In the beginning was the Word: spiritists and spiritism in the religion of Brazil in modern age

Author(s)

Celia da Graça Arribas

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-08-15

Examining board members

Jose Reginaldo Prandi; Eliane Hojaij Gouveia; Bernardo Lewgoy; Marcelo Ayres Camurça Lima; Ricardo Mariano

• Advisor: Jose Reginaldo Prandi

Abstract

Within the movement of confessional pluralization led by secularization (a characteristic of Brazilian religious modernity), I circumscribe, for the purpose of this study, a more specific process, namely, the institutional densification of Kardecist Spiritism between the decades of 1920 and 1960. Through the examination of trajectories of relevant agents in this segment and their religious intellectual production, the analysis took into account the material and symbolic disputes between distinct forms of spiritist worldviews. Through this prism, the objective was to understand and explain how spiritist belief systems are articulated and what are the actual sources of authority. There are two work fronts. The first one basically consists in a historical reconstitution of some important coordinates for the understanding of both the scenery and the spiritist cast. On the second work front, the purpose was to build a sociological definition of what could be a spiritist clergy, and, more particularly, what outlines characterize the different roles played by the various actors on the scene (AU)