Edward Cleary's broad-ranging text on the ‘Charismatic Renewal’ in Latin America represents one of the first English-language efforts to describe the appearance of the movement in the region. While substantial work in theology and religious studies, and to a lesser extent in sociology and political science, has emerged in Spanish or Portuguese, relatively little has been written about charismatic Catholicism in English, making this text a welcome addition to the canon. Cleary was a Dominican priest and a prominent scholar of Catholicism in Latin America; here he provides a rich historical account of the key figures involved in the rise of charismatic Catholicism in selected countries in the region. The book, published shortly before his death in November 2011, benefits from his long insight but ultimately does not live up to the standard set by his previous work.

Cleary knew Latin America's rich religious history well. He sets the stage for his analysis by pointing out the poverty of available information regarding the charismatic Catholic renewal, a movement with an estimated 73 million adherents. The rise of Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Protestantism have rightly commanded much attention throughout the region, but Cleary argues that the largest and most important shift in the region has taken place within the Catholic Church via the rise of the charismatic renewal movement. Most of the chapters each investigate one selected country, primarily in South America, providing matter-of-fact descriptions of the appearance of the movement there. Cleary focuses on describing the movement's differences across countries; for example, did the movement appear from the lower classes? Was there widespread consensus or conflict within the Catholic Church regarding the movement? Did conflict with competing religions appear (for example, with Protestantism and Pentecostalism)? Did the movement appear slowly, in short bursts or in a strong surge?

The countries selected for case analysis appear to be those in which the movement was strongest, based on a rough approximation of the percentage of charismatic Catholics in each country, the percentage of charismatic Catholic priests and the percentage of charismatic Catholics per million inhabitants. However, the selection rationale is not clear. The charismatic Catholic movement in Latin America is one that, although steadily growing in popularity, has been more successful in some countries than others. Cleary moves through his analysis by outlining the general strength of the movement in each nation. This approach has positive and negative aspects. For example, Cleary is interested in whether the charismatic Catholic movement was imposed on the local context from above, by episcopal fiat, or whether it developed via lay initiative from below. Looking in depth at these case studies allows us to see that in Bolivia and Colombia, for example, the movement is not externally imposed on the local context but rather led by adherents who join the movement. Cleary also shows that the main issue for the movement has been enculturation, the extent to which it has adapted to fit local cultural religious practices. David Martin characterised charismatic Catholicism as a top-down movement, being passed from middle to lower classes, a finding which Cleary's approach contests, since it is not borne out in Colombia. However, the book also suffers from the use of this approach. For example, the differences in lay and clerical leadership are not immediately clear, and while Cleary demonstrates that Argentina had a large clerical presence in the movement, the importance of this presence (versus lay leadership) is undetermined.

While Catholicism seems to have been enlivened by the charismatic movement in all of the Latin American countries analysed, some societies were affected more than others. Overall, the book's strength lies in its description of charismatic Catholic dynamics in each country; its weakness lies in its lack of analytical structure and inability to integrate theory. This pattern holds in various ways throughout the book. Thus, Cleary spends most of his time recounting the growth and characteristics of the movement as well as the key figures within each country, but offers relatively little comparative analytical leverage. Likewise, the book would also benefit from more explicit theorising, perhaps drawing on recent ‘religion on the edge’ approaches, the religious economy literature of Rodney Stark, Roger Finke and Steve Warner, or the conflict theory of religion from Otto Maduro. Instead, the text is mostly descriptive, providing facts and citations without fully integrating these into the context of time and place, or into a theory of religion or social movements. Again, Cleary usefully highlights the conflict between charismatic Catholicism and other religious movements, but he does not bring conflict theory to bear explicitly on them. Finally, the text would have benefited from more supportive citations, especially for historical events, as well as a more structured comparative argument.

Such theoretically grounded comparative analysis could have led to very interesting conclusions, for example illuminating why the charismatic movement appeared less strongly in Central America while gaining greater strength in South America. Alas, Cleary's passing has left that analytical agenda unfinished. Nonetheless, this book will be highly useful for identifying key players and moments during the beginning and maturation of the charismatic movement in each country; this wealth of information will be vital to future scholars of charismatic Catholicism, who may carry forward that more ambitious analytical agenda.