Abstract
Based on fieldwork developed between 2013 and 2016, this article is an ethnographic study concerning the concepts of “deliverance”, “discernment”, and “openness” among Christians who gather in a prayer group and/or are members of a Catholic community in São Paulo/SP, Brazil. Its aim is to describe a mode of existence in which to deliver is not to emancipate, but rather to attach, to commit oneself ever more intensely to God. It is not a path towards individual freedom, and consequently to the kind of autonomy associated with modern individualism. This commitment to strengthen the alliance with divinity instigates the Devil’s efforts to open a “breach” in the person’s “openness to God”, the driving force of deliverance. As it will be argued, the commungatory character of the relationship with divinity results in discernment: a divinely oriented way of knowing characterized by the realization of “distinctions”, rather than divisions and mixtures, which thrives in an intrinsically “open” world.
Keywords:
deliverance; discernment; openness; knowledge