Pluralism, modernity and tradition: transformations in the religious field

Abstract

Latin American societies show themselves at this end of millennium with a deeply changed and renewed religious field, where different forms of religious expression - institutional and not institutional, traditional and new, permanent and short-lived, fundamentalists and performatics, sectarians and ecumenics - share a context of pluralism that doesn’t seem to put limits to the diversity. The present paper intends to discuss the dynamics of this religious field in the modernity, considering the religious diversity and the secularization as two historically associated processes. We try to recognize the importance of the religious analysis in the contemporaneous society as a vital element in the interpretation processes of the social facts and in the ones of building and rebuilding collective identities.