This volume examines the lives of more than thirty-five key personalities in Latin American law with a focus on how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law in their countries and the region. The book is a significant contribution to our ability to understand the work and perspectives of jurists and their effect on legal development in Latin America. The individuals selected for study exhibit wide-ranging areas of expertise from private law and codification, through national public law and constitutional law, to international developments that left their mark on the region and the world. The chapters discuss the jurists within their historical, intellectual, and political context. The editors selected jurists after extensive consultation with legal historians in various countries of the region looking at the jurist’s particular merits, contributions to law in general, religious perspective, and importance within the specific country and period under consideration. Giving the work a diversity of international and methodological perspectives, the chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars and historians from Latin America and around the world. The collection will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between law and religion. Political, social, legal, and religious historians among other readers will find, for the first time in English, authoritative treatments of the region’s essential legal thinkers and authors. Students and other who may not read Spanish will appreciate these clear, accessible, and engaging English studies of the region’s great jurists.

Noted theologian Samuel Escobar offers a magisterial survey and study of Christology in Latin America. In Search of Christ in Latin America examines the figure of Jesus Christ in the context of Latin American culture, starting with the first Spanish influence in the sixteenth century and moving through popular religiosity and liberationist themes in Catholic and Protestant thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, culminating in an important description of the work of the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (FTL). Escobar provides theological, historical, and cultural analysis of Latin American understandings of Christ and places liberation theology within its social and revolutionary context. This book is an important step toward a rich understanding of the spiritual reality and powerful message of Jesus.

This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American history, John Lynch sets out to explore the reception of Christianity by native peoples and how it influenced their social and religious lives as the centuries passed. As attentive to modern times as to the colonial period, Lynch also explores the extent to which Indian religion and ancestral ways survived within the new Christian culture.The book follows the development of religious culture over time by focusing on peak periods of change: the response of religion to the Enlightenment, the emergence of the Church from the wars of independence, the Romanization of Latin American religion as the papacy overtook the Spanish crown in effective control of the Church, the growing challenge of liberalism and the secular state, and in the twentieth century, military dictators' assaults on human rights. Throughout the narrative, Lynch develops a number of special themes and topics. Among these are the Spanish struggle for justice for Indians, the Church's position on slavery, the concept of popular religion as distinct from official religion, and the development of liberation theology.