It took me many months to finish reading Miles Richardson’s comparison of Latin American Catholicism and Anglo-American Protestantism. The publicists at Louisiana State University (where Richardson is a chaired professor in Latin American Studies, with “no plans to retire”) call it “bracingly original” and “rooted in the author’s personal story of why he became an anthropologist.” I found the early chapters (the first third of the tome) undisciplined and self-absorbed. Topics careened from the author’s youth to the dawn of human awareness, from the brain sizes of hominids, to their feet, their hands, their tools, and their Neanderthal fellows, to Jacques Derrida, Ernest Becker, and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, and then to participant-observation in anthropology. Such a wobbly trajectory made me wonder if the man in the cowboy hat on the dust jacket (“Whiskey Bent & Hell Bound,” the sign says in his office) has both hands on the reins.At the beginning of chapter 4, he addresses his companion, the mysterious “You” with whom he converses throughout the work: “You, having traveled with me down the twists and turns of the Christian story in the New World, rightly grow impatient. I have promised, you remind me, I have promised that we will find how they find Christ” (p. 134). My patience exhausted, I had to remind myself that three very prominent scholars whose work I admire have written enthusiastic blurbs for this work. Yi-Fu Tuan states that it is “a superb example of what humanist scholarship can offer both specialists and the general reader in our time.” James L. Peacock calls it “fabulous, . . . lucid, poignant, moving, and compelling.” James W. Fernandez remarks that Richardson, “raised a Southern Baptist but now an anthropologist, has been a long-term participant observer of Spanish American Catholicism” and has undertaken “a remarkable journey of Christian comparison and religious revelation.” With these three evaluations encouraging me, I persevered. And I am glad I did.At its core, Being-in-Christ and Putting Death in Its Place compares the religious practices at the Catholic church in Nueva Esperanza de San Pablo, Costa Rica, and the First Baptist Church in Mt. Hope, Texas. The book contrasts their architectural forms (ornate temple vs. foursquare auditorium), their liturgical emphases (Eucharist vs. sermon), their sensory channels (eyes and hands and their palpable icons vs. ears and their dramatic words), their biblical interpretations (sacramentalist vs. literalist), their devotional outpourings (pilgrimages to shrines vs. revivalist homecomings), and their eschatological orientations (suffering with Christ crucified vs. triumphant with Christ ascended). For all their differences, however, both share the aspiration of “being-in-Christ” (Albert Schweitzer’s phrase), which means to live by virtue of his suffering, death, and resurrection. As one Latin American man told Richardson, “‘Christ died so that we too could learn how to suffer and how to die. To live is to die. It is part of the human tragedy. Through his actions, Christ teaches us this tragedy and how we must face death’” (p. 263).For all his discomfort with both Catholic and Protestant practice—expressed repeatedly throughout the text—the author finds the Christian project uplifting. “My contention,” he writes, “is that a Christ nailed to a cross with blood flowing down his face and a Christ strolling through the streets of gold in a heavenly city are, in fact, affirmations of our humanity” (p. 281). “When we are in-Christ,” Richardson continues, “the weak, the tortured, the despised, the crucified, and the dead, normally objects of scorn, become icons of solidarity. This symbolic reversal, so compelling in all religions, is Christianity’s strong suit” (p. 291). The author concludes that “the gift of Christ is the gift of death. . . . The vision of death brings awareness of self, and the self, once awake, knows death. . . . The power of death that is released is the power of our presence. We affirm our solidarity in the face of absence. We, together, repeat with Paul, ‘O, death where is thy sting? O, grave where is thy victory?’ ” (pp. 330-1).
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Sep 1, 2007
Gerard Loughlin 
Open Access