Pedagogies of an intelligent faith: neoliberal spirituality and narratives of personal development in Edir Macedo's biography

our proposal is to analyze Edir Macedo's narratives of himself from a hermeneutic study of the biography Nada a Perder (Nothing to lose) - vols. 1, 2 and 3, written in co-authorship with Douglas Tavolaro. The current paper is based on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic perspective (1976, 2006, 2010), for whom the narrative arises from the dialectic between reality and fiction, past and present, all articulated through a narrative configuration that has as its constituent process the composition of the intrigue. The study indicates that more than an example of life, the narratives that constitute Macedo's biography materialize a particular type of pedagogy that teaches its readers to act according to the precepts of the "intelligent faith" from Universal Church of the Kingdom of the God, which is anchored not only in a political rationality, but also in a neoliberal spirituality.