Religious Studies Welcomes New Assistant Professor Garry Sparks

Religious Studies adds a specialist in Latin American religion to its faculty

Religious Studies Welcomes New Assistant Professor Garry Sparks

This fall the Religious Studies Department is happy to welcome Garry Sparks to the Religious Studies faculty. Prof. Sparks holds a PhD in Religious Studies and Theology from the University of Chicago (2011) and specializes in the religious history and culture of Latin America. His research and interests encompass contemporary Christian and Native American religious movements in the Americas, including liberation theology, Latin American Protestantisms, and the revitalization of indigenous traditionalism (such as Maya Spirituality or kojb’al). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Central America, working in Spanish as well as indigenous Mayan languages.

This fall Prof. Sparks will teach “Religion and Revolution in Latin America,” (RELI 376-002, MW 1030-1145), which introduces students to the intersection of religion and politics in Latin America, and the rise of Christian liberation theology in the region. It also examines the criticism of liberation theology that emerged, both from the Vatican and among the indigenous population.

Prof. Sparks has recently published “The Use of Mayan ‘Scripture’ in the Americas’ First Christian Theology” in Numen (International Review of the History of Religions) 61, no. 4 (August 2014) and is currently working on a book on Domingo de Vico’s Theologia Indorum, as well as a volume of English translations of sixteenth-century Maya and missionary religious documents originally written in highland Mayan languages, entitled The Americas’ First Theologies: Forgotten Dominicans and Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Mesoamericans.

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Sparks!