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Although the study of religious phenomena from the perspective of lived religion was born in the North Atlantic countries, several researchers have adopted this approach in the Latin American context to account for the religious fact and its evolution. This orientation responds to the dissatisfaction with the conclusions reached by classical sociological theories when they try to explain the place and meaning of religion in the context of Latin American modernity, as in the case of the theories on secularization. This approach has proved promising, insofar as it offers evidence of the presence of the religious phenomenon in contemporary society that has not been sufficiently taken into account before. But, at the same time, it presents aspects that need to be clarified and/or developed. One of them is the relationship between lived religion and the theoretical frameworks that, from the different social sciences, are intended to explain the religious phenomenon. This article offers some considerations on the fruitful relationship that can be established between lived religion and the phenomenology of religion. It identifies aspects in which both disciplines complement and enrich each other, as well as critical issues to be taken into account. Specifically, it proposes a phenomenological approach to two distinct and, at the same time, intertwined fields of analysis: lived religion and lived spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the central role of cultural distances in social sciences, literature is surprisingly scarce in quantitatively measuring and graphically representing this concept in Latin America. This study addresses this issue calculating a cultural distance index using the nine cultural dimensions measured by House et al. (2004) for ten Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela. Also, this study graphically presents the cultural distances calculated. The relevance of this study is the ability to incorporate cultural indicators that allow comparing the current situation and prospects in Latin America. In order to illustrate the implications of this study, the case of cultural distances of Mexico with other nine Latin American countries is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that, despite the importance of the Soviet model in the Latin American imaginary, the latter's relations with Moscow during the Cold War have not been a topic of frequent research. The sixties saw the rise of the first studies on the subject, which expanded in the early seventies, and again in the late eighties after a phase of "silence," but which were strongly impregnated by the typical prejudices of their context. Other than punctual interpretations, however, the end of the conflict has not stimulated the academic renovation that was expected, and an evaluation of the "state of the art" shows that, In the area of Soviet-Latin American ties, the social sciences are still In debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]