Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking

by Miguel A. de la Torre

A groundbreaking corrective work, Latina/o Social Ethics strives to create a liberative ethical approach to the Hispanic experience by using its own tools and materials. First explaining why Eurocentric ethical paradigms are inadequate in their attempts to liberate oppressed communities, Miguel De La Torre looks with Hispanic eyes at three major ethicists of the twentieth century--Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas--and how ethics is presented in U.S. culture wars, from the Religious Right to the Religious Left. He deconstructs these ethical paradigms and demonstrates why all are detrimental to and irreconcilable with the Hispanic social location. With a clean slate, then, De La Torre moves to constructing a new Hispanic-centered ethical paradigm that is rooted in the Latino community way of being. Reviewing the field of Hispanic ethical thought, De La Torre pays special attention to specific concepts ripe with potential that have been developed over the past generation. In the final chapter, De La Torre offers his own constructive paradigm--an ethics para joder , which is rooted in the Latina/o experience, and by which, he argues, the Hispanic community can survive within U.S. culture.

Genres: Theology

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2010

About the author

De La Torre received a Masters in Divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a doctorate from Temple University in social ethics. The focus of his academic pursuit has been ethics within contemporary U.S. thought, specifically how religion affects race, class, and gender oppression. He specializes in applying a social scientific approach to Latino/a religiosity within this country, Liberation theologies in Latin America, and postmodern/postcolonial social theory.

De La Torre currently servers as the Professor of Social Ethics and Latino/a Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.

Reviews

[Neil Harmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a reading book for a course in Christian Ethics. This book was covered at the end of the course so I read only the first part during the course. I just came back and finished it during the summer. The book is very readible. It is a very practical book that isn't full of academic jargon but that bases itself in the realities faced by Hispanic communities every day in the United States and how that experience (rather than academic ply based ethics) can be used to suggest approaches to ethics and as a basis for social action. It was not only an informational book but an enjoyable one as well. A little uncomfortable at times (I'm reading I as a non-Hispanic white male) but that is part of what makes it useful and worth reading.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book! In it De La Torre deconstructs Eurocentric theology and morality and presents a Hispanic theology that subverts the status quo. Check it out and see if it challenges your thinking. As always you don’t have to agree with everything a book says in order to gain something from it. Overall though this book gave me a whole new set of new ideas and questions to ponder. And hopefully the pondering will lead to praxis.

[David Estringel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be one of the most important books I will ever read for myself. Self-affirming, self-confirming that Latino/a (in all its layers, but especially ethics) is a verb.