FRONTIERS OF THEOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

A disorganized but useful collection of articles on liberation theology. The 13 authors represented here (especially Gustavo Guti‚rrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and Rubem Alves) constitute a Who's Who of radical religious thought in Latin America. Their essays, though they follow one another in no discernible order and repeatedly raise the same issues, still constitute as good an introduction to the subject as any available today. They articulate a Christian strategy, or the beginnings of one, to deal with the poverty and oppression of the masses, given the incompatibility of the gospel and the realities of Latin American life. What this comes down to, concretely, is calling for the downfall of all social and political structures that stand in the way of Christian brotherhood, and hence espousing some form of socialism. Traditional European theologians have accused the liberationist of combining Marxism with a superficial, even sentimental ""revolutionary"" Christology, but the theological writing here is solid and mature. Which is not to say, unfortunately, that it always, or often, makes for lively reading. Despite their insistence that theology be rooted in history, few of the authors speak of the actual conditions, past and present, that have given rise to their work. One exception is the Argentinian Enrique Dussel, who traces the theme of liberation from Bishop Bartolom‚ de Las Casas to modern times. Another is the Brazilian Rubem Alves, whose essay, ""From Paradise to the Desert: Autobiographical Musings,"" conveys the pain and frustration felt by a committed Christian idealist. Thorough, if unsystematic, coverage of a promising spiritual movement.