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date: 08 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Latin America faces environmental crises that directly affect the health and well-being of its people, especially the poor. This essay discusses the involvement of religious groups in the myriad environmental struggles found in Latin America today. It charts religious beliefs and practices of indigenous religions, focusing on Roman Catholicism, liberation theology, ecofeminism, Protestants (emphasizing evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism), and diaspora religions of Latin America and the Caribbean. In each case, it analyzes religious symbols, theologies, myths, narratives, and rituals as they relate to the nonhuman world. It also examines the link between environmental ethics and action, the legacy of colonization in Latin America, religious syncretism and sacred/secular blurring, epistemology, and hermeneutics.

Keywords: Latin America, religious groups, religious beliefs, indigenous religions, Roman Catholicism, liberation theology, ecofeminism, environmental ethics, diaspora religions

Lois Ann Lorentzen

Lois Ann Lorentzen is professor of social ethics, associate director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas, and principal investigator for the Religion and Immigration Project at the University of San Francisco. She has authored or edited seven books and has written numerous articles in the fields of environmental ethics, religion and immigration, and gender and the environment. She is a former wilderness guide and misses it desperately.

Leavitt-Alcantara Salvador

Salvador Leavitt-Alcantara is a graduate student of systematic theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He received a Master of Arts in theology from Harvard University and is a recipient of the Hispanic Theological Initiative scholarship. He is studying the contributions of Latin American liberation theologies to global concepts of violence, justice, democracy, and environmental issues. He was born and raised in El Salvador.

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