Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

This chapter broadens the focus to the Spirit’s renovation of human community through a prayerful “confessional movement” of self-dispossession, the reception of one’s identity in Christ, and responsive self-offering to God. Attention to this confessional movement both emphasizes the Augustinian tradition’s capacity for self-critique, fosters greater solidarity with the oppressed, and builds conceptual bridges toward greater dialogue with liberatory theological traditions.

This chapter underscores the role of liberation theology in promoting social rights. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) and the Catholic Church’s concern with social inequality and development inspired the liberation theology movement, which took these concerns still further. From the mid-1960s until the end of the century, a small but active and progressive sector of the Mexican Catholic Church engaged with liberation theology and played a significant role in advancing the cause of social, cultural and indigenous rights. Empowering communities at the grassroots level, they helped found lay Catholic organisations and collaborated with networks and institutions to establish new NGOs and social movements that began to assert their social, cultural and indigenous rights. This was the first time that Catholic Church leaders took a radical approach to social inequality and opposed the state. By the 1990s, the influence of liberation theologians in the Church hierarchy was on the wane, but their legacy has persisted in social movements throughout Mexico ever since.

Narrates a shift in reading methods from notions of objectivity and authorial intent to a reader-oriented approach which emphasizes the reader as the subject who interprets the text. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schneiders argues that reading scripture is an event with the potential to transform the reader through the transcendent reality mediated by the text.

Studies the ‘afterlife’ of the gospels into the public realm – the realm of morality and politics. According to Bader-Saye, the gospels are misunderstood if they are confined to the realm of the personal. Rather, the gospels are a summons to a moral life expressive of shared ‘deep themes’ of liberation, dispossession and love. He elaborates on this through a critical appreciation of the way these gospel themes have been taken up in modern discussions of ethics and politics from Immanuel Kant to Romand Coles.

Discusses ecology and the role of natural environments in religious discourse, looking specifically at how religious institutions talked about the environment and conceive of it in relation to religious doctrine and belief and practice.

During the second half of the twentieth century, some Latin American intellectuals put theology and philosophy at the service of explaining and solving the social and economic disparities facing the region. Paradigm results of this development were the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiėrrez and the liberation philosophy of Enrique Dussel. Chapter 9 considers these attempts to establish the causes of oppression and become the voice of a vaguely defined group of people, the Latin American poor. Other categories of liberation theology and philosophy examined here include the center-periphery distinction and the very notion of liberation, which are adaptations of categories from dependency theory and Marxism respectively. The chapter argues that neither liberation theology nor liberation philosophy can accommodate strong intuitions about justice. They also rely on discredited assumptions from dependency theory. In addition, liberation philosophy faces some problems of its own, since it makes misleading and often false claims about events and rival philosophical theories. To illustrate these problems, the chapter looks closely at Dussel’s claim that all Western philosophy suffers from ideological contamination.

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.

According to Griffith-Dickson, a theological enquiry that aims to understand the significance of religious experience as a whole must engage with the reality of religious diversity, including the place of religious "others." She explores some ways that such understanding has been sought, including through a theology of religions, comparative theology, interreligious theology, and interfaith dialogue, while emphasizing the value of such understanding.

Human rights would become instrumental in trying to resolve the tensions between religion and the modern state. Chapter 5 commences with the Irish Constitution, which illustrates how Catholic political thought would evolve as a cosmopolitan civil society project. The use of rights-based language within this Constitution was part of the trend to both restrain a newly forming nation state, while at the same time to acknowledge the limits of religion in such a new political polity. During the Cold War the Christian democratic parties consolidated and expanded European political and economic cooperation, and Section 5.2 of the chapter looks at how those who shaped that era began drawing human rights into the confrontation between Eastern and Western Europe by emphasising religious freedom. In Latin America, human rights became a distinctively different project, and Section 5.3 examines in what manner human rights was used against state authority and part of a programme of liberation and democratisation. In each of these many contexts, a cosmopolitan Catholicism presented the value of participating in the human rights project with varying degrees of success.