Category: Liberation Theology

July 4th: What Made Me Stop Loving “America”

Every Fourth of July Americans are invited to celebrate freedom, democracy, and the birth of the republic. This year, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, I find myself unable to join the celebration.

A few days ago, listening to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, I heard Princeton historian Eddie Glaude utter words that startled me by expressing exactly what I had been struggling to admit to myself: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Those words open his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, which examines what our official commemorations leave out as much as what they include.

Unlike Professor Glaude, however, I cannot say that I never loved America. Quite the contrary. I was raised to love it instinctively. My journey has not been one from radicalism to disillusionment. It has been the reverse: from unquestioning patriotism to reluctant dissent. It was a conversion I resisted almost every step of the way.

I grew up in what I would call a quietly Republican family. My parents usually described themselves as independents, but I suspect they voted otherwise. I admired my Uncle Ben because, unlike my other uncles, he worked downtown in Chicago at the First National Bank. Success, respectability, and patriotism all seemed to fit naturally together.

My education reinforced those assumptions. I spent nine years in Catholic elementary school, thirteen more in Catholic seminaries, and another five years studying theology in Rome as a young priest. When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, I remember wondering why he had wandered into foreign affairs. As far as I was concerned, civil rights were one thing; Vietnam was another.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, one of my favorite seminary professors remarked, “A great man died today.” That simple sentence reveals how conservative my early formation really was.

My first presidential vote was cast for Barry Goldwater.

Reality, however, has a way of intruding on ideology.

The Vietnam War was my first great awakening. I remember reading in Time magazine—of all places—that American leaders opposed internationally supervised elections in Vietnam because Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won. I can still remember arguing with my father about what that implied. If democracy was our highest value, why were we preventing democratic elections?

At almost the same time Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council and announced his intention to “open the windows” of the Church to the modern world. I resisted that as well. I defended traditional Catholicism against classmates who seemed eager to dismantle it. I even found myself defending Thomas à Kempis‘ The Imitation of Christ against criticism.

Yet resistance gradually gave way to curiosity.

I immersed myself in the documents of Vatican II. I read theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and even the young Josef Ratzinger, then one of the Council’s progressive voices. Even more important were the scripture courses taught by our remarkable professor Eamonn O’Doherty. Under his guidance I learned that the Bible is not a single literary form but a library containing myth, poetry, legend, law, debate, parable, apocalypse, and theological reflection. To read every passage as straightforward history is to misunderstand Scripture itself.

That realization liberated me from biblical literalism. More surprisingly, it also taught me to read secular history differently. If biblical texts required careful attention to genre, perspective, and purpose, why should national histories be treated as transparent accounts of objective fact?

That question changed everything.

History came first. Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, Walter Rodney‘s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth revealed an America I had never encountered in classrooms. Economics followed. Frances Moore Lappé‘s Food First and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer‘s The Politics of Compassion exposed structures of hunger and inequality that conventional economics preferred to ignore. Then years of teaching Great Books at Berea College required me to wrestle seriously with Marx alongside Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Dickens. Little by little, assumptions I had once regarded as self-evident dissolved under the weight of evidence.

But books alone did not transform me.

Liberation theology did.

After earning my doctorate in moral theology, I became fascinated by a movement that insisted theology must begin not from the perspective of the powerful but from that of the poor. Faith, it argued, should be judged by whether it liberates those who suffer, not by whether it justifies existing institutions.

That conviction took me far beyond libraries.

My wife Peggy and I studied and worked throughout Latin America and the Global South—in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and Israel-Palestine. We became friends with Paulo Freire, whose understanding of education as liberation profoundly influenced both of us. In Costa Rica we joined the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, where Franz Hinkelammert and Helio Gallardo became two of my most important teachers.

Neither man simply gave me new information. They taught me something much more valuable: how to see.

They invited me to view history from below—from the perspective of those who bear the consequences of imperial decisions made thousands of miles away. Peasants, workers, indigenous communities, political prisoners, refugees, and theologians throughout Latin America repeatedly described the United States in ways that initially seemed exaggerated to me. Gradually I realized they understood my country’s history far better than I did.

Liberation theology completed what Vatican II had begun. It taught me that the decisive question is never whether a nation calls itself democratic, Christian, or free. The question is always: What happens to the poor? Everything else is secondary.

Seen from that perspective, a different America emerged.

It was a republic built upon slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples. It repeatedly overthrew governments that threatened American corporate interests. It armed dictators while speaking eloquently about democracy. As Martin Luther King Jr. concluded near the end of his life, it had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Eventually I encountered an admission even more startling than King’s. In 1948, George Kennan—the architect of America’s Cold War strategy—explained privately what U.S. foreign policy actually sought:

“. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. Our real task…is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We should cease to talk about vague…objectives such as human rights…and democratization…. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

For me, that memo confirmed what liberation theologians had already been teaching for years.

So today I find myself agreeing, though for reasons different from Professor Glaude’s opening declaration.

No, I no longer love what is commonly called “America”—if by that we mean an empire built upon military supremacy, economic domination, and stories that conceal as much as they reveal.

But neither have I become cynical.

I still love the American people. I love those who organize, protest, teach, tell the truth, and refuse to surrender the country’s unrealized promise. I love the constitutional ideals that have so often been betrayed. And I love the generations of Americans who have struggled to redeem the republic from its own mythology.

Perhaps that is what Jesus would have understood as well. He loved neither the Roman Empire nor the religious establishment that collaborated with it. His loyalty belonged instead to what he called the Kingdom of God—a social order measured not by wealth or military power but by the well-being of the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the stranger. Liberation theology taught me to ask of every nation, including my own, not whether it proclaims itself exceptional, but whether it stands with those people.

If my understanding of America changed, it was not because I became more cynical. It changed because teachers, colleagues, friends, and ordinary people throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East patiently taught me to see history through the eyes of those who pay the price for empire.

For that gift—and especially for the friendships that made it possible—I remain profoundly grateful.

On this Fourth of July, perhaps genuine patriotism begins not with celebration, but with truth.

Zohran Mamdani: Story, Theology & Social Change

Last week Zohran Mamdani strengthened his reputation as a political kingmaker. Congressional candidates he endorsed defeated more traditional opponents in New York City Democratic primaries. Mamdani’s influence is clearly growing.

Watching those results come in, I found myself thinking about a novel I published a few months ago, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever. My thoughts also turned to liberation theology and its promise to engage progressives in the current political conversation that depends so heavily on the fundamentalist religious talk that turns so many of us off.

So here I ask you to consider Mamdani’s increasing influence in terms of my novella, liberation theology and Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

The Arc of Justice Alliance

Start with Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance. Rob is the editor-in-chief of OpEdNews where I am a senior editor. He and his cohorts (myself included) are anxious to counter the Republican Project 2025 agenda that proposes to remake government by yet more privatization, deregulation, and tax breaks for the rich.

In resonse the AJA refuses to become just one more advocacy group. Instead it aspires to be an infrastructure connecting activists, researchers, educators, writers, faith leaders, organizers, and ordinary citizens into a learning ecosystem that inspires collective action.

The idea is both simple and ambitious. It asks what if organizations could learn from one another systematically? What if successful strategies could be shared, tested, refined, and remembered? What if social movements had a collective intelligence capable of accumulating wisdom rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel?

It is a compelling vision. Yet infrastructures, however necessary, seldom inspire people by themselves. Roads are essential. Libraries are essential. The internet is essential. Yet no one devotes a lifetime to roads or servers. People devote themselves to purposes and hopes.

And this is where, I think, story enters the picture.

Against All Odds

As a specifically AJA novella, Against All Odds: how Zohran Mamdani became president and changed America forever was never intended as a prediction. It was an exercise in political imagination aimed at illustrating what the AJA might accomplish.

As such, it is increasingly proving to be strangely prescient. It asked what might happen if a young Muslim democratic socialist from New York City somehow became the focal point of a movement capable of transforming American political life. More to my point here, it imagined the emergence to prominence of the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA), a network of organizations and ordinary citizens who discover their collective power and learn how to act together.

When first published, Against All Odds seemed like pure fantasy. Yet Mamdani’s continuing success suggests that the deeper questions raised by the novel may not be so far-fetched after all.

Why does this particular politician seem to inspire such enthusiasm? Why do so many people see in him possibilities that mainstream politicians cannot?

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey suggests an answer. There Vogler draws on Joseph Campbell’s famous analysis of what Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have told remarkably similar stories. An unlikely hero leaves the familiar world, confronts powerful adversaries, overcomes fear, discovers hidden strengths, and returns bearing gifts for the community.

In Mamdani millions instinctively have recognized the pattern. They see an outsider confronting entrenched power. They see someone overcoming obstacles that conventional wisdom declared insurmountable. They see a figure who embodies possibilities larger than himself.

Moreover, In Against All Odds, the AJA becomes more than an infrastructure for Mamdani. It becomes a character in its own right. It becomes a collective hero. Mamdani serves as the visible protagonist, but the deeper story concerns ordinary people (AJA associates) discovering their capacity to act together.

Liberation Theology

That connection with ordinary people suggests something else that might enrich the presentation of AJA “philosophy.” I’m referring to liberation theology which I’ve come to describe as “critical faith theory.” More fully I describe it as “reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed committed to changing their condition by replacing the structures that have caused it.”

In our present religion-obsessed political context, liberation theology potentially supplies a powerful corrective to the prevailing Christian nationalism.

I say this not because liberation theology is Christian, but because it addresses questions that every movement for justice must eventually confront. Liberation theology asks who benefits from present systems and who pays their costs. It insists that injustice is not simply the result of bad individuals making bad choices. More often it is embedded in institutions, economic systems, political structures, and cultural assumptions.

In that sense, liberation theology complements many of the traditions AJA already embraces. Like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it insists that liberation cannot be delivered from above. Like Asset-Based Community Development, it recognizes the wisdom already present in ordinary communities. Like Four Arrows‘ Kinship Worldview and Fritjof Capra‘s Living Systems Theory, it understands human beings as fundamentally interconnected.

But liberation theology contributes something distinctive as well. It offers a method for analyzing power.

Too much contemporary political discussion focuses on personalities. Too much religious discussion focuses on individual morality. Liberation theology directs attention toward structures. It asks why poverty persists in wealthy societies. It asks why war remains profitable. It asks why systems repeatedly generate inequality, exclusion, and environmental destruction. It reminds us that social transformation requires more than good intentions.

In today’s political climate, that insight seems especially important because it counters Christian nationalism, and forms of religion that function largely as chaplaincies to wealth and power. Too often religion blesses the status quo. Too often it directs attention away from structures of domination and toward the private lives of individuals.

The Jesus who emerges from liberation theology is very different.

He announces what he calls the Kingdom of God. He proclaims good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. He blesses the hungry and warns the rich. He overturns tables in the Temple and repeatedly challenges religious and political authorities. The central question of his ministry is not, “How do I get to heaven?” It is, “What kind of world does God intend for God’s children, and how do we begin building it here and now?”

That question lies close to the heart of every authentic movement for justice.

Indeed, as I read through the philosophical foundations of AJA, I am struck by how often they converge on a common insight. Whether we approach the matter through the Kinship Worldview, Partnership Theory, the Evolved Nest, Freire’s pedagogy, Living Systems Theory, Asset-Based Community Development, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or liberation theology, we encounter the same broad conclusion. Human beings flourish not through domination but through relationship. Not through hierarchy but through participation. Not through fear but through solidarity.

Conclusion

Perhaps that is why Mamdani’s recent success (anticipated in Against All Odds) matters.

It is not simply that a politician has accumulated influence. It is that many people seem hungry for a story larger than cynicism and fear. They are searching for evidence that ordinary citizens can still shape history. They are looking for a way beyond the politics of resentment and despair.

Christopher Vogler would probably recognize what is happening. The hero’s journey is never finally about the hero. It is about the transformation of the community to which the hero returns.

If that is true, then the most important lesson of Mamdani’s story may be that the hero we have been waiting for is not a single person at all. It may be the emergence of a people who finally discover their collective power and begin using it to create a more just and compassionate world.

That ultimately is the goal of the Arc of Justice Alliance too.

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.