The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil by Maria José de Abreu (review)

Breathe in and then breathe out. Input, output. Reception and distribution. The text of Maria José de Abreu’s The Charismatic Gymnasium has a respiratory rhythm to its cadence, drawing readers deeply into the religious, political, haptic, and circulatory systems working in contemporary Charismatic Brazilian Catholicism before expanding out to consider the larger networked extremities of Brazil’s body politic and plexus of right-wing Christian ideology that has been of fueling social metamorphoses rapidly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. de Abreu’s richly textured ethnography centers on the voltaic connections among bodies, theological ideas, and right-wing political authority found in Brazil and beyond in the 2010s. In doing so, de Abreu traces how the dynamic conditions of religious praxis, tele-dynamic social movements, and local political contingencies are enmeshed in the sensorial production of charismatic communities. With deft detail, de Abreu pays close attention to how kinetic worship, materiality, and media practices are synced together and broadcasted as hybridized and “paradoxically fluid totalitarianism” borne out in body, soul, and society (31).