The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology

by Lilian Calles Barger

On November 16, 2017, Pope Francis tweeted, "Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters." With this statement and others like it, the first Latin American pope was associated, in the minds of many, with a stream of theology that swept the Western hemisphere in the 1960s and 70s, the movement known as liberation theology.

Born of chaotic cultural crises in Latin America and the United States, liberation theology was a trans-American intellectual movement that sought to speak for those parts of society marginalized by modern politics and religion by virtue of race, class, or sex. Led by such revolutionaries as the Peruvian Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the African American theologian James Cone, or the feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, the liberation theology movement sought to bridge the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism. It combined theology with strands of radical politics, social theory, and the history and experience of subordinated groups to challenge the ideas that underwrite the hierarchical structures of an unjust society.

Praised by some as a radical return to early Christian ethics and decried by others as a Marxist takeover, liberation theology has a wide-raging, cross-sectional history that has previously gone undocumented. In The World Come of Age, Lilian Calles Barger offers for the first time a systematic retelling of the history of liberation theology, demonstrating how a group of theologians set the stage for a torrent of new religious activism that challenged the religious and political status quo.

Genres: Religion, History, Theology, Christianity, Nonfiction, Politics

392 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2018

About the author

Lilian Calles Barger was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and immigrated as a child to the United States and received her Ph.D. in Humanities/History of Idea from the University of Texas at Dallas. She pursued an early career in business and went on to become the founder of The Damaris Project a non-profit cultural initiative engaging in inter-religious dialogue and creating multiple venues for conversation on faith, feminism, and life. She developed multiple programs to address the life concerns of women by drawing on literature, the arts, religion, and history. Her various social and cultural projects resulted in two trade books on women and religion and a historical study of liberation theology. She is a frequent podcast co-host for New Books Network and works as an independent historian and cultural critic. She is available to address conferences and university groups.

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent history of ideas that dives into the work of thinkers who understood that theology must must have something to offer to subordinated peoples.

Lilian Calles Barger traces the parallels between the liberation theologies of Latin America, black thinkers, and feminists in the 1960s and 70s in response to extreme poverty, entrenched white supremacy, and the constrictions of patriarchal power. Theology from the perspective of elite white men reinforced ideas of freedom “defined by the individualism of capitalist economics,” and upheld the rifts in post-Enlightenment theology: “a sacred/secular split, a universal humanity, a private religious self, and ideological autonomy.” In response, Liberationists across traditions turned to a theological poetics that would express a “theology from below.”

Exploration of the idigenista movement and the black social gospel map the streams of ideas followed by Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, Rosemary Ruether and many others. Although these liberation theologians did something new, they worked in longstanding traditions and brought together concepts and impulses with long histories. Barger does an excellent job of telling those stories.

Trained and educated in traditional western theology, but drawing on theological resources outside the seminaries, liberation theologians worked to address the real conditions of subordinated peoples. Turning to social science, they found a discipline still working to think society along the grooves carved by theological thought, absorbing questions authority and community formation though scrubbed them of their religious aspects. Returning the church to concern over social and political life, liberationists recovered the resources of sociology and put them to theological use, in the process continuing to smash the wall between what we perceive as a secular thought, and what we understand as a theological thought. Reconfiguring the theo-political ground and making “a singular American contribution” to our understanding of where politics and theology meet.

Rather than taking a biographical or institutional lens to view the history of these theologies, Barger emphasizes “a web of interconnected and circulating ideas.” Lines of descent from “antecedent thinkers, social networks,” and snippets of “personal biography” all appear over the course of the book, but World Come of Age advances a cultural history that places religious ideas within the “overall frame of social thought,” where “one can see a persistent religious liberatory sensibility and examine how this sensibility converged with numerous intellectual and social movements.” The result is a study wide in scope and full of surprising connections, stark realities, and a compelling statement about “the import and ubiquity of religious ideas in modernity.”

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book--the topic is important and the book positions itself to cross-reference the currents of African American, Latina American and feminist liberation theologies. I appreciated the bibliographical dimension and assembled a reading list that I'll pursue moving forward. My knowledge of the Latin American elements was relatively thin and Barger helps correct that. But I wound up disappointed, in large part because she simply attempts to do too much in too few pages. The surveys of Black religious thought frequently gloss over the important nuances of debates and she flat out misses some of the most important voices in Black feminist theology; Katie Canon, certainly. Similarly, the overviews of the huge philosophical currents of the twentieth century rely heavily on generalized observations rather than detailed engagements with the texts. That may be simply saying that it wasn't the book I wanted, but it was pretty much the book promised. I'd recommending those interested in the compelling topic go directly to the sources--Cone, Guittierez, Ruether.

[ND · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, fairly thorough overview of the development of liberation theology. I do wish it went into (much) more depth on various iterations it mentions. The book would not suffer for being twice as long. (This is a compliment.)

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough intellectual history that situates the first generation of liberation theologians within their context, demonstrating the various streams of thought that gave rise to this hemisphere-wide movement and how it responded to the immediate concerns facing oppressed peoples. The end of the book evaluates the movement, show how it did not achieve its stated aims of a revolution of the political order, but that it has had broad influence throughout the Americas and far beyond theology.

[Anthony Bart Chaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A impressive and thorough work of scholarship. Introduces the reader to a whole world of serious thinking about the human condition.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF Love intellectual and academic takes but this felt too in the clouds at times. I don’t have patience for that and good academic writing doesn’t need sound like it