Category: Liberation Theology

What Does Prayer Mean in An Age of Empire? The Dangerous Simplicity of Pope Leo’s “Nonviolence”

Suddenly, everyone is talking about prayer and theology.

That comes as a surprise to many who, since Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, have assumed that secularization had effectively removed God from serious political consideration. Yet recent controversies have forced the issue back into public view.

The debate surrounding Pete Hegseth’s prayer about U.S. policy in Iran –so reminiscent of Mark Twain’s haunting “War Prayer” has reopened questions many thought settled.

It has even produced the strange spectacle of Donald Trump adopting quasi-messianic language, while J.D. Vance publicly disputes Pope Leo XIV about whose prayers God hears and whose God ignores.

I have addressed those developments elsewhere. Here I want to press further into the deeper issue: What is prayer? What are its political implications? And what does the Bible itself reveal about the competing claims made in God’s name, especially about nonviolence?

What Does Prayer Mean?

To begin with, what exactly is being invoked when Hegseth appeals to the Psalms and asks God to “break the teeth” of enemies, to leave women widowed and children orphaned?

And what does the pope mean when he insists that Jesus rejects such petitions outright and stands unequivocally for nonviolence?

In both cases, the underlying assumption seems the same: a supernatural being “out there,” watching events unfold and selectively intervening on behalf of one side or another.

But can such imagery still be taken seriously?

We live in the age of the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals a universe so vast that our planet becomes nearly invisible within it. We also live in the age of quantum physics, where matter dissolves into energy and probability. In such a world, the idea of a localized deity monitoring human conflicts and deciding which missiles hit their targets strains credulity.

Is God “up there” listening? Is Jesus literally seated at the Father’s right hand, weighing petitions and choosing sides?

Or are such images relics of an earlier worldview that no longer corresponds to what we know about reality?

And Then There’s the Bible

It is true that the Bible itself often reflects that older worldview. Its language presumes a cosmos structured in ways we now recognize as outdated.

Yet that does not render the Bible irrelevant. On the contrary, its enduring significance lies elsewhere.

As scholars such as Pablo Richard have emphasized, the Bible does not present a single, unified picture of God. Instead, it stages an internal conflict– a “struggle of the gods.”

On one side stands the God of Moses: the liberator of slaves, the defender of the poor, the protector of widows, orphans, and immigrants.

On the other side stands the God claimed by kings and elites, beginning with the royal ideology of David and Solomon, a God invoked to justify wealth, hierarchy, domination, and even genocide.

The prophets– Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah– consistently take the side of the former against the latter.

Jesus clearly stands in that prophetic tradition: a marginal figure, an artisan, an outsider, a victim of imperial violence. His execution by crucifixion– Rome’s punishment for political dissidents– makes unmistakable where he stood.

In this sense, while the Bible does not address modern cosmology, it does address a far more urgent question: Whose side is Ultimate Reality on? Does Dr. King’s long arc of history really bend towards justice for the poor and marginalized?

The Bible refuses to let that question be answered cheaply.

Was Jesus Unequivocally “Nonviolent?”

This brings us to the claim that Jesus was simply “nonviolent.”

Stated without qualification, that claim risks obscuring more than it reveals. It can even function as a form of moral disorientation– especially for those subjected to systemic oppression.

“Violence” is not a single, simple category. It has at least four distinct forms.

First, there is structural violence: embedded in laws, institutions, and social arrangements that quietly destroy lives. Slavery, segregation, economic deprivation, denial of healthcare, and wars of aggression all belong here.

Second, there is defensive violence: the response of those who resist such conditions. When oppressed peoples fight back, their actions are immediately visible and condemned by the powers that be– yet they are widely recognized as legitimate, even under international law.

Third, there is repressive violence: the state’s attempt to crush resistance and restore the original injustice, often under the banner of “law and order.”

And finally, there is terroristic violence: the deliberate use of fear and destruction to achieve political ends– a practice historically employed most devastatingly and frequently by states, even as they label resisters “terrorists.”

In this light, to describe Jesus simply as “nonviolent” is not only inadequate; it risks distorting the reality of both his life and his context. The Roman authorities who executed him certainly did not regard him as harmless.

Conclusion

We are left, then, with the question that has been with us from the beginning: What does prayer mean in the world just described?

Whatever it means, it cannot be what figures like Hegseth, Trump, or even the pope seem to assume. Prayer is not a way of persuading a distant deity to intervene on behalf of our causes, bless our wars, or guarantee our victories.

Nor can the question of God’s allegiance be resolved by lifting isolated biblical texts or by invoking abstract slogans like “nonviolence,” as though such words settled anything at all.

The Bible itself will not allow that kind of evasion. It presents instead a conflict– deep, unresolved, and unavoidable– between competing visions of God, of humanity, and of justice. It exposes how easily “God” becomes the sacred cover for power.

But our problem runs even deeper. In the light of the James Webb Space Telescope and of quantum physics, the very notion of God must be rethought. The old image of a supreme off-planet being ” watching, judging, intervening, is no longer credible.

What we have called “God” must instead be understood as the creative energy of the universe– indeed, of a universe of universes– the living source in which everything participates, including the mysterious energy of consciousness itself. This is not an object among others, but the depth of reality, the Thou we may still address, not because it sits above us, but because it lives within and among us.

In biblical language, it is the Creator. In Paul’s words, it is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Such a reality cannot be captured by any nation, claimed by any empire, or enlisted in any war. It recognizes no borders, no chosen peoples in the exclusionary sense, no privileged civilizations. The earth belongs to all. Its gifts are not the possession of a few, but the common inheritance of everyone– each of us entitled to no more than our one-eight-billionth share.

Seen in this light, prayer changes meaning entirely.

It is no longer a request for favors from above. It is an act of alignment with the deepest currents of reality itself. It is a way of opening ourselves to the creative, life-giving energy that stands against domination, exclusion, and death.

And so the issue returns to us, stripped of illusion.

When we pray, we are not stepping outside history. We are locating ourselves within it. We are aligning ourselves– consciously or not– with one side of an ongoing struggle between the forces that sustain life and those that diminish it.

This is not theology as speculation. It is theology as decision.

To pray is to choose.

And the choice we make– however piously we disguise it– places us either with the flourishing of the whole or with the systems that deny it.

So the question remains, now more demanding than ever:

When you pray, are you aligning yourself with the life of the whole– or with the powers that divide and destroy it?

Wells, Walls, and Manufactured Thirst

Readings for the Third Sunday of lent: Exodus 17:1–7, Romans 5:1–2, 5–8, John 4:5–42.

The readings for this Third Sunday of Lent deal with the very human question of thirst. They raise the question, what are we thirsting for — ultimately?

Our politicians give us a glib answer. They tell us that our thirst is for security — from the threatening humans that surround us. The nation is dying we are told. We have lost our greatness. We are being overrun. Scarcity is closing in.

“Make America Great Again” is not just a slogan; it is an appeal to a deep anxiety — the fear that there is not enough: not enough jobs, not enough cultural cohesion, not enough safety, not enough control.

And so we are offered a diagnosis: the crisis is immigration. The problem is those people (who happen to be the poorest in the world!). The solution is walls, expulsions, exclusion. We are invited to believe that national greatness depends on tightening the circle.

But step back for a moment. The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population and consumes roughly a quarter of its resources. The “crisis” is narrated as though the most powerful nation in human history were a fragile victim of desperate families crossing deserts.

That story itself deserves scrutiny. It feels eerily similar to another story we heard today.

Thirst in the Desert

In Exodus 17, the people have escaped Egypt — escaped forced labor, escaped imperial extraction, escaped brick quotas. But once in the wilderness, they panic. There is no water. And fear rewrites memory. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” they ask. “Were there not enough graves there?”

Notice what is happening. A people freed from empire begin to long for the security of empire. Scarcity produces nostalgia. Anxiety produces accusation. Moses becomes the problem. Freedom itself becomes suspect.

And they ask the piercing question: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

That question echoes beneath our own political rhetoric. Is God present in pluralism, in equity, in inclusion? Is God present in demographic change? Is God present in movements of displaced people seeking survival? Or is God only present in the imagined stability of a past we have sanctified?

At Massah and Meribah, the people’s fear does not disqualify them. Yahweh brings water from rock. Not from Pharaoh’s storehouses. Not from a border wall. From a rock in the desert. The provision comes not through renewed control, but through trust in a God who sides with vulnerable people.

The biblical tradition has always insisted that this is the decisive revelation: God is known in history through concrete acts of sustenance for those escaping bondage. Not through slogans of greatness, but through water in the wilderness.

The Woman at the Well

Then we move to John’s Gospel, and the political charge intensifies.

Jesus is in Samaria — enemy territory. Centuries of ethnic hatred stand between Jews and Samaritans. Purity codes, historical grievances, competing temples. If ever there were a border crisis, this was it. And yet Jesus does not reinforce the boundary. He crosses it.

He asks a Samaritan woman for a drink.

It is astonishing. The one who will speak of “living water” begins by placing himself in need before someone religiously and socially marginalized. He does not begin with a lecture about law and order. He begins with vulnerability.

And this woman — doubly stigmatized as Samaritan and as female — becomes the first missionary in John’s Gospel. She leaves her jar and runs to her town: “Come and see.”

Our Real Thirst

What if the real thirst in our society is not for greatness, but for encounter? What if the deeper crisis is not immigration, but isolation? What if we have mistaken demographic change for existential threat because we have forgotten how to sit at wells with strangers?

“Living water,” Jesus says, becomes a spring within — not hoarded, not policed, not weaponized. It flows outward.

The irony is painful. The people who once wandered as refugees in the desert now fear refugees at their gates. The descendants of immigrants fear immigration. The community that drinks from a rock fears sharing water.

And beneath it all is that ancient question: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

If God is only with the secure, then fear makes sense. But if God is the One who hears slaves, who provides water for rebels, who speaks across enemy lines, then perhaps the presence of the stranger is not a threat but a test.

Paul, in Romans, says that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts.” Poured. Abundance language. Not scarcity language. Not zero-sum logic. Poured out while we were still estranged, still flawed, still confused.

Conclusion

Lent invites us to examine our thirst honestly. Are we thirsty for justice — or for dominance? For community — or for control? For security — or for solidarity?

Greatness, in the biblical sense, is never about territorial assertion. It is about fidelity to the God who brings water from rock and who offers living water at a contested well.

The wilderness is frightening. Demographic change is unsettling. Empires promise certainty. But the Gospel suggests that life springs up not from walls, but from wells.

The bush still burns. The rock still flows. The well is still there.

The only question is whether we will drink — and whether we will let others drink too.

Returning to Rome: Redrawing My Map of God and the World

I am back in Rome — a city that once formed me more deeply than I knew at the time. This time Peggy and I will be here for three months visiting our diplomat son, his wife, and our three little granddaughters.

More than fifty years ago, as a young priest, I walked these same streets believing I stood near the center of the Christian world. Rome felt solid, ancient, authoritative. Theology here carried the weight of centuries. I absorbed its categories, its rhythms, its confidence. That was soon after Vatican II (1962-’65). I was only beginning to question the map I had inherited.

Now, decades later, I find myself returning not as a defender of that center nor as its adversary, but as someone who has been slowly reshaped by teachers, students, and experiences far from these stones. Being here again has stirred gratitude — and reflection. I see more clearly how much of my life has been an apprenticeship in learning to redraw the map I once took for granted.

Learning to Turn Things Over

To begin with, my teachers here in the Eternal City were dynamite in terms of creatively upsetting my theological and even political certainties. I think especially of Magnus Lohrer and Raphael Schulte at the Atheneum Anselmianum on Rome’s Aventine hill. That first year in Rome, lectures at the Anselmo were in Latin. Regardless, Lohrer and Schulte called all my categories into question. They had me seriously reading non-Catholic theological giants for the first time. I brought it all home to unending lunch and dinner debates with the fifteen or so young priests (who were also pursuing terminal degrees in Rome) at our Columban house on Corso Trieste 57.

But the deepest fissures in my theological and political certainties came after Rome – in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and especially in Costa Rica, where Peggy and I became fellows at the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, a liberation theology think tank. The center of it all was Franz Hinkelammert who became not only my teacher, but colleague and friend. As an economist and theologian, he adopted critical thinking as his own central category.

I remember telling him, somewhat playfully, that I thought I had figured out the method behind his approach to the discipline: he seemed always to take what passed as “common sense” and quietly invert it with exquisite historical,  philosophical, and theological insight. Markets are described as free. Economic growth is described as necessary. Sacrifice of the vulnerable is described as realistic. He would simply ask: who benefits? who suffers? what “god” is being served?

He smiled when I said that — a smile that felt less like approval and more like invitation. He was not urging me toward cynicism. He was urging me toward attentiveness.

Under his influence, I began to recognize how easily societies sanctify their own arrangements. The market can become providence. National security can become destiny. Even theology can become a cloak for power. What I once called realism I learned to approach more cautiously.

That habit of questioning did not make me certain. It made me slower to accept easy answers.

Learning to Relocate the Center

Another teacher, Enrique Dussel, unsettled me in a different way. I first met him in Brazil during a seminar specifically on liberation theology. The cream of the crop – theologians I had been reading for years – were there.

I still see Dussel at a whiteboard, sketching a world map from memory. He did not begin in Athens, as my education had. He began in Egypt. He traced the movement of civilizations across Asia. He lingered over China’s long intellectual and cultural history before Europe entered the frame at all.

“Wherever I lecture,” he would say, “people repeat the same historical story: ancient, medieval, modern.” Then he would perceptively add, “That story is not universal. It is European.” Leonardo da Vinci’s futuristic drawings were lifted straight from Chinese engineers.

I felt enlarged listening to him. The world was older and more intricate than the timeline I had inherited. Europe’s achievements remained real, but they were no longer singular or central in the way I had assumed.

After his lectures, I found myself trying to reproduce his map — not because I wished to argue, but because I wanted to see as he saw. His point was not so much to diminish Europe, as to free history from provincial boundaries.

That lesson stayed with me. Once you realize that a “center” may simply be a perspective, you become cautious about every center — political, economic, even theological.

Encounters in the Global South

My years of teaching in the United States and traveling in Latin America and other parts of the Global South deepened that reorientation. Theology in Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and Mexico was not an abstract discipline. It was bound up with hunger, repression, resilience, hope.

Through thinkers like Pablo Richard and Elsa Tamez, I saw how scripture could sound different when read from below rather than from established centers of power. Through Rosemary Ruether, I came to see how deeply gendered our language about God and authority has been. Helio Gallardo showed how The United States’ regime change policies prevented human development throughout the Global South. Vandana Shiva widened my awareness of how economic systems scar both land and people in the name of progress. And Dom Hélder Câmara reminded me, in his gentle way, that charity without justice leaves underlying structures intact. He famously said, “‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’

None of these encounters destroyed my faith. They complicated it. They forced me to acknowledge that what I had once regarded as neutral theology was often shaped by social location and power.

Over time, I began to describe myself not simply as Catholic, bus as belonging to the Church’s “loyal opposition.” I still claim that designation. I did not wish to abandon the Church. I owed it too much. But I could not ignore its entanglements with empire or its silences in the face of suffering.

I learned that loyalty without critique can drift toward idolatry. But critique without love can harden into bitterness. Holding both has never been simple.

The God I Was Taught — and the God I Pray To

Returning to Rome has also stirred memories of the God-image that accompanied my early formation.

God was Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, Punisher (even Torturer!). Sin was pervasive. Conscience was vigilant. That framework gave me seriousness and discipline. It also sometimes fostered fear and self-scrutiny that felt heavier than grace.

Over the years, influenced by the teachers I have named and by the communities I have encountered, that image loosened. I began to see how easily our political imaginations shape our theology. A hierarchical society imagines a hierarchical heaven. An imperial culture imagines a commanding deity.

Genesis says something simpler and perhaps more daring: we are clay, animated by breath. Clay is not flawless. It is vulnerable, shaped by experience, capable of cracking and reforming. The problem in Eden is not embodiment but mistrust — the suggestion that God is withholding, that God is threatened by human growth.

Slowly, I found myself praying less to a divine Auditor and more to a Life-Giver. Paul’s contrast between Adam and Christ came to sound less like courtroom procedure and more like two ways of being human: hiding in shame or standing in trust.

That shift did not happen overnight. It came through study, mistakes, conversations, disappointments, and, occasionally, grace.

Sitting in Trastevere

Recently, sitting in Santa Maria in Trastevere, I felt the weight of all these strands all at once.

Trastevere was once a district of the marginal — dockworkers, Jews, early Christians. Yet the Church that took root among them eventually learned to speak the language of empire. The basilica’s golden mosaics shimmer above centuries of compromise and devotion alike.

The Church, I realized again, is both clay and gold.

So am I.

If my children sometimes experience my positions as strong or unsettling, I understand. They did not sit in those classrooms. They did not travel in those communities. They did not hear those lectures. My convictions were not born of sudden rebellion. They accumulated slowly, sometimes against my own initial resistance.

I do not claim to see perfectly now. If anything, these teachers made me more cautious about certainty. They taught me to ask whose voices are missing, whose suffering is hidden, which assumptions have gone unquestioned.

Returning to Rome does not feel like a triumph. It feels like a reminder. A reminder of where I began. A reminder of how much I was given. A reminder of how much I had to unlearn. And a reminder that any map — even the one I now hold — remains partial.

Clay, Breath, and Ongoing Revision

The longer I live, the less interested I am in appearing marble. Marble is impressive, but rigid. Clay is humbler, more exposed, more capable of change. Genesis names us clay. The Spirit breathes.

If there has been a “crime,” it was never Rome itself. It was the temptation to mistake any center — any institution, any system, any theology — for the whole.

The teachers who shaped me did not hand me a new dogma. They handed me a way of seeing: turn the claim over, redraw the map, listen to the margins, be wary of sanctified power, hold loyalty and critique together.

Rome, with all its beauty and ambiguity, is a fitting place to remember that.

I return not to condemn, nor to congratulate myself for having moved beyond something, but to give thanks for the long, unfinished work of being reshaped.

The map has been redrawn more than once in my life. It may yet need redrawing again.

For now, I remain grateful — for Rome, for the margins, for the teachers who widened my world, and for the breath that continues to animate clay.

Liberation Theology as Critical Thinking: Why God Talk Still Matters

I recently found myself in conversation with a young activist—brilliant, earnest, morally serious—who made a claim that was both understandable and unsettling. Young people, he said, simply don’t want to hear from old people like me, especially old white men. We’ve had our turn. We made a mess. And whatever we call “wisdom,” grounded in our long lives and accumulated experience, feels to them less like insight and more like obstruction.

I understood immediately why he would feel that way. My generation was born during the Great Depression and its aftermath; the boomers who followed presided over imperial wars, environmental devastation, runaway capitalism, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions. Zoomers have every reason to be suspicious of elders who lecture them about patience, realism, or incremental change. The house is on fire. Who wants to hear a sermon about proper etiquette?

And yet, something about the conversation troubled me—not because I felt personally dismissed, but because of the assumptions beneath the dismissal. In particular, the identification of “young people” with young Americans struck me as dangerously parochial. Outside the United States, especially in the Global South, students and young intellectuals are often strikingly comprehensive in their critical thinking. They do not imagine that wisdom expires with age, nor that critique began with TikTok.

Across Latin America, Africa, and parts of Europe, young activists routinely engage figures who are not only old, but long dead: Marx, Engels, Gramsci; Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Daly, and Malcolm X. They read these thinkers not out of antiquarian curiosity, but because the structures those thinkers analyzed—capital, empire, race, class—remain very much alive. Ideas endure because oppression endures.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the tradition known as liberation theology.

Liberation Theology

Liberation theology is often caricatured in the United States as a quaint Latin American experiment, a left-wing theological fad that peaked in the 1980s and was later disciplined by Rome. That caricature misses the point entirely. Liberation theology is not primarily a set of doctrines; it is a method. More precisely, it is a disciplined form of critical thinking rooted in the lived experience of the poor. (In this connection, see my book, The Magic Glasses of Critical Thinking: seeing through alternative fact and fake news.)

At its core lies a deceptively simple question: From whose point of view are we interpreting reality? Classical theology asked what God is like. Liberation theology asks where God is to be found. And its answer—radical then, still radical now—is among the poor, the exploited, the colonized, and the discarded.

This shift has enormous epistemological consequences. It means that theology is not done from the armchair, nor from the pulpit alone, but from within history’s conflicts. Truth is not neutral. Knowledge is not innocent. Every analysis reflects interests, whether acknowledged or denied.

This is why liberation theologians insist on what they call praxis: reflection and action in constant dialogue. Ideas are tested not by elegance but by their consequences. Do they liberate, or do they legitimate domination?

That is critical thinking in its most rigorous form.

Beyond the American Youth Bubble

In Latin America, thinkers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Elsa Tamez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, and figures like Franz Hinkelammert, Enrique Dussel, Paulo Freire, and Helio Gallardo pushed this method far beyond church walls. They integrated history, economics, philosophy, pedagogy, and political theory into theological reflection. They read the Bible alongside dependency theory and Marxist political economy, not because Marx was a prophet (he was!), but because capitalism is a religion—and a deadly one.

Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains one of the most influential works of critical pedagogy worldwide. Its central insight—that education is never neutral, that it either domesticates or liberates—could easily be applied to theology, media, or political discourse. What Freire called “conscientization” is nothing other than the awakening of class consciousness.

Contrast this with much of American youth culture, where “critical thinking” is often reduced to identity signaling or stylistic rebellion, easily co-opted by market logic. The phenomenon of Charlie Kirk and similar figures is instructive here. Kirk’s appeal to college students is not an aberration; it is a symptom. Young people are starving for meaning, for narrative coherence, for moral seriousness. Into that vacuum rush slick, biblically uninformed ideologues like Kirk who weaponize Scripture in service of hierarchy and exclusion.

The Bible as Popular Philosophy

For millions of Americans, the Bible remains the primary source of moral reasoning—and often of historical understanding as well. This is frequently mocked by secular intellectuals, but mockery is a luxury we can no longer afford. The Bible functions in the United States as a form of popular philosophy. People may know little about economics, geopolitics, or climate science, but they believe they know what the Bible says.

And what they believe it says shapes their views on Israel and Palestine, abortion, feminism, sexuality, immigration, and race.

The tragedy is not that the Bible matters, but that it has been systematically stripped of its prophetic core and repackaged as an ideological weapon. White, patriarchal, misogynistic, anti-gay, xenophobic, and racist forces have successfully co-opted a tradition that is, at its heart, a sustained critique of empire, wealth accumulation, and religious hypocrisy.

This is not accidental. Empires have always sought divine sanction.

Yeshua of Nazareth & Class Consciousness

What liberation theology insists upon—and what American Christianity has largely forgotten—is that the Judeo-Christian tradition is saturated with class consciousness. From the Exodus narrative to the prophets, from the Magnificat to the Beatitudes, the Bible relentlessly sides with the poor against the powerful.

Yeshua of Nazareth did not preach generic love or abstract spirituality. He announced “good news to the poor,” warned the rich, overturned tables, and was executed by the state as a political threat. His message was not “be nice,” but “another world is possible—and this one is under judgment.”

Liberation theology takes that judgment seriously. It refuses to spiritualize away material suffering or postpone justice to the afterlife. Salvation is not escape from history but transformation of it.

To say this today is not to indulge in nostalgia. It is to recover a critical tradition capable of resisting the authoritarian, nationalist, and theocratic currents now surging globally.

The Need for More God Talk, Not Less

Here is where my disagreement with my young interlocutor becomes sharpest. The problem is not that there is too much God talk. The problem is that there is too little serious God talk.

When theology abdicates the public square, it leaves moral language to demagogues. When progressives abandon religious discourse, they surrender one of the most powerful symbolic systems shaping mass consciousness. You cannot defeat biblical nationalism by ignoring the Bible.

Liberation theology offers an alternative: God talk grounded in history, class analysis, and the lived experience of the oppressed. It exposes false universals. It unmasks ideology. It insists that faith, like reason, must answer to reality.

This is not theology for clerics alone. It is a way of thinking—rigorous, suspicious of power, attentive to suffering—that belongs at the heart of any emancipatory project.

Old Voices, Living Questions

Perhaps young Americans are right to be wary of elders who speak as if experience itself confers authority. It does not. But it is equally short-sighted to assume that age disqualifies insight, or that the past has nothing left to teach us.

Outside the United States, young people know better. They read old texts because the structures those texts analyze persist. They mine ancient traditions because myths and stories carry truths that statistics alone cannot.

Liberation theology stands at precisely this intersection: ancient scripture and modern critique, myth and materialism, faith and class struggle. It reminds us that critical thinking did not begin with social media, and that wisdom does not belong to any generation.

If we are serious about liberation—real liberation, not branding—then we must reclaim every tool that helps us see clearly. Theology, done rightly, is one of them.

Not because God solves our problems.

But because the question of God forces us to ask, relentlessly: Who benefits? Who suffers? And whose side are we on?

A Gospel for Palestinians under Siege

Readings for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time: JER 38: 4-10; PS 40: 2-4, 18; HEB 12:1-4; LK 12: 49-53

Today’s gospel excerpt presents real difficulties for a thoughtful homilist. That’s because it shows us an apparently confrontational Jesus — one who sounds completely revolutionary. It raises an uncomfortable question: why would the Church choose such a passage for Sunday worship? What are we supposed to do with a Jesus who doesn’t sound like the soft-focus “Prince of Peace” in our stained-glass windows?

In the context of Zionist genocide and starvation of Palestinians, perhaps this is providential. Maybe this gospel can help us understand a truth that polite Christianity often avoids: people living under the heel of settler colonialism supported by empire — even people of deep faith — sometimes find themselves pulled toward resistance that is anything but gentle.

We forget that Jesus and his community were not free citizens in a democracy. They were impoverished, heavily taxed subjects of an occupying army. Roman power loomed over their fields, their marketplaces, their synagogues. By today’s international standards, they were an occupied people with the legal right to resist.

And in Luke’s gospel today, Jesus says, without apology:

“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing… Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”

In Matthew’s parallel account, the language sharpens:

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

These are not the soundbites that make it into Christmas cards. They make us ask: what happened to “Turn the other cheek” and “Love your enemies”?

Some scholars, like Reza Aslan, suggest that Jesus’ nonviolence applied primarily within his own oppressed community, while his stance toward the Roman occupiers was far less accommodating. Others, like John Dominic Crossan, argue that Jesus was unwaveringly committed to nonviolent resistance, and that later gospel writers softened or altered his message to make it more palatable in times of war.

Either way, the backdrop remains the same: an occupied land, a foreign military presence, a people dispossessed. In that context, fiery words about “division” and “swords” are not abstract theology. They are the language of a people under siege, the language of survival.

This is where the parallels to our world are hard to miss. Today, in the land we call Israel-Palestine, we see a modern occupation with its own walls, checkpoints, home demolitions, and armed patrols. We see Palestinian families pushed off their land in the name of “security.” We see the weight of military might pressing down on those who have little power to push back.

This is not to glorify violence but to say that this kind of daily humiliation, dispossession, and threat inevitably breeds anger, desperation, and — for some — the temptation to meet force with force. The gospel today, like the headlines from Gaza and the West Bank, confronts us with the messy, often tragic choices that emerge under occupation.

As Christians, we have to wrestle with this. Would we cling to a nonviolent ethic, like the Jesus Crossan describes? Or, living under bulldozers and armed patrols, would we find ourselves understanding — perhaps even empathizing with — those who choose other paths?

Jesus’ words today refuse to let us take the easy way out. They call us to name the real causes of conflict — not some vague “ancient hatred,” but the concrete realities of military domination, settler colonialism, and American imperialism. They challenge us to imagine what peace would require: not simply the silencing of the oppressed, but the dismantling of systems that oppress them in the first place.

Because if we only condemn the flames without questioning the spark, we miss the deeper gospel truth: that justice is the only soil in which true peace can grow.

Gustavo Gutierrez and Liberation Theology’s Critical Faith Theory

The Great Gustavo Gutierrez died this week. He transitioned as a 96-year-old giant whose A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (1971) popularized and spurred the most important theological movement of the last 1700 years (i.e. since Constantine in the 4th century). In fact, liberation theology (LT) might well be described as responsible for the West’s most influential intellectual and social developments of the last 175 years (i.e. since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848). United States and Vatican fierce opposition to LT testifies to its impact.

Think about it. Without liberation theology it is impossible to account for Salvador Allende’s rise to power in 1973 or the triumph of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1979, or the power the FMLN in El Salvador had and continues to enjoy today. The Zapatista movement in Mexico is also intimately connected with liberation theology. Even more, without reference to liberation theology, it’s impossible to fully understand the rise of new left governments throughout Latin America. All of them are indebted to liberation theology and its power to motivate the grassroots.

Perhaps more surprisingly: apart from LT, one cannot fully understand the prominence of conservative evangelicals in the United States. That’s because (as we’ll see below) political support for their movement was part of the Reagan administration’s strategy to defeat liberation theology which the White House and the Pentagon termed a national security threat. Their fear of LT mirrored that of the Vatican which ended up cooperating with Washington’s war against it.

Many are convinced that Washington’s and Rome’s anti-LT war was successful. That’s because the U.S. systematically assassinated its prophets along with hundreds of thousands of its adherents in a massive conflict that Noam Chomsky called “the first religious war of the 21st century.”  The sheer terrorism of the U.S. response plus an equally systematic offensive against LT within the Catholic Church itself deprived liberation theology of its best leaders, misinformed and intimidated the grassroots, and silenced many more. Nonetheless LT has changed the world. It has changed the church and Christianity in general.

But what is liberation theology? And why was it so threatening to the powers-that-be, both political and ecclesiastical? What steps were taken to defeat it? And why should believers be so grateful to theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez?   

 Liberation Theology Defined

Simply put, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed. More accurately, it is reflection on the following of Jesus the Christ from the viewpoint of those among the poor who are committed to their own liberation. That is, LT begins from a place of commitment – to a world with room for everyone. In itself, it represents a popular movement, a solidarity movement for social justice.

Liberation from what? In a word, from colonialism and from the neo-colonialism represented today by the forces of corporate globalization. Those forces have nearly half the world living on $2 a day or less. They’ve concentrated the world’s wealth in the hands of a sliver of 1% of the world’s population. According to UN statistics, eight billionaires own as much as 50% or humanity. As a result, at least 25,000 people including 10,000 children die of preventable starvation each day. In the eyes of liberation theology’s protagonists, that’s sinful and runs entirely contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

And what were those teachings? (This is the heart of liberation theology.) They were first of all those of a man recognized by the impoverished protagonists of liberation theology as someone like themselves. He looked like them. According to experts in the field of forensic archeology, he resembled poor mestizos everywhere in Latin America. He probably stood about 5’1’’ and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was brown. He was a laborer, not a scholar; his hands were calloused.

Ironically, Jesus also possessed characteristics that mainstream Christians often find repulsive and ungodly. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother (Mt. 118-22; Lk. 1:26-38). He was homeless at birth (Lk.2:7).  If we are to believe Matthew’s account, Jesus became an immigrant in Egypt (Mt. 2:13-15). The good people of his day called him a drunkard and the companion of prostitutes. They expelled him from his synagogue because he didn’t seem to care about the 10 Commandments, especially the most important one – the Sabbath law. (For a Jew such excommunication and the shunning it entailed were like a death sentence.) The religious authorities said he was a heretic and possessed by the devil. The occupying Roman authorities identified him as a terrorist. They arrested him. And he ended up a victim of torture and of capital punishment carried out by crucifixion – a means of execution the Romans reserved specifically for insurgents. He was not the kind of person mainstream Christians usually admire. He was far too liberal to merit their approval.

Jesus was clearly a feminist. Many of his disciples were women. He spoke with them in isolated places. He actually forgave a woman caught in adultery, while implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of patriarchal law which punished women for adultery and not men. And Jesus refused to recognize his contemporaries’ taboos around segregations. He crossed boundaries not only dividing men from women, but Jew from gentile, lepers from non-lepers, and rich from poor.     

He couldn’t have been more liberal. In a sense he was an anarchist. He honored no law that failed to represent the loving thing to do. His attitude towards the law is best summarized in his pronouncement about the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was instituted for human beings,” he said, “human beings weren’t made for the Sabbath.” This was pure humanism placing human beings above even God’s holiest law. Again, it was anarchistic.

Jesus’ teachings were politically radical as well. They centered on what today is called social justice. As such they infuriated his opponents but were wildly inspiring to the poor and oppressed. His proclamation was not about himself, but about what he called “The Kingdom of God.” That was the highly charged political image he used to refer to what the world would be like if God were king instead of Caesar. In that kingdom everything would be turned upside-down. The first would be last; the last would be first. The rich would be poor; the poor would be rich.

Subsequent reflection by followers of Jesus in the Book of Revelation teased all of that out and drew the conclusion that with the dawning of God’s kingdom, the Roman Empire would be destroyed and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth entirely unlike empire. There (as indicated in the Acts of the Apostles) wealth would be distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There would be room for everyone. If that sounds like communism, it’s because, as the Mexican exegete Jose Miranda points out, the idea of communism originated with Christians, not with Marx and Engels.  

U.S. Opposition to LT

Those connections with Marxist analysis go a long way towards explaining resistance to LT by the U.S. government as well as within the Catholic Church.

That liberation theology dared to enter the mythological arena the right had long dominated virtually without rival astounded and infuriated the empire. Peasants throughout the subjugated world found the new explanations of God, Jesus and the gospels entirely empowering. Everywhere throughout Latin America they formed biblical circles, and those circles issued in social movements for justice.

In response, the Rockefeller Report of 1969 already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of the United States. By 1987, the Latin American Military Chiefs of Staff meeting in conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, devoted several pages of their final report to liberation theology and the threat it posed to regional stability.  In between, in 1979 the first Santa Fe Document advised the incoming Reagan administration that it had to do something decisive about the threat posed by liberation theology. The administration heeded the advice, and responded both militarily and ideologically.

Reagan’s military strategy against liberation theology issued in a bloody war pitting the United States against the Catholic Church in Latin America whose bishops meeting in conference in Medellin Colombia had together dared to affirm a “preferential option for the poor” as their official position. To combat that commitment, the U.S. did exactly what Rome had done in the first three centuries of our era – and for the same reason: faithfully following Jesus who called empire into question and motivated the poor to assert their rights in this world as children of the God of life.

And both the Roman response and the U.S. response to Jesus and his followers resulted in blood baths. Many of us are well acquainted with the best-known martyrs: Camilo Torres, Archbishop Romero, the Salvadoran team of liberation theologians killed at San Salvador’s Central American University in 1989, the U.S. women religious murdered years earlier in that same country, and Che Guevara. (Yes, Che. His spirituality was secular, but it was no less spiritual or liberationist than any of the others.) And then the unending list of martyrs in this war against the Catholic Church – 200,000 in Guatemala, more than 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and literally untold killings and disappearances in Honduras.

In every case, the carnage was a response to social movements inspired by liberation theology. Again, as Chomsky points out, official U.S. military documents show that liberation theology was a major target of those wars. In fact within those same official documents, the Army boasts specifically about defeating LT.

As for Reagan’s ideological response to liberation theology . . . .  On his accession to power, CIA psyops began funding conservative alternatives to liberation theology in Latin America and in the U.S. So did business concerns that saw the leftward drift of Latin America as a threat to their presence there. Domino’s Pizza and Coors Brewery were prominent among the cases in point. As a result, evangelicals throughout the region grew rapidly in number, and the recipients of those funds in the United States increasingly identified with Republicans, the “hand that fed them.”

So, the television programs of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and others were beamed into every poor barrio, población, and favela. Right wing churches sprang up everywhere feeding and expanding an already robust evangelical presence in areas once completely dominated by the Catholic Church. The reactionary message was always the same – a depoliticized version of Christianity whose central commitment involved accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior and rejecting communism including the type allegedly represented by the theology of liberation.

All this points up the extreme importance of LT. including being indirectly responsible for the rise of the religious right in the United States.

On the other hand however, and on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, the Obama presidency represented the first U.S. president directly influenced by liberation theology. For 20 years, Barack Obama was part of the congregation of Jeremiah Wright – identified by James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, as the latter’s foremost contemporary embodiment.   

Nevertheless, Reagan’s two-front strategy (military and ideological) worked. Revolutionary gains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and most prominently, in Nicaragua were halted and reversed. Militarily, the “Guatemala Solution” was the template. It entailed using military and paramilitary death squads to kill everyone remotely connected with guerrilla movements. According to the Reagan strategy, that included priests, nuns, lay catechists and ministers of the word influenced by liberation theology. The theological strategy worked as well. The slogan promulgated by the Salvadoran military said it all, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.”

Our Debt to Gustavo Gutierrez 

Gustavo Gutierrez was by no means the founder of liberation theology. However, he is said to have coined the term in 1968 after the bishops of Latin America adopted as their own LT’s understanding of the Christ event as expressing God’s “preferential option for the poor.” The poor are God’s chosen people, liberationists explained, as testified by the divine choice to incarnate as the poor peasant earlier described.

In a sense then, Gutierrez and the movement he popularized represents a kind of “Critical Faith Theory” comparable to contemporary academia’s “Critical Race Theory.” Like the latter in relation to race, liberation theology seeks to reverse the traditional employment of religion and the Judeo-Christian tradition as tools of oppression meant to drug, pacify, infantilize, and depoliticize their adherents.

In that sense, LT is a kind of anti-theology.  

Thank you Saint Gustavo Gutierrez for your life and work.

Could Hamas Be the Unlikely Agent of God’s Revelation?

Readings for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Exodus 22: 20-26; Psalm 18, 2-4, 47, 51; 1 Thessalonians 1: 5c-10; Matthew 22: 34-40

Thank God for Hamas.

Yes, thank God for Hamas. At least that’s what I’m thinking. Hamas could be the unlikely agent of God’s revelation.

That Hamas possesses such agency seems likely in the light of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions in general and in that of the liturgical readings for this Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time. All three can enable discerning people of faith to see past western propaganda to what Hamas is actually up to. Hamas is lifting the veil to help us identify who’s responsible for most of the world’s problems. It’s the United States and Israel. Both represent brutal criminal enterprises. 

That’s my two-point message for today. it’s one that we’d do well to let into our consciousness blinded by nonstop propaganda that hates Muslims and the poor, that hates non-whites, and those who dare to defend themselves against imperialists, colonialists, and racists.

So, don’t expect here the de rigueur denunciation of Hamas’ “atrocities.” In terms of freedom and justice for Palestine’s oppressed, that requirement is deceptively counterproductive. It creates a detestable false equivalency between the tactics of resistance fighters on the one hand and the infinitely worse barbarisms of their overlords on the other. Once again, it ends up justifying Israel’s slaughter of their concentration camp captives.

[By the way, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, Munir Akram, recently said something like that to the General Assembly. He refused to criticize Hamas unless Israel was also criticized as the root cause of the crisis in Israel-Palestine. But, of course, the U.S. and Israel refused to allow such critique. (Be sure to view Akram’s speech above.)]

No, my points for us living within a nearly impenetrable “veil of ignorance” are to affirm that (1) Hamas may well be the agent of God’s revelation, and (2) the scriptural traditions of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions suggest that strongly.

Hamas  

To begin with what do we know of Hamas? I mean, what do we really know that’s not filtered through western (i.e., through imperial and colonial) propaganda machines?

The answer is, “almost nothing!”

Think about it. What we know of Hamas comes from its inveterate enemies. It’s like getting information from the Nazis about Jews in the 1930s. And we fall for it every time. I think Goebbels said something about that.

In other words, our information about Hamas comes from proven compulsive liars (like the colonialist Benjamin Netanyahu, the imperialist Joe Biden, and their lackey press corps). Uniformly, they tell us:

  • Hamas represents “pure unadulterated evil.”
  • Simply put, they are “terrorists.”
  • There is no distinction between them and the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza.
  • All of them (including women, children, and even infants) are guilty.
  • After all, they elected Hamas to govern them in 2006.
  • That proves that all Gazans are inhuman. They’re simply animals. They have no human rights. Yes, they’re beasts and can be treated as such.
  • The Hamas violence on October 7th provides further evidence.
  • It came out of the blue and was “unprovoked.”
  • Hamas cadres wantonly killed innocent young people spraying them down with machine gun bullets at a rave dance. (Nothing about crossfire.)
  • Unlike Apartheid-Israelis who hold more than a thousand Palestinians in custody (often without charge) Hamas has no right to take political prisoners.
  • After all, hostages and political prisoners are not the same.
  • Hamas militants even beheaded infants and children. Joe Biden said he saw the photos. (Later, his team “walked that back.”)
  • They raped women. (No evidence. Again, a claim “walked back.”)
  • Their rockets, not Apartheid-Israelis, destroyed a Gazan hospital. (Without investigation, Joe Biden believes that too – on the word of the highly principled Benjamin Netanyahu.)
  • They’re worthy of condemnation because they have chosen violence over the non-violent tactics so obviously favored by virtuous Apartheid-Israelis and Apartheid-Americans. [Nothing about Palestinians’ non-violent “Great March of Return” (2018), Apartheid-Israel’s brutal response killing hundreds, and the general lack of coverage in the west’s mainstream media.]

That’s what we know about Hamas. Am I right or wrong?

And every one of those allegations is a lie or at best a prevarication containing a tiny grain of truth. Every one of them!

I won’t waste my time or yours debunking them one-by-one. You can find that information elsewhere.

Instead, let me tell you briefly what we’re never told about Hamas. (You can find all this on Wikipedia):

  • To begin with, it is a political organization democratically elected by the people of Gaza in 2006.
  • It is also a religiously inspired social services collective that funds welfare projects helping people survive the hardships of hostile governments throughout the Middle East.
  • It represents a kind of Islamic theology of liberation that (in the name of the biblical and Koranic God of the poor) serves the impoverished and embraces the right to revolution recognized by Article 51 of the UN Charter.  
  • For instance, in Gaza, Hamas provides food, water, medical and rent assistance for residents. It funds nurseries, schools, orphanages, soup kitchens, women’s activities, library services, and sporting clubs. That’s the foundation of its popular support.
  • And, of course, Hamas also has a powerful military wing to defend Gazans from the atrocities that Apartheid-Israelis have routinely inflicted on Palestinians for the last 70 years.
  • As such, according to international law, it enjoys the legitimacy accorded those resisting illegal occupation by foreign powers. (As illegal occupiers and aggressors, Apartheid-Israelis have no such corresponding rights.)
  • With all that in mind, Hamas atrocities turn out to be no different (except in their lesser severity) from those of the Apartheid-Israelis which preceded and followed upon them.
  • In the Palestinian case, they are acts of anger and vengeance for a whole series of brutalities inflicted upon them by their oppressors for the last 70 years. Those acts are far more understandable and justifiable than the acts of Apartheid-Israel that preceded and followed them.

Agent of Revelation

Moreover, (and this is a principal point in this homily) whatever you might think of its tactics today, Hamas is functioning as the agent of God’s revelation as articulated in this Sunday’s readings.

And here I’m using the word “revealing” in its etymological sense – removing the veil.

That is, (according to Scott Ritter ) Hamas has forced Apartheid-Israel and Apartheid-America to show their true colors. As a result, we finally see the blood drenched palette every day on our TVs. Simply put, the colonizer and its imperial sponsor have revealed themselves as brutal reincarnations of that other genocidal European force whose name can barely be printed in the mass media. Apartheid-Israel and Apartheid-America are revealing themselves to be racist, white supremacist, and N*zis.

According to Ritter, such revelation is what Hamas’ strategy is all about. They desperately realized that the settler invasions and occupations of Palestinian lands coupled with Israel’s Abraham Accords with surrounding Arab nations signaled a window closing on any hopes for an independent Palestinian state.

So, Hamas decided to force Israel’s and America’s brutal hands. They took up arms against their concentration camp captors. And the captors reacted in exactly the way Hamas knew they would – by bombing the concentration camp itself. Their keepers responded with wholesale slaughter of women and children – with obvious war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and outright genocide.

And the world finally noticed. The Hamas tactic worked. Everyone (outside the western bubble) now sees Israel and the United States for the criminal enterprises they are.

Both the latter claim to embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s all hypocrisy.

Just read today’s first selection from the Book of Exodus. It’s so short and to the point that I risk quoting its first paragraph verbatim here:

“Thus says the LORD: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.’” (Ex 22:20-26).

And then there’s today’s Gospel selection from Matthew. Confronting the upperclass Pharisees and Sadducees whom the Jewish Yeshua saw as blaming the victims of the Romans (in the case of the Pharisees) and directly cooperating with their imperial oppressors (in the case of the Sadducees) he reminds them that they must love those they despised. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he says.

Those words expressed the Christ’s mystic insight that all humans are one single entity. We are all equally “chosen.” We are more than brothers and sisters. Our neighbor is Our Self. In killing Palestinian women and children, elders, teachers, doctors, nurses, first responders – and Hamas supporters – we are committing suicide. We’re killing our common indwelling Spirit.

All that promises to become even more apparent as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues while the whole world is watching. The horrific revelation will continue.

Conclusion

So, yes, I’ll dare to say it: thank God for Hamas. Yes, it’s removing our veil of ignorance. In that sense, it is the agent of God’s re-veil-ation. The thousands and thousands Apartheid-Israel is executing before our eyes are martyrs reminiscent of the early Christians. They are revealers too.

The world’s poor, the Global majority living in the West’s former colonies and current neo-colonies see that more clearly than any of us. While Israel and the U.S. scandalously oppose a cease fire, the Global South (i.e., the world’s vast majority) supports it.

It’s far past the time for westerners like us join their chorus demanding that the criminal Apartheid-Israel state and its criminal American counterpart STOP THEIR CRIMINAL OPPRESSION.

Like Scott Ritter, I find myself praying for the complete defeat and humiliation of Apartheid-Israel — and of the United States on every front.