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Living one day at a time: Pentecostal fasting and Christian waiting in a context of food insecurity

Abstract: In this text, we analyze the practice of Pentecostal fasting in a slum marked by food insecurity. We argue that the voluntary deprivation of food evoked by Pentecostals as mediation before the divine alludes to a possibility of aspiration of the poor in a context in which the Pentecostal supernatural conforms textures, temporality, and spatiality. We add that this sense of aspiration evoked by fasting is configured in the relationship between temporality and spatiality (Das 2012). Thus, by giving up possible food in the name of the divine, believers seek immediate and future food security. This postulate is not a contradiction, it is a possibility that leads to the sense of “Christian waiting” for providence, a temporality experienced in the context of the favela in question, putting into perspective a notion of Christian transcendence.

Keywords:
fasting; Pentecostalism; food insecurity; Anthropology of Christianity


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