Popular interpretations of "Holy Spirit" in Bolivia

• Autor: Wrisley, Betsy
• Formato: artículo
• Fecha de Publicación: 1973
• Institución: Universidad Católica San Pablo
• Repositorio: Revistas - Universidad Católica San Pablo
• Lenguaje: español
• OAI Identifier: oai:revistas.ucsp.edu.pe:article/380
• Enlace del recurso: https://revistas.ucsp.edu.pe/index.php/Allpanchis/article/view/380
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: espíritu santo; cultura popular; Bolivia; popular culture

These brief notes are not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the subject. They only want to warn about an aspect that is not always taken into account in our pastoral work: often certain words in common use have a very different meaning in the mind of the speaker and in the mind of the listener. In the proclamation of the Word, some give it meanings typical of Western biblical theology and others give it autochthonous meanings in accordance with local pre-colonial beliefs and cosmogonies or derived from the popular religiosity of colonial Spanish. Here we will limit ourselves to enunciating some common popular meanings such as "spirit" and "holy". But the problem reappears in almost every paragraph of the Bible and the liturgy. Think of other words like believe, body and soul, grace, church. etc. It could be generalized that in order to effectively transfer the salvific message from the culture in which it was originally formulated to the very different culture of the new churches that it is desired to help, almost every "technical" word presents this problem. Then a simple "translation" is not enough, since all the connotations are often different or simply absent in one culture or another.