Engaging Coloniality

The fifteen chapters of Engaging Coloniality tell a complex and multifaceted story of Latin American Christianity. Latin America was the first region of the colonized world to be Christianized. As no form of Christianity preexisted the colonial invasion of Latin America, no Latin American Christian story can be told without reference to colonialism. Throughout its five-hundred-year history in Latin America, Christianity has taken multiple forms. This history is presented as in no other volume available in English. Primarily non-Eurocentric perspectives alternate between continuity and transformations. Rather than emphasizing denominational branches, this volume focuses on liberative, decolonial, and intercultural movements. This book is cutting-edge scholarship on Latin American religion and theology, and the featured contributors represent the extent of a continent where almost six hundred million Christians live today. Latin American Christian identity has never been homogeneous, and the volume describes countless Christian spiritualities and practices resulting from continuous encounters, tensions, and negotiations over five centuries. These encounters have not taken place in a historical vacuum but as part of a broader history in which visible and invisible power disparities still inform the limits, challenges, and promises of the Christian experiment in the region.

Raimundo C. Barreto Jr. is Associate Professor of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and was one of the conveners of the World Christianity Conference at Princeton Seminary. His most recent books include Protesting Poverty: Protestants, Social Ethics, and the Poor in Brazil (2023) and Base Ecumenism: Latin American Contributions to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology (2025).


Mark A. Lamport has been a professor for nearly forty years at theological schools in the United States and Europe. He is coauthor of Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians (2021), coeditor of the seven-book series The Global Story of Christianity, and coeditor of Emerging Theologies from the Global South (2023). He works from Grand Rapids and Fort Myers.