the Catholic mass is celebrated with Afro-Brazilian music, percussion and dance. The lively mix reflects a painful past: The church has its roots in communities of freed and enslaved Africans who were not allowed to worship with Catholics of white European descent.
It was so eye opening. The colonial legacy and the resistance – they’re both visible in the religious landscape.
By the time the course wrapped up in late January, students had met with key liberation theologians like Ivone Gebara, a Catholic nun and eco-feminist, and Júlio Renato Lancellotti, a Catholic priest who feeds hundreds of homeless people daily on the streets of São Paulo. The class also visited religious communities including Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and the Afro-Brazilian faith of Candomblé. They discussed human rights with judicial authorities; and met with local organizers and interfaith groups.
“This course is about relationships above all else,” says Barreto, who grew up in Brazil and studies its religious movements. “It is about meeting community; meeting people, the religious leaders, and the leaders of social movements.It is quite different than simply traveling with a travel agency,” he added with a wry grin.
Heath W. Carter, Associate Professor of American Christianity and Director of PhD Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary who co-taught the course for the first time, agreed. “This was a deeply relational experience that was only possible through Raimundo’s connections,” Carter said. “We went to churches, and we had dinner in people’s homes. We sat in the sacristy where they gave us bowls of feijoada” (a black bean stew that enslaved Africans concocted from scraps).
Brazil is predominantly Christian. But the nation of 212 million also teems with other religions and belief systems. One stop by the group was at the largest Buddhist temple in South America. Barreto, says Brazil is the ideal place to experience the dynamics of a religiously plural society.
“Religion is everywhere,” Barreto said. “It is unavoidable, and that is what makes the course so rich.”
In one visit to a village where residents practice Candomblé, students watched riveted as a woman made palm oil from scratch, a cultural and spiritual act of the African diaspora.
Just experiencing that was transforming. We’re right there with the members in their own community, doing what they do on a daily basis, and sharing a meal with them. That was amazing
Students also found that going to church, even in seemingly familiar denominations, brought unexpected and welcome twists. Alvarez recalled a Baptist service where, “during the sign of the peace, people you don’t know hug you.The way they worship is more embodied and more spirit-led,” she said. “It was a humbling experience that made us feel like we’re one family in Christ.”
Evison marveled at how the service at Our Lady of Rosary of Black Men blended music, preaching, and worship into one seamless whole. “Ordinarily, you’d think you’d have worship, and you’d have preaching, but it wasn’t like that,” she said. “There wasn’t this emphasis on separation or those very clear lines of what is and what’s not. Just to see that was incredible.”
The class also saw some unsettling parallels with their own country: An emboldened religious right aligned with authoritarian political figures.
“Brazil and the United States can be seen as slightly distorted mirrors of each other,” Barreto said. “In this course, we think a lot about these distorted images in terms of the culture, the legal system, and the political world.”
Brazil is a center of World Christianity, a term that refers to Christianity’s enormous growth across the Global South and the new trends and movements emerging as a result. One trend, Barreto explained, has been the growth of conservative evangelical Protestants, including Pentecostal Christians, which has fueled the rise of a religious right that helped elevate Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency in 2018.
Students engaged those issues through lectures and readings, comparing and contrasting the developments in Brazil with the religious right in America and its support for Donald Trump. In São Paulo, the group dove deeper into those themes at a panel discussion titled, “Evangelicals and the Growth of the Extreme Right: Brazil and the USA.” The event took place at an independent evangelical church that lost members after it became more welcoming of LGBTQIA+ people.
“I thought there would be 10 or 15 people in the audience,” said Carter, who was among the panelists. “But it was a packed house, filled with people who came out on a weeknight because they’re really engaged in these questions of what their faith means to them and how to live in society.”
At other stops—including meetings with interfaith and ecumenical groups—the students saw evidence of a renewal and reinvention of Latin American liberation theology, the largely Catholic movement that emerged in the 1960s to support the poor and stand up to oligarchy and economic exploitation.
“The influence of that movement remains, not only among Catholics, but actually involving many evangelicals, and people from other religious traditions,” Barreto said. “They want a say in the public sphere, especially in keeping that connection with the oppressed, who are no longer just the economically oppressed. There is now a greater awareness of oppression against black Brazilians, women, and queer communities.”
Weeks after returning to campus, students said the journey was still vivid in their minds. Patterson was moved by encounters with Afro-Brazilian communities. In a Baptist church, he saw parallels with his own African American heritage: a welcoming spirit and vibrant expressions of faith and resiliency.
That connection across hemispheres, he says, will endure as he pursues his goal of becoming a “working pastor”—a pastor who moves beyond purely administrative roles to work directly with the community.
“I saw that the Afro-Brazilian people have learned what the African American people have learned: how to survive with the broken pieces,” Patterson said. “In the middle of political oligarchy and extremism, they are still cultivating and taking care of their community.”
Evison, similarly, recalled how Rev. Pereira interacted with the poor of Recife, modeling for students a ministry driven by compassion and conscience.
Seeing how he was interacting in the community was clarifying to me. He really makes it about serving people, about walking beside people, about being there for people. And that is the kind of person I want to be in ministry
Alvarez is already working on a project that could represent a new chapter in the field of World Christianity. She is researching the emergence of Pentecostal congregations formed by LGBTQ communities in Latin America, a development that just a few years ago would have been “unthinkable,” she said.
The journey to Brazil, where such congregations are taking shape, inspired her to continue doing on-the-ground research that blends theology with social sciences. And like the other students, Alvarez expressed immense gratitude toward Barreto for creating a course that opened so many possibilities.
“We walked the steps that Dr. Barreto had walked, and we met the people who are meaningful in his academic and personal journey,” Alvarez said. “People opened their houses, churches, and organizations because they trust and admire Raimundo.We wouldn’t have the access to all these amazing people and initiatives without that trust.”
