Overview

A richly cinematic and compelling look at priest-politicians in Brazil and their religious and secular entanglements What does desire have to reveal about the nature of power? Through a detailed focus on the lives and loves of Catholic priests as they enter the profane world of party politics, Maya Mayblin explores the complex intersection of democracy, patriarchy, and religiosity in Brazil. For over a hundred years, Catholic priests have been running for government office, challenging Brazil’s constitutional separation of church and state and its self-image as a modern, secular nation. Priests find themselves walking a tightrope between religious and secular demands in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. Vote of Faith is a beautifully crafted ethnography based upon decades of fieldwork that tells the story of the ambiguous and frequently transgressive relationship between Catholicism and state governance, a relationship ultimately mediated by kinship, gender, and sexuality. For the protagonists of Vote of Faith, democracy becomes a sphere in which divine will and human ambition compete with one another, a tension embedded in the vernacular concept of faith. In the Brazilian context, faith signifies a complex set of assumptions about the nature of the world, assumptions derived not just from Christianity, but also from Afro-Brazilian and secular ideas about power, causation, and human agency. In combining ethnographic, theological, and feminist perspectives, Vote of Faith places desiring bodies at the very heart of Catholicism’s complex connection to multiple forms of power and offers provocative new angles on the question of the secular. The first work by an anthropologist to explore the unique phenomenon of the mayor-priest, this book offers an essential new angle on emerging debates about secularity as the condition of separation of the religious from the political. Brimming with originality, Vote of Faith is required reading for those interested in the gendered and sexual dimensions of the secular, the plasticity of religion, and the fundamental nature of the world’s largest religious institution.

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9781531509088

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Reviews

In this elegantly creative feminist analysis, Mayblin shows how faith, abundance, and virile priestly celibacy animate Catholicism in political forms and foundational ways to the secular Brazilian state, prefiguring a close intertwining rather than a preconceived opposition between politics and religion.---Valentina Napolitano, author of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church This is a beautifully written book about passion, politics, and Catholicism in Brazil. Theoretically sophisticated yet personal in style, it uses ethnographic perspectives on 'mayor-priests' to provide new ways to think about both democracy and desire. Though deeply rooted in place and time, Vote and Faith is an important book for anybody interested in understanding how sexuality and celibacy, but also secularity and religion, are mutually implicated across religious institutions, political activities, and everyday lives.---Simon Coleman, University of Toronto Vote of Faith, a map of the dizzying, libidinal concatenations of politics, secularism, religion, kinship, gender, and desire in Northeastern Brazil, is at once empathic, provocative, and theoretically sharp. Covering territories that stretch from Catholic theology to psychoanalytic yearning to local realpolitik, it's a beautiful example of the thorough portrayal and complex analysis that only a first-rate ethnographer can produce and the book will be a touchstone for decades to come for those wrestling with these issues in Brazil and beyond.---Jon Bialecki, University of California San Diego, and author of A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement Through the stories of parish priests who enter local politics, Maya Mayblin offers a truly innovative intervention in debates about the Catholic Church and the secular state. Going beyond formal theories of secularism, Mayblin situates Brazilian mayor-priests within a complex political process that binds sexuality, kinship, and desire. The religiously produced body of the priest embodies both the democratic desires of local communities but also a response to democracy as an imperfect system. Guiding readers beyond Brazil, Mayblin insightful reconceptualizes the Catholic Church's enduring power as an institution that has reconstituted itself for centuries with the political and erotic at its heart.---Hillary Kaell, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McGill University and author of Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States

Vote of Faith is an astutely argued book addressing the importance of the libidinal economy to theopolitics, and to personal and political futures in democratic Brazil. With an elegant ethnography, it follows Catholic priests who leave the Church to run for mayor and make a political and economic difference in their congregation's life. This book is a welcoming rush of fresh air into the room of secularism studies worldwide.---Eduardo Dullo, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS/Brazil), and co-editor of A Horizon of (Im)possibilities: A Chronicle of Brazil's Conservative Turn At the moment when questions on the relation between desire, religion and politics reappear strongly within social sciences, along comes Vote of Faith as an ethnographically appealing contribution to the topics. In six well-crafted chapters, Mayblin draws a fine-grained portrait of the institutionally enduring, yet turbulent affair between politics and priesthood, secular power and Catholicism, faith and desire, the pastoral and the political, as incarnated in the person of the priest-mayor in Northeastern Brazil.---Maria Jos� de Abreu, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, and author of The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil In this elegantly creative feminist analysis, Mayblin shows how faith, abundance, and virile priestly celibacy animate Catholicism in political forms and foundational ways to the secular Brazilian state, prefiguring a close intertwining rather than a preconceived opposition between politics and religion.---Valentina Napolitano, author of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church This is a beautifully written book about passion, politics, and Catholicism in Brazil. Theoretically sophisticated yet personal in style, it uses ethnographic perspectives on 'mayor-priests' to provide new ways to think about both democracy and desire. Though deeply rooted in place and time, Vote and Faith is an important book for anybody interested in understanding how sexuality and celibacy, but also secularity and religion, are mutually implicated across religious institutions, political activities, and everyday lives.---Simon Coleman, University of Toronto Vote of Faith, a map of the dizzying, libidinal concatenations of politics, secularism, religion, kinship, gender, and desire in Northeastern Brazil, is at once empathic, provocative, and theoretically sharp. Covering territories that stretch from Catholic theology to psychoanalytic yearning to local realpolitik, it's a beautiful example of the thorough portrayal and complex analysis that only a first-rate ethnographer can produce and the book will be a touchstone for decades to come for those wrestling with these issues in Brazil and beyond.---Jon Bialecki, University of California San Diego, and author of A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement Through the stories of parish priests who enter local politics, Maya Mayblin offers a truly innovative intervention in debates about the Catholic Church and the secular state. Going beyond formal theories of secularism, Mayblin situates Brazilian mayor-priests within a complex political process that binds sexuality, kinship, and desire. The religiously produced body of the priest embodies both the democratic desires of local communities but also a response to democracy as an imperfect system. Guiding readers beyond Brazil, Mayblin insightful reconceptualizes the Catholic Church's enduring power as an institution that has reconstituted itself for centuries with the political and erotic at its heart.---Hillary Kaell, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McGill University and author of Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States

Through the stories of parish priests who enter local politics, Maya Mayblin offers a truly innovative intervention in debates about the Catholic Church and the secular state. Going beyond formal theories of secularism, Mayblin situates Brazilian mayor-priests within a complex political process that binds sexuality, kinship, and desire. The religiously produced body of the priest embodies both the democratic desires of local communities but also a response to democracy as an imperfect system. Guiding readers beyond Brazil, Mayblin insightful reconceptualizes the Catholic Church's enduring power as an institution that has reconstituted itself for centuries with the political and erotic at its heart.---Hillary Kaell, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McGill University and author of Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States

Author Information

Maya Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores religion, theology, politics, and gender in Brazil and beyond. She is the author of Gender, Morality and Catholicism in Brazil and co-editor of The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader.

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