History, but not necessarily good reading.
South America in pre-Hispanic times was dominated by the Inca culture (Peru), with a tendency to expand into the Inca Empire (or Tahuantinsuyo in the Quichua language). Towards the North (Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela), the cultures it met were of the Chibcha family. Toward the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay), Inca expansion encountered the diversity of the Magellan peoples (Chile), the peoples of the Pampas (Argentina), and the Chaco cultures (Paraguay). In Brazil, there were two vast regions with their respective cultures, i.e., Eastern Brazil and the
Amazon region.
In the sixteenth century, South America was dominated in the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, provoking a cultural shock as the sociopolitical organization was forcibly dismantled by a culture characterized by the dominating presence of Catholic Christianity. For some 300 years, the Catholic Church took root in the fibers of Latin American culture until it became a constituent of its being. This was not by decree; it was a process, slow and complex, by which means Catholicism became part of the culture of these lands.
In the nineteenth century, the Protestant insertion on the continent began. One of the pioneers of this process was Diego (James) Thompson, a Baptist colporteur of the British Bible Society, who reached Buenos Aires in 1818 to promote the Lancaster system of reading (1) which had achieved a measure of success in England. Diego Thompson also worked in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, founding in the last mentioned country the first Bible Society of Latin America in 1825.
Posted 10/30/2010 11:36 pm
