Engaging Coloniality: The Liberative Story of Christianity in Latin America - Hardcover

by Raimundo C. Barreto (Editor), Mark A. Lamport (Editor)

The fifteen chapters of Engaging Coloniality tell a complex and multifaceted story of Latin American Christianity. Latin America was the first region of the colonized world to be Christianized. As no form of Christianity preexisted the colonial invasion of Latin America, no Latin American Christian story can be told without reference to colonialism. Throughout its five-hundred-year history in Latin America, Christianity has taken multiple forms. This history is presented as in no other volume available in English. Primarily non-Eurocentric perspectives alternate between continuity and transformations. Rather than emphasizing denominational branches, this volume focuses on liberative, decolonial, and intercultural movements. This book is cutting-edge scholarship on Latin American religion and theology, and the featured contributors represent the extent of a continent where almost six hundred million Christians live today. Latin American Christian identity has never been homogeneous, and the volume describes countless Christian spiritualities and practices resulting from continuous encounters, tensions, and negotiations over five centuries. These encounters have not taken place in a historical vacuum but as part of a broader history in which visible and invisible power disparities still inform the limits, challenges, and promises of the Christian experiment in the region.

Author Biography

Raimundo C. Barreto Jr. is Associate Professor of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and was one of the conveners of the World Christianity Conference at Princeton Seminary. His most recent books include Protesting Poverty: Protestants, Social Ethics, and the Poor in Brazil (2023) and Base Ecumenism: Latin American Contributions to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology (2025).



Mark A. Lamport has for nearly forty years been a professor at graduate theological schools in the United States and Europe. He is author, editor, or coeditor of over twenty books. Along with the present volume, he has coedited other recent titles in the Global Story of Christianity series from Cascade Books, including Entangling Web and Expanding Energy (2024).