Hey there. This is Tara McCoy, the Rear

De Janeiro Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. And I'm just now walking into my

office. We got a noisy street here, so I'm going to close the window and settle in.

I'm going to sit down on my desk here and pour myself a cup of coffee

because I have a story to tell today.

This is where I wrote this story for our Deep Reed series,

a series that showcases narrative journalism here at the post.

It's a perfect place to tell you of a recent tale from the deep

Amazon forest where a Catholic priest is competing with an evangelical

pastor for the soul of a river village named Sal Miguel. I've wanted to tell this type of story for years as I've traveled through the Amazon.

I've seen the region change.

It was once defined by the Catholicism of its early settlers.

Now Protestant evangelicalism has remade the region. In small

river towns I visited the evangelical church is the heartbeat, pulsing at night

as the faithful sing in the neon blinking lights, its

faith, its entertainment, it's a new Amazon. But I've never seen all these forces

collide with such power as they did in Selmigail, where one day a mysterious evangelical pastor arrived

and everything changed.

Okay, here's my story.

When the rains finally receded, Father Moisez-O-Liveira, pulled his motorboat out onto the swollen Boudou's River and pointed it downstream.

Chugging down muddy waters toward the next community on his schedule, the Catholic

priest felt uncertain.

...