Since its inception in Roman Catholic Spain in the 1940s, the Cursillo movement has been a steadily-growing phenomenon and has spread into many Protestant churches worldwide under various names. The weekend initiation is often a deeply-felt experience that boasts of many conversions and recommitments. Yet in this comprehensive analysis of Cursillo the author finds theological concerns, questions about the propriety of the methods, and complications such as disaffection from the local church, transfer of loyalty to the Cursillo community, and a significant drop-out rate, raising implications for similar, spiritual movements. Interviews with former Cursillo participants confirmed many of these conclusions but also raised a challenge to the church: many Cursillo participants do not perceive vital faith in their local church. The author suggests that the Cursillo attempts to imitate the work of the church in an extraordinary form and that this might initiate some of the unhelpful results. The church would be better served by seeking to revitalize its ordinary ministries of Word and sacrament, prayer, community, and Sabbath observance.

The internationally growing Cursillo movement, or "short course in Christianity," founded in 1944 by Spanish Catholic lay practitioners, has become popular among American Catholics and Protestants alike. This lay-led weekend experience helps participants recommit to and live their faith. Emphasizing how American Christians have privileged the individual religious experience and downplayed denominational and theological differences in favor of a common identity as renewed people of faith, Kristy Nabhan-Warren focuses on cursillistas--those who have completed a Cursillo weekend--to show how their experiences are a touchstone for understanding these trends in post-1960s American Christianity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork as well as historical research, Nabhan-Warren shows the importance of Latino Catholics in the spread of the Cursillo movement. Cursillistas' stories, she argues, guide us toward a new understanding of contemporary Christian identities, inside and outside U.S. borders, and of the importance of globalizing American religious boundaries.

Winner of 2014 Book Award for Excellence in Missiology from the American Society of Missiology Winner of the 2015 Christianity Today Award for Missions/Global Affairs Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Predominantly Catholic for centuries, Latin America is still largely Catholic today, but the religious continuity in the region masks enormous changes that have taken place in the past five decades. In fact, it would be fair to say that Latin American Christianity has been transformed definitively in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Religious change has not been obvious because its transformation has not been, as in Africa and Asia, the sudden and massive growth of a new religion. It has been rather a simultaneous revitalization and fragmentation that threatened, awakened, and ultimately brought to a greater maturity a dormant and parochial Christianity. The rapid growth of Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, forced Catholics to adopt a more active and dynamic approach to their religion. Although many Catholics left their church to become Pentecostals, many others responded to the Protestant challenge by joining new Catholic movements. Today, Latin American Christianity is so energized that the region is sending missionaries to Africa, Europe, and the United States. In The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity, Todd Hartch examines the changes that have swept across Latin America in the last fifty years and situates them in the context of the growth of Christianity in the global South.