This book is both an expert guide through major events in the history of Latin American Christianity and a presentation of the scholarly debates surrounding those events. The volume's twenty-seven concise chapters cover most of the fundamental details one would expect to find on religion in a Latin American history textbook, but with an added depth and new theoretical framing that textbooks normally eschew. The contributors are an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States and Latin America. Most are trained as historians or theologians, but the list includes anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and religious studies scholars as well. The volume is divided into four parts that span, in a roughly chronological way, from the early colonial period to the present day, with each section serving as its own coherent scholarly conversation.

Part i is perhaps the book's most theoretically rich, with its reimagining of the arrival and rootedness of Christianity in the region. In chapter v, the anthropologist Andrew Orta offers a path beyond the overused ‘convert-resistor’ binary when he argues that indigenous Christianity is an ‘ever emergent project of cultural production’ (p. 84). In her chapter ‘The sacred art of counter-conquest: material Christianity in Latin America’, Jennifer Scheper Hughes develops the concept of the ‘materium tremendum’ (thinking alongside Rudolf Otto) as a framework for understanding the altars, images and embodied practices of Latin American religiosities. In this section, readers with interests in early modern Christianity will find familiar topics approached from new and intriguing perspectives.

Part ii contains a well-curated group of chapters that focus on the intersection of politics, social change and Christianity in the twentieth century. The topics range from Philip Berryman's sharp insights on the pastoral innovations of liberation theology to Christine Kovic's work on Christian responses to the dual crises in Mexico's southern and northern borderlands. Anyone working on religion and politics in twentieth-century Latin America will find this section an indispensable guide to the best recent work in the field.

The twelve chapters in parts iii and iv cover what Virginia Garrard and Justin Doran refer to as Latin America's ‘new religious landscape’ (p. 291). Here, readers will find essays on Pentecostalism, Christian ecologies, mainline Protestantism and the Catholic charismatic renewal, among other topics. Rachel M. McCleary's essay is a nuanced look at the success of US Protestant missionaries in converting many non-literate Guatemalans through targeted audio-visual media campaigns. While the essays in these sections cover many disparate topics, the unifying principle here is a focus on understanding the roots of the apparently novel and seemingly unorthodox ways of being Christian in modern Latin America.

Unlike most edited volumes, books in the Oxford Handbook series are intentionally wide-ranging in scope and meant to be used primarily for reference purposes. For these reasons, the Oxford handbook of Latin American Christianity contains only a brief introduction by the editors, and the book's four parts are unaccompanied by editorial or introductory material. Similarly, there is no concluding chapter to the volume. The text is designed, instead, around the assumption that most readers will select and reference relevant information at will, paying little attention to the order in which the essays are presented. And yet despite this practical design principle, the care with which the editors selected and organised the essays is evident throughout the book.

This coherence is clearest in a series of conversations carried throughout the chapters, within and across the four parts of the book. Lived religious experience is a central theme in many of the essays, with scholars emphasising embodied faith and theologically inspired action through case studies ranging from the colonial African diaspora (Rachel Sarah O'Toole, chapter vi) to modern-day devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Jeanette Rodriguez, chapter xxv). Perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is arguably Latin America's biggest contribution to global Christianity, liberation theology enjoys a privileged place throughout the book. In addition to each of the eight chapters in part ii, with its specific focus on twentieth-century Catholic activism, many of the other essays deal with liberation theology, treating it either as a culmination of earlier events or a precursor of later developments.

For all of this volume's richness and depth, some imbalances emerge when we consider the essays as a whole. In terms of chronological focus, the book leans heavily towards the twentieth century, especially the post-Vatican II years. The late colonial period is mostly glossed over in passing, and the volume includes no essay on the role of religion in Latin America's independence movements. Similarly, aside from Edward Wright-Ríos's insightful essay on popular religiosity in nineteenth-century Mexico, readers will learn little about the struggles between liberals and conservatives that defined much of the early national period. But these lacunae in topical coverage are more than made up for by the truly innovative work presented in each section.

The Oxford handbook of Latin American Christianity is an essential resource for campus libraries. College instructors will find it useful in generating lectures and choosing readings for courses on Latin American history, theology and religious studies. At the end of the volume, the reader will find what may be the most complete bibliography on Christianity in Latin America compiled to date. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates, who will use this bibliography to begin research projects on any number of topics, can be assured that they are consulting works that have made major contributions to the field.

As editors, Orique, Fitzpatrick-Behrens and Garrard set out with the bold aim of integrating Latin America into the growing field of global Christianity. I have no doubt that this volume will make important strides in this direction. In many respects, the book's chapters carry on the diverse research interests of the late sociologist and Dominican priest, Edward J. Cleary, who first developed the idea and scaffolding for this reference volume. As in any good collection on Latin America, transnational, cross-cultural and transcontinental points of contact are at the centre here. From Latin America's role as arguably the largest site of ‘conversion’ to Christianity, to its deeply intertwined social, religious and political spheres, the editors make a convincing case for the region becoming a ‘core reference point in studies of Global Christianity’ (p. 2).