Forms of Speech, Religion, and Social Resistance Cláudio Carvalhaes This issue This issue of Cross Currents wants to work at the crossings of several currencies: religious movements, social resistance, public speech/performance, all within a demarcated global context. The intent of this issue is to examine that which is happening in our societies, from economic structures to street protests that form and shape our feelings, our habits, our laws, our forms of contestation, and consequently, who we are becoming throughout these performative processes and what sort of world we are creating. At first, the whole idea of this issue was intended to expand the notion of public discourses, and within this qualification, the communal aspects of a “sermon,” seen as this self‐sustained performative event done by a preacher alone. The hope was to expand the notion of individual pubic speaking into larger systems of communal work and social accountability. Having lived in United States for almost twenty years, I have come to realize that here, there is always a grounding sense of the individual who does and thinks and affects reality, always subverting the social by way of the individual who does this, who says that, most often from a community that is not always considered as part of that speech. Coming from Latin America, where I grew up seeing social movements putting down a military dictatorship and electing both a peasant and a woman as presidents of the country, it has been strange to live in this very individualized society. However, things have drastically changed in Brazil and in the United States as well. The savagery of the neoliberal project has taken over many societies, undoing social ties and leaving the individual at the center of those disappearing societies. It seems that we are all bowing down to Margaret Thatcher, who once said “… there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” What this individually focused culture does is to reinforce a sense of life that is lived without dependency or interconnections, but is based instead on individual gestures of transformation. No wonder the sense of loneliness and fear of being disconnected are two of the major diseases of our times. And no wonder that the whole sense of celebrity is so heightened, a norm for cultural orientation. To the point that even good critical theologians in the USA are making cases for the need for pastors and theologians to be superstars, as if to place themselves within the flow of the culture. It seems that every Protestant denomination needs a pastor superstar who will give a sense of coolness to his/her denomination. In the USA, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the lone ranger figure still looms large as an ineffable representative place of social‐celebrity recognition. What all this phenomenon does it to create a sense of political voluntarism, the feeling that the individual is the (only) one able to change anything. Under this scenario, the individual appears either as a volunteer who, out of altruism, gives her time to make a better world; or as a benefactor who will, out of the combination of altruism, money, and particular desires for self‐accomplishment, support good causes that she agrees with and that will sustain a certain group/mission/order. This voluntarism manages to strip away the civic duties of the individual that go beyond voting, which is itself a choice, and proposes that by voting, she has exhausted her responsibility toward the polis. In this way, she is not to be involved in crafting the major laws of the country or the way in which wealth is used in her community or what is needed for the good of the country. She becomes a passive volunteer who carries not only the idea of a certain type of patriotism/identity, but who also sustains a class struggle that she doesn't want to perceive. The power of the state, with a very clear organization of principles and ideologies, bombards any form of connection or association between individuals that can, for any reason, create groups of resistance. She is then left on her...