Community Exploration
Surviving the Forgotten Pandemic and the Role of the Catholic Church: A Challenge to AIDS and a Fight for Life among South Africa's Migrants
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jean Halley, Ron Nerio
In 2014, a motley group of volunteers with HIV, led by a determined mother superior, was evicted from a home in Johannesburg run by the Sisters of Nazareth. The beautiful facility, replete with sprawling gardens, was in a poor, crowded neighborhood in South Africa’s largest city and had served thousands of migrants with HIV and AIDS. Following the eviction, the migrants whose lives they had saved found a padlocked door where they once received vital medications and where their support group met. Left with no more than a stapler, a filing cabinet, and a few plastic chairs, these volunteers scrambled to find a new space where they could continue providing services to the large number of international migrants living with HIV in Johannesburg’s inner-city. On a shoestring budget, they launched the Sister Mura Foundation (SMF). This paper examines the contemporary HIV and AIDS crisis in Southern Africa by telling the stories of the people who built organization and those who have sought support and community from it. We conduct roughly 50 in-depth, open-ended interviews with migrants about their experiences having and surviving HIV and AIDS in South Africa. We explore the role of the Catholic Church which, for a time, was the only nationwide organization in South Africa to provide healthcare, therapy, and information to migrants. As AIDS transitions in Southern Africa from a fatal illness to a chronic disease, we explore the continued need of migrants for health access.
Religion and Politics in Brazil Today View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Manuela Löwenthal Lopes
This research examines the participation of religious organizations and leaders in Brazil, especially Pentecostal evangelicals, in disputes over the State. The evangelical-Pentecostal presence in the Brazilian Congress reveals that its agents act in different trenches and fronts, including against each other, whether defending the right to religious freedom, social rights and the rule of law, or opposing them and demands for sexual and reproductive rights and the Human Rights of minorities, whether disputing the definition and legal-political interpretation of the principle of constitutional secularity and its application in government guidelines, public policies, legislatures, public schools, and so on. This research seeks to understand how this relationship between religion, secularism, and politics occurs in Brazil.
