The year was 2000. A group of black youths about sixteen years of age, most of them self-professed Christians, answered my question about how they saw the AIDS epidemic in their community, a mining town just south of Johannesburg, by invoking HIV infectivity rates of more than 95 percent.

The national paper money that predominates across the globe today is a relatively newfound phenomenon, as many authors have detailed (e.g., Brantlinger 1996; Cohen 1998; Davies 1997; Dodd 1994; Eichengreen 1996; Hart 1986; Helleiner 2003; Ingham 2004; Sargent and Velde 2002; Spahn 2001).

Our God is a Living God," or "We do not believe in God, we believe God." The Pentecostal squatters in Venezuela's capital city, Caracas, among whom I have recently done fieldwork, voice these and other related statements on the most varied occasions, often to distinguish their own brand of spirituality from that of other religious communities across Venezuela.