Professor Manuel Vasquez will deliver the fifth lecture in the 2013-2014 At-Large Lectures on Religion series. He is Professor of Religion at the University of Florida. His lecture, like all others in the Center for the Study of Religion-sponsored series, is free and open to all. There will be a brief question-and-answer session and a reception following the lecture.
This presentation explores the conditions that have facilitated the global spread of Latin American and African Pentecostalisms. Focusing on the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and Nigerian the Redeemed Christian Church of God, two Neo-Pentecostals transnational churches which are spearheading this global dissemination, I argue that the great portability of Latin American and African Pentecostalisms is in large part due to the strategic use of embodied, performative technologies of self and an animated materiality, the efficaciousness of which is both a sign of and an instrument for the fulfillment of the Great Commission. The efficaciousness of Latin American and African neo-Pentecostal visceral aesthetics also dovetails with the dynamics of an electronically-mediated global capitalism.
