One day, when I was a boy growing up in Detroit, I ran horne crying to ask my mother, “Who is this guy Jesus? They say I killed him, but I don’t know anything about it.” From those early confrontations with Catholic children and their parents, still influenced by the pro-Nazi broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin and the thousand-year tradition of anti-Semitism, I learned that Christianity opposed me.

I was not surprised to learn in later years that the institutional church had oppressed the common people throughout feudal times. It was natural to me that Christianity, whether in the form...

The advent and spread of liberation theologies following the middle 1960s is the most important development in Christian theology and practice since the Protestant Reformation. In their approaches to religious doctrine, social action, and church organization, these theologies present a profound challenge to existing orders, both civil and religious. They constitute a radical rupture with the modern theological traditions of the capitalist era.

Liberation theologies have emerged in the context of the specific social and material conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century. They arose first in poorer countries of the Third World, but their influence and the...

Critiques of capitalist economic structures have been elaborated at all levels within the Catholic hierarchy, including national and regional assemblies of bishops. In response to the appalling conditions of life that hundreds of millions of Catholics and others experience in the modern capitalist world, and in the presence of powerful mass movements to confront these conditions, church leaders have sought ways to bring Catholic teaching to bear on the daily needs of the common people.

Liberation theology is the most recent and vibrant development of Catholic social doctrine. It has emerged in Latin America, where mass suffering has been particularly...

Any dialogue between religion and economics must include women and take account of women’s needs and experiences if it is to develop an inclusive and equitable emancipatory practice. Feminist liberation theology has a contribution to make to such a dialogue.¹ First of all, it is committed to the social, spiritual, and material well-being of women specifically and humanity more generally. Second, like other liberation theologies it is experiential, but feminist liberation theology pays particular attention to women’s experiences of oppression—experiences that are often overlooked in other liberation theologies. Furthermore, feminist liberation theology insists that an emancipatory practice begin with...

As we enter the 1990s, many people, tired of political struggle that seems to be going nowhere, are making their way back into religious communities, searching for a meaning and purpose in their lives that they did not find in political movements. Other activists feel betrayed by that move—and see the return to religion as nothing more than the final copout of a conservative period, the much-to-be-regretted consequence of the Reagan and Bush years.

In fact, the recent return to religion has often been a return to a kind of religious consciousness that is a willed forgetting of the...

In 1984, and again in 1988, films of emaciated women and children starving in Ethiopia invaded comfortable United States living rooms. Many compassionate U.S. citizens sent dollars, checks, even food parcels to relief agencies, hoping to help save some of the lives they had seen literally fading into oblivion on their television screens.

But religious and development-oriented groups working in Africa have long argued that starvation reaches far beyond the borders of Ethiopia to the disparate regions of a vast continent—a land mass three times the size of the United States, with a population exceeding 500 million. There, starvation,...

We live in a world in which one in four persons suffers from hunger on a daily basis, in which the economic gap between rich and poor nations continues to widen, and in which poor nations labor under crushing debt burdens. In this world, living standards decline inexorably year by year in many nations of Africa and Latin America. At the same time, people in the rich nations of the Northern Hemisphere, with less than one-quarter of the world’s population, consume over three-quarters of the world’s production of goods and services each year. These few chilling facts lay out in...

From its beginnings, liberation theology has focused attention on the problems of the poor. In one important document of the movement, Latin American bishops enunciated the “preferential option for the poor,”¹ through which the church is urged to commit itself first and foremost to the needs of the poorest members of society. This formulation has now become widespread. In asserting such an option, church leaders are drawing on a long Christian tradition of concern for the poor, which is also found in Jewish religious practice through the ages and in virtually all other religions as well.

When this assertion is...

One of the hallmarks of the revival of progressive theological concern with social problems is the insistent demand that the economy conform to moral precepts. But are such precepts capable of fulfillment? Does the “ought” of social justice imply the “can” of economic policy?

The moral criteria the economic system is called upon to satisfy are often demanding indeed. For instance, the Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy,Economic Justice for All,affirms that the dignity of the human person, realized in community with others, is the criterion against which all aspects of economic life must...

The contemporary, post-196os ecological vision began as an extension of the progressive political vision. The broad, popular environmental movement was born in the 196os-at an intensely political moment in American history. The same capitalist-military-industrial machine that was bombing Hanoi and the Ho Chi Minh trail, searching and destroying South Vietnam—with Black and white working-class American youth as the cannon fodder—was also defoliating Southeast Asian rain forests, building nuclear power plants as well as nuclear weapons at home, and mining and polluting North American soils and waters. Progressive political and ecological movements coalesced in response.

The intellectual sources of...