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Documents the history of Catholic activism to mitigate human rights abuses in Guatemala and the failed US policies in the country and region during the 1970s and 1980s
 
Blessed Are the Activists examines US Catholic activists’ influence on US-Guatemalan relations during the Guatemalan civil war’s most violent years in the 1970s and 1980s. Cangemi argues that Catholic activists’ definition of human rights, advocacy methods, and structure caused them to act as a transnational human rights NGO that engaged Guatemalan and US government officials on human rights issues, reported on Guatemala’s human rights violations, and criticized US foreign policy decisions as a contributing factor in Guatemala’s inequality, poverty, and violence. His work foregrounds how Catholic activists emphasized dignity for Guatemala’s poorest citizens and the connections they made between justice, solidarity, and peace and brought Guatemala’s violence, poverty, and inequality to greater global attention, often at great personal risk.

Cangemi pays considerable attention to multiple facets of the strained US-Guatemala diplomatic relationship, including how and why Guatemala’s military dictatorship exposed the internal flaws within the Carter administration’s decision to link military aid to human rights and how internal foreign policy debates in the Carter and Reagan administrations helped to intensify Guatemala’s bloody civil war. He also includes interviews conducted with Guatemalan genocide survivors and refugees to provide firsthand accounts of the consequences of those policymaking decisions. Finally, he offers readers an in-depth examination of the US Catholic press’s sharp rebukes of US policies on Guatemala and all of Central America when the broader Roman Catholic Church began to move farther toward the ideological right under John Paul II.

Blessed Are the Activists offers rich, original research and a gripping narrative. With Guatemala and other countries in Latin America still experiencing human rights abuses, this book will continue to provide context. It will appeal to a broad swath of readers, from scholars to the general public and students.
 

Divined Intervention provides an innovative institutionalist account for why religion enables political activism in some settings, but not others. Christopher W. Hale argues that decentralized religious institutions facilitate grassroots collective action, and he uses a multimethod approach to test this explanation against several theoretical alternatives. Utilizing nationally representative Mexican survey data, the book’s statistical analyses demonstrate that decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with greater individual political activism across the country. Using case studies centered in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Morelos, the author shows that religious decentralization encourages reciprocal cooperative interactions at a local level. This then increases the ability of religion to provide goods and services to its local adherents. These processes then prompt the growth of organizational capacities at the grassroots, enabling secular political activism.

Because this theoretical framework is grounded in human behavior, it shows how local institutions politically organize at the grassroots level. Divined Intervention also offers an improved understanding of religion’s relationship with political activism, a topic of ever-increasing significance as religion fuels political engagement across the globe. The book further synthesizes seemingly disparate approaches to the study of collective action into a cohesive framework. Finally, there is some debate as to the impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods, and this study helps us understand how local institutional configurations can enable collective action across ethnic boundaries.

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals explains how a group of Catholic lay catechists educated in liberation theology came to take up arms and participate on the side of the rebel FMLN during El Salvador’s revolutionary war (1980-92). In the process they became transformed from popular intellectuals to insurgent intellectuals who put their organizational and cognitive skills at the service of a collective effort to create a more egalitarian and democratic society. The book highlights the key roles that peasant catechists in northern Morazán played in disseminating liberation theology before the war and supporting the FMLN during it—as quartermasters, political activists, and musicians, among other roles. Throughout, From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals highlights the dialectical nature of relations between Catholic priests and urban revolutionaries, among others, in which the latter learned from the former and vice-versa. Peasant catechists proved capable at making independent decisions based on assessment of their needs and did not simply follow the dictates of those with superior authority, and played an important role for the duration of the twelve-year military conflict. 

José Martí's Liberative Political Theology argues that Martí's religious views, which at first glance might appear outdated and irrelevant, are actually critical to understanding his social vision. During a time in which the predominant philosophical view was materialistic (e.g., Darwin, Marx), Martí sought to reconcile social and political trends with the metaphysical, believing that ignoring the spiritual would create a soulless approach toward achieving a liberative society. As such, Martí used religious concepts and ideas as tools that could bring forth a more just social order. In short, this book argues Martí could be considered a precursor to what would come to be called liberation theology.

Miguel De La Torre has authored the most comprehensive text written thus far concerning Martí's religious views and how they affected his political thought. The few similar texts that exist are written in Spanish, and most of them romanticize Martí's spirituality in an attempt to portray him as a “Christian believer.” Only a handful provide an academic investigation of Martí's theological thought based solely on his writings, and those concentrate on just one aspect of Martí's religious influences. José Martí's Liberative Political Theology allows for mutual influence between Martí's political and religious views, rather than assuming one had precedence over the other.

In Kingdom Come, Tshepo Masango Chéry charts a new genealogy of early twentieth-century Black Christian activists who challenged racism in South Africa before the solidification of apartheid by using faith as a strategy against global racism. Masango Chéry traces this Black freedom struggle and the ways that South African church leaders defied colonial domination by creating, in solidarity with Black Christians worldwide, Black-controlled religious institutions that were geared toward their liberation. She demonstrates how Black Christians positioned the church as a site of political resistance and centered specifically African visions of freedom in their organizing. Drawing on archival research spanning South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Masango Chéry tells a global story of the twentieth century that illuminates the formations of racial identity, state control, and religious belief. Masango Chéry’s recentering of South Africa in the history of worldwide Black liberation changes understandings of spiritual and intellectual routes of dissemination throughout the diaspora.

"[A]n introduction that competently places liberation theology in its cultural and religious context, [and] elucidates its roots in the Bible and in Catholic theology." --The Washington Post Book World In the chaos that is Latin American politics, what role does the Catholic church play with regard to its clergy and its members? How does the church function in Latin America on an everyday, practical level? And how successful has the church been intervening in political matters despite the fact that Latin American countries are essentially Catholic nations? Philip Berryman addresses these timely and challenging issues in this comprehensive. Unlike journalistic accounts, which all too frequently portray liberation theology as an exotic brew of Marxism and Christianity or as a movement of rebel priests bent on challenging church authority, this book aims to get beyond these clichés, to explain exactly what liberation theology is, how it arose, how it works in practice, and its implications. The book also examines how liberation theology functions at the village or barrio level, the political impact of liberation theology, and the major objections to it posed by critics, concluding with a tentative assessment of the future of liberation theology. "Liberation Theology is just the book I've been searching for--unsuccessfully until now--as the basic text for the course I offer on Latin American Liberation Theology. It is everything I need. Concise, well-written, and balanced, it gives some real attention to the critics of Liberation Theology, as any fair text must do." --Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School "...a very clear, reliable, and readable introduction to and survey of liberation theology. It is also an introduction to the literature on the subject interwoven with history...[and] Berryman is a very trustworthy interpreter." --Dr. Larry Rasmussen, Union Theological Seminary "The book answers the charge that Liberation Theology is essentially Marxist by indicating to the reader that the use of Marxism is something minor in comparison to a Biblical reading and interpretation in the light of contemporary social and political realities.... It advocates the use of theologies of liberation and is addressed to an American audience." --Monsignor Joseph W. Devlin, Department of Religion, LaSalle University "... adds significantly to the documenting and appraisal of a theological movement of lasting importance." --John Raines, Department of Religion, Temple University

A study of liberationist Christianity in Latin America, offering new insights for discussing liberation theology.

This highly interdisciplinary collection brings together diverse and complementary approaches from history, theology, cultural studies, architecture, sociology, and anthropology to reevaluate the legacy of liberation theology in Latin America.

Liberation theology was born in the 1960s at a time of Church renewal and socio-economic ferment, as many sought more radical solutions in the context of the exhaustion of developmentalist projects and the institutionalized violence of capitalism. The book’s central focus on the lived experiences and embodied practices of those engaged in social action in the region challenges the narrative that suggests that liberation theology had reached its decline by the end of the 1970s. It demonstrates that liberationist Christianity was at once more diverse and internally conflicted, more widely resonant outside ecclesial confines, and more interconnected over time than often allowed.

The chapters investigate a range of topics: the ecclesiology of a revolutionary movement of Argentine priests in the 1960s and ́1970s, the engagement of liberation theology with Participatory Action Research and its influence on architectural approaches and urbanism, 1980s feminist liberation theology, encounters with Western human rights at a time of Cold War repression and exile, and ecofeminist political theology in contemporary Latin America. Pulling these threads together, Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America invites us to reconsider how we understand liberation theology’s history as well as its reach into the present day.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s vast corpus of theological, philosophical, literary, and pastoral writings remains one of the most impressive achievements in 20th century thought. In light of liberation theology and now the papacy of Francis, however, a theological affirmation of the option for the poor remains dangerously weak in Balthasar’s corpus. Von Balthasar and the Option for the Poor offers a sympathetic reforming of Balthasar’s account of the drama of salvation – what he calls “theodramatics” – in response to this weakness.