SPIRITUAL REALITIES, RELATIONALITY, AND FLOURISHING: BRAZILIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (2025-2027)

How can Brazilian religious traditions reshape core debates in philosophy of religion? This project engages philosophically with Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo, demonstrating how they challenge dominant models of spiritual reality, meaning, and human flourishing. Rather than centering on belief, these traditions emphasize practice, relationality, and embodied engagement with the spiritual world. By integrating their conceptual frameworks into philosophy of religion, the project expands its methodological scope and reorients discussions toward lived religious experience.

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Key outputs include six single- or co-authored publications by the principal investigator (José Eduardo Porcher), two by the co-investigator (Marciano Adilio Spica), and at least five by contributing scholars in a special issue edited by the project leaders. Additional publications will include a book symposium and a groundbreaking co-edited volume, broadening global conversations in the field. Public engagement will feature workshops at Brazilian universities and a capstone event at the Congress of the Brazilian Association for Philosophy of Religion. By foregrounding Brazilian perspectives, this project offers new ways of understanding how spiritual relationships shape knowledge, identity, and ethical life, contributing to the global development of philosophy of religion.

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PROJECT AIMS

This project seeks to integrate Brazilian religions—especially the interconnected traditions of Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo—into core debates in philosophy of religion. While recent efforts have worked to globalize the field, Latin American traditions remain disproportionately underrepresented in these discussions. However, engaging with these traditions is not simply a matter of inclusivity but of expanding the conceptual and methodological boundaries of philosophy of religion itself. These traditions challenge dominant assumptions about divine agency, the nature of spiritual reality, meaning, and human flourishing, requiring new approaches that move beyond classical theological frameworks.

 

One of the key contributions of this project is a reconceptualization of spiritual reality that accounts for how Brazilian traditions resist classical metaphysical categories. In many of these traditions, divinity is not an essence but an emergent and relational presence. Divine agency is neither purely transcendent nor reducible to immanent social functions—it is relational, dynamic, and embedded in specific ritual contexts. Unlike classical theistic models that treat divine agency as fixed, independent, and universally operative, Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo conceptualize spiritual beings as situated entities that interact with practitioners in ways that are neither wholly independent nor fully anthropocentric.

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Thus, our project builds on the idea of entitology as an alternative to theology—one that accounts for divine beings not in terms of essence but in terms of relational presence and contextual efficacy. The standard theological distinction between ontology (what a being is) and function (what a being does) does not hold in Brazilian traditions, where entities are constituted through their ritual roles and relationships. This shift has major implications for the metaphysics of divine agency: for instance, if deities (orixás) and spirits emerge through specific ritual engagements, then their agency is neither fully autonomous nor merely a projection of human culture—it is enacted through embodied practices and intersubjective interactions. The implications extend beyond Brazilian traditions: if divine presence is relational rather than essential, this challenges dominant theological assumptions about divine simplicity, necessity, and immutability.

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Beyond metaphysics, the project also advances an alternative model of human purpose and meaning. Much of Western philosophy of religion assumes meaning is derived from an overarching divine plan or transcendent moral order. In contrast, Brazilian traditions emphasize meaning as emergent from relational and communal spiritual practices. Espiritismo, for instance, envisions moral progress as an open-ended process across multiple incarnations rather than as a singular goal. This challenges traditional philosophical views of moral responsibility and identity persistence: if selfhood is distributed across lifetimes and shaped by spiritual evolution, then standard criteria for personal identity may not fully apply. Similarly, Candomblé’s model of selfhood is deeply communal and dynamic: individuals are not born with fixed identities but are shaped through ritual, spiritual initiation, and ongoing relationships with the orixás.

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The implications for flourishing and well-being are equally significant. Western models of well-being, particularly those influenced by eudaimonism, tend to prioritize individual moral perfection or self-realization. Brazilian traditions suggest an alternative: flourishing is not about achieving a fixed state of virtue but about maintaining balance within a web of spiritual and social relations. In Candomblé, well-being is achieved not through adherence to abstract moral principles but through ritual alignment with one’s orixá, the cultivation of spiritual depth, and the navigation of a dynamic, hierarchical cosmology. Healing, too, is not understood merely as restoring a prior state of health but as a transformative process that reconfigures an individual’s place in the cosmic and social order. Rather than framing flourishing as self-actualization or individual fulfillment, these traditions offer a model in which well-being is inseparable from spiritual and communal attunement.

 

By engaging with these themes, this project will contribute directly to GPR-2. Brazilian traditions do not simply provide new examples to fit into existing frameworks of philosophy of religion; they challenge the field’s assumptions and open up new lines of inquiry. Taking these traditions seriously means reconsidering foundational categories—what counts as divine agency, what gives life meaning, and how we conceptualize the good life—not only as abstract philosophical questions, but also as matters rooted in lived practice and experience.

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PROJECT MEMBERS

• Dr José Eduardo Porcher (PI)

• Dr Marciano Adilio Spica (co-I)

• Prof Bettina Schmidt

• Prof Steven Engler

• Prof Rogério Severo

• Dr Daniel De Luca–Noronha

• Dr Veronica Campos