Chapter 9 or Rausch’s book highlights the regionalism of our one catholic (universal) Church. This is easily seen today in our post-globalized world. Communities are no longer isolated from each other. The computer I am typing this on was likely made in China, the software developed in California, while I am sitting here in Louisiana. When describing the characteristics of African Christian churches, Rausch notes that rather than focusing on teachings such as original sin, they teach whatever contributes to good health, fertility, warding off evil, etc. (171).

Indeed middle class American Christian living looks very different from Christians in the developing world. Earlier this week, I decided to trade in my four-year-old flip phone that still worked perfectly for an iPhone. While at the Verizon store I learned that in addition to the phone, I could also get $100 off a new iPad. I did not need an iPad (nor did I need the new iPhone for that matter), but why not!

Rausch’s chapter forced me to compare this experience with my time in a predominantly Catholic Amerindian village in Guyana, South America. The schoolteachers were some of the highest paid residents in the village; they earned more that the subsistence farmers. I remember distinctly the excitement one of them had when she had finally saved enough money to buy her first computer, a Dell laptop that would probably sell for about $350 in the U.S.

While sitting at the dinner table in Guyana on Ash Wednesday a few years ago, I noticed that chicken and rice was being served. I looked at the local Jesuit priest with an inquisitive mind. He informed me that he has never concerned the local residents with the regulations regarding meat and lent. Growing up as a Catholic in America, I have studied the Church's teachings on original sin, fasting and abstaining from meat during lent, and other theological concepts (often through reading on the internet). In Africa and Guyana, the Christian people focus on the simplistic teachings if Christ. We are all a part of the same catholic Church, but I often wonder how we have become so different.