Transforming Popular Catholicism: The El Shaddai Movement of the Philippines

265 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.This study argues that these Filipinos are transforming popular Catholic religiosity to cope with the economic and social realities of their times. Old Catholic notions of suffering, leftist ideologies of struggle and oppression, and old forms of sacred power and mediation no longer speak to the contemporary spiritual and material needs of many Filipinos. Revealing the voice of a marginalized sector of society, El Shaddai legitimizes desires for upward mobility while changing the way in which its members conceive of those desires. It offers a context and a language in which to remake oneself, and opens up a creative but controversial space of change within popular Filipino Roman Catholicism.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD