Religión y Modernización. La producción y la recepción de los escritos de Emilio Willems en Brasil sobre religión

Emilio Willems (1905-1997), a native of Germany, arrived in Brazil in 1931. He had completed a Ph.D. program in the University of Berlin. Five years later, he started serving as a professor and a researcher at the Universidade de S o Paulo, which had been recently founded, and at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política. In the beginning, his studies were focused on the process of assimilation and acculturation of immigrants in Brazil. But later, Brazil, a catholic, traditional, rural and outdated country that was quickly becoming modern, urban and industrial, was made the focus of his studies. For Willems, the impact of Brazil’s passage from rural to urban led to the arising of a religious pluralism and an interiorized religion. The growth in the number of Protestants, especially Pentecostals, would be connected to the modernization process of the Latin-American society.