Book Review
The Other Americas
The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity
by Todd Hartch
Oxford University Press, 2014
(294 pages, $24.95, paperback)
reviewed by Leon J. Podles
Todd Hartch, a professor of Latin American history at Eastern Kentucky College, maintains that Latin America has become both more Protestant and more Catholic in the past two generations. He holds that "Protestantism was a blessing in disguise for the Catholic Church. Nothing roused Latin American Catholics more than the spread of Protestantism."Catholicism was the universal religion of Latin America, but the Catholic Church encompassed a spectrum of religious modes, from the clerical, European Catholicism of the cities to the folk Catholicism of the countryside, where priests were rare, and which faded off into syncretism and paganism.
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Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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