Lived Religion and Phenomenology of Religion: The Case of Latin America

Abstract

Although the study of religious phenomena from the perspective of lived religion was born in the North Atlantic countries, several researchers have adopted this approach in the Latin American context to account for the religious fact and its evolution. This orientation responds to the dissatisfaction with the conclusions reached by classical sociological theories when they try to explain the place and meaning of religion in the context of Latin American modernity, as in the case of the theories on secularization. This approach has proved promising, insofar as it offers evidence of the presence of the religious phenomenon in contemporary society that has not been sufficiently taken into account before. But, at the same time, it presents aspects that need to be clarified and/ or developed. One of them is the relationship between lived religion and the theoretical frameworks that, from the different social sciences, are intended to explain the religious phenomenon. This article offers some considerations on the fruitful relationship that can be established between lived religion and the phenomenology of religion. It identifies aspects in which both disciplines complement and enrich each other, as well as critical issues to be taken into account. Specifically, it proposes a phenomenological approach to two distinct and, at the same time, intertwined fields of analysis: lived religion and lived spirituality.