Maria Jose de Abreu, "The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" (Duke UP, 2021)

An interview with Maria Jose de Abreu

Episode 128 of the New Books in Christian Studies podcast, hosted by Marshall Poe, titled "Maria Jose de Abreu, "The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" (Duke UP, 2021)" was published on November 9, 2021 and runs 101 minutes.

November 9, 2021 ·101m · New Books in Christian Studies

Summary

In The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil (Duke University Press, 2021), 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. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Episode Description