Deliverance in Catholic Charismatic Renewal: a study of religious experience

Abstract

This project aims to address aspects of the phenomenon of religious healing from a Roman Catholic Church movement known as the Charismatic Renewal.Through a religious practice known as "deliverance" - a kind of ritual in which the existence of distress conferred by evil entities is central - I intend to describe the problem of healing through the concept of network, insofar as we are faced with a universe that integrates potentially different beings: the faithful and demons, humans and non-humans (Latour, 1994, 2001, 2002, 2005). The project focuses on three issues: The first is the study of the ritual of "deliverance" (practices, performances and rules), people who undergo it; the second is aimed at, based on recent advances of phenomenology in anthropology, through the work of Thomas J. Csordas (1990, 1994, 2004), questioning the extent to which religious experience is apprehended by an analysis based on a psychologizing positioning within people the genesis of the sufferings and misfortunes for which they are going through; the third , as opposed to the second, concerns the assumption that the concept of the network (Latour, 2005) allows us to approach symmetrical connections, attributions and distributions made between adepts and demons, without reducing the latter to the poles of collective representation malaise or the subjectivation of daily torments. As for the ethnographic ground, I intend to work with prayer groups in the city of São Paulo/SP. Prayer groups are the main expression of renewal and can be understood as the primary instance of the manifestation of the sacred, the use of Charisms, the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, the "deliverance". (AU)