About
Profile
Gustavo Morello, SJ. is a Jesuit priest, Professor of Sociology, Boston College; Ph.D., Universidad de Buenos Aires (2011), MA in Social Sciences (2001, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), Licentiate in Theology (2007, UdSal) and Philosophy (1991, UdSal). He has taught at the Univesidad Católica de Cordoba (1997-2011), and was a visiting scholar at University of Michigan (2009-2010), PI of the research project ‘The transformation of lived religion in urban Latin America: a study of contemporary Latin Americans’ experience of the transcendent' (2015-2018), and gave The D’Arcy Lectures, at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, UK (2019). His latest books are Religion in Latin America. An Enchanted Modernity (OUP, 2021) and The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War (OUP, 2015).
He is a sociologist of religion, with a particular focus on the interaction between religion and modernity in Latin America. With reference to modernity, his research is on cultural characterizations by the promise of emancipation and abundance, achieved by the differentiation of social functions, separations of spheres of values, capitalistic dynamics, and expansions of human rights, all of these under the organization of national states. By religion, he specifies an ongoing human relation with superhuman beings. The emphasis is on “relation”. The connection people have with the supra-human is what makes them religious or spiritual. When the relation does not exist, there is no religion.