Manuel Vasquez will present the 2012 Lester Lecture on October 4 at 6:30 p.m. in Hale 230. The title for his talk is "The Materialist Turn in Religious Studies: Promises, Challenges, and Pitfalls." Vasquez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. Vasquez has written widely on topics of contemporary relevance, including immigration and theory of religion. His recent publications include, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford, 2011) and The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998). He also co-authored Living ‘Illegal’: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration (New Press, 2011) and Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (Rutgers, 2003). Moreover, he has published a number of co-edited volumes, including A Place to Be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New Destinations (Rutgers, 2009), Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context (NYU, 2008), and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America. (AltaMira, 2005).