The Mystic of Friendship

“Lebner thoughtfully reveals allegory as an active site of moral deliberation, intergenerational connection, and religious protest. This book is an important ethical and ethnographic act of taking religious people at their word to show how faith stories animate lived religion. Lebner also presents a compelling case for focusing on religious, familial, and friendship relationships to perceive religious, spiritual, and political practices that secular or institutionalized frameworks overlook.” – Todne Thomas, Yale University“A thought-provoking ethnographic account of a major highway that cuts across the heart of Brazil. With theoretical sophistication, Lebner reconsiders the relationship between religion, secularity, and politics through the allegory of friendship. This book is critical reading for anyone interested in understanding how Catholics and Evangelicals make meaning of the violence of colonization that extends beyond the secular realm of governance and into the affective realities of human relationships.” – Chad E. Seales, University of Texas at Austin“In this original work, Lebner analyzes frontier settlement along a stretch of Amazonian highway and the ongoing struggles for life and land among settlers. By attending to settlers’ habit of deciphering divine messages in everyday events and relationships, she captures something that eluded conventional histories of the Amazonian frontier: the role of a diffuse, allegorical way of thinking through which people read and negotiate both their own lives and the politics of the present.” – Kelly E. Hayes, Indiana University

Ashley Lebner is associate professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University.