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The physical signs of Roman Catholicism pervade the Mexican countryside. Colonial churches and neighborhood chapels, wayside shrines, and mountaintop crosses dot the landscape. Catholicism also permeates the traditional cultures of rural communities, although this ideational influence is less immediately obvious. It is often couched in enigmatic idiom and imagery, and it is further obscured by the vestiges of pagan customs and the anticlerical attitudes of many villagers. These heterodox tendencies have even led some observers to conclude that Catholicism in rural Mexico is little more than a thin veneer on indigenous practice.

In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer John M. Ingham attempts to develop a modern semiotic and structuralist interpretation of traditional Mexican culture, an interpretation that accounts for the culture's apparent heterodoxy. Drawing on field research in Tlayacapan, Morelos, a village in the central highlands, he shows that nearly every domain of folk culture is informed with religious meaning. More precisely, the Catholic categories of spirit, nature, and evil compose the basic framework of the villagers' social relations and subjective experiences.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights.

This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.

Don Vasco de Quiroga (1470-1565) was the first bishop of Michoacán in Western Mexico. Driven by the desire to convert the native Purhépecha-Chichimec peoples to a purified form of Christianity, free of the corruptions of European Catholicism, he sought to establish New World Edens in Michoacán by congregating the people into pueblo-hospital communities, where mendicant friars could more easily teach them the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and the values of Spanish culture.

In this broadly synthetic study, Bernardino Verástique explores Vasco de Quiroga's evangelizing project in its full cultural and historical context. He begins by recreating the complex and not wholly incompatible worldviews of the Purhépecha and the Spaniards at the time of their first encounter in 1521. With Quiroga as a focal point, Verástique then traces the uneasy process of assimilation and resistance that occurred on both sides as the Spaniards established political and religious dominance in Michoacán. He describes the syncretisms, or fusions, between Christianity and indigenous beliefs and practices that arose among the Purhépecha and relates these to similar developments in other regions of Mexico.

Written especially for students and general readers, this book demonstrates how cultural and geographical environments influence religious experience, while it adds to our understanding of the process of indigenous appropriation of Christian theological concepts in the New World.

A study of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan, a historically beloved religious icon from sixteenth-century Mexico, and its evolving cultural importance.

The life-sized crucifix known as the Christ of Ixmiquilpan (also the Señor de Santa Teresa) was one of the most important artworks in colonial Mexico. The statue began as an ordinary devotional image, but in 1621 devotees witnessed it undergo a miraculous renovation that gave it a supernatural beauty. Over the next two and half centuries, its perceived power increased until it was surpassed in importance only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite its historical significance, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan’s history has yet to be fully told.

Derek Burdette brings the miraculous crucifix out of the shadows and explores its instrumental role in shaping the devotional culture of New Spain. Following the arc of the statue’s life, he chronicles the story of the statue’s creation, miraculous renovation, and subsequent veneration at the heart of Mexico City. He also reveals how colonial politics were woven into the statue’s life from the very start. Reconstructing the history of a key artwork, Miraculous Celebrity sheds new light on the intersection of art, faith, and politics in the Spanish colonial world.

There is no mystery shrouding the toppling pillars of Western civilization and human culture, and George Marlin can no longer watch. Like many readers who are seeing the same destructive forces roaming unchecked and wish to confront them, Marlin has with keenness composed a kind of response that contextualizes the problem and its historical masters, these so-called post-modern "monsters." Among these are Martin Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Comte, Mussolini, Hitler, and Marx. His treatment of Antonio Gramsci's "anti-Church" is particularly jolting and redeems the underrepresented efforts of two Catholic popes to defend human dignity. Marlin is notorious for making sense sting a bit in the reader who has been too complacent, and encouraging those who wish to fortify and steel the intuitions of the intellect.
            Modern Monsters exposes the lack of coherency and bitterness (the only 'natural' attributes of ideology) and claims that ideological thinking in the post-modern era is waging open war with the foundations of Judeo-Christian society. Its chief target is the Catholic Church. Marlin rightly calls out the irony in ideologues, as theirs is simply another kind of idolatry and "secular religion."
            This concise review of the fatal attraction to ideologies and their applications takes the reader quickly to the heart of the matter and introduces him to a plethora of voices that ought to be heard instead. Indeed, one of the delights of this book is the host of true intellects he calls upon to make his point. In that sense, despite his emphasis on a society in ruin, Marlin's lasting effect is leaving us in the company of those who model what it is to live as worthy heirs of the Western tradition.