This publication by means of Miguel De l. a. Torre deals a desirable advisor to the background, ideals, rituals, and tradition of Santería — a spiritual culture that, regardless of persecution, suppression, and its personal secretive nature, has on the subject of 1000000 adherents within the usa alone.

Santería is a faith with Afro-Cuban roots, emerging out of the cultural conflict among the Yoruba humans of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who introduced them to the Americas as slaves. As a religion of the marginalized and persecuted, it gave oppressed women and men energy and the need to outlive. With the exile of millions of Cubans within the wake of Castro's revolution in 1959, Santería got here to the USA, the place it really is steadily coming to be well-known as a sound religion tradition.

except obscure suspicions that Santería's rituals contain animal sacrifice and notions that it's a “syncretistic” type of Catholicism, most folk in America's cultural and non secular mainstream understand little or no approximately this wealthy religion culture — in reality, many have by no means heard of it in any respect. De l. a. Torre, who was once reared in Santería, units out during this e-book to supply a uncomplicated realizing of its internal workings. He in actual fact explains the actual worldview, myths, rituals, and practices of Santería, and he discusses what position the faith mostly performs within the lifetime of its practitioners in addition to the cultural impact it maintains to exert in Latin American groups today.

In delivering a balanced, knowledgeable survey of Santería from his distinct “insider-outsider” point of view, De los angeles Torre additionally offers perception into how Christianity and Santería can input into discussion — a discussion that would problem Christians to think about what this rising religion culture can train them approximately their very own. better with illustrations, tables, and a thesaurus, De los angeles Torre's Santería sheds gentle on a faith all too frequently shrouded in secret and misunderstanding.