Liberation Theology

For years I've been fascinated by liberation theology. The ole pater familias was a priest, before his babies, and his peculiar brand of Marxism with a human face is still, to me, the least bad way to face down the awful brutality of capitalism and empire. Marx's most inspired insight was his articulation of the ideal/hope/truth that we create ourselves through our labors, of love and for money and in fear and desperation. Left Catholics know that the world we live in is inextricably shaped by this anthropological conviction, and know further that the scandal of a hard-working human being paid less than is necessary to raise a family and hope and shape and love in a modicum of comfort is as much a turn away from God as is one's opinion on abortion, or the cut of the piety on one's sleeve.

And yet these two traditions, Marxism and the theology of liberation, have together shaped me (and countless others) more than any other cultural or intellectual current. The insistence on a rhetoric of dignity undergirds the success of Hugo Chavez and Nestor Kirchner and Lula too; my church's recognition of the preferential option for the poor, and of the sick sin of several billionaires living amidst the countless wretched, is the chief reason it will continue to thrive in the face of our deliciously godless market-driven cultural secularization.