Marginal Christianity

The Psalms as Liberation Theology and The Unliberating Theology We North Americans Hold “The psalms are dangerous . . . The psalms are a crash course in liberation theology.” So writes Richard Beck ( http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-psalms-as-liberation-theology.html ). So used are we to reading the Psalms as “spiritual” or devotional reflections on the inner state of state of our hearts and our relationship with God. We think they deal with us (as individuals and a corporate people) and God. The spiritual/material dualism which keeps us locked within our souls (so to speak), and which we owe to Plato, causes us to miss the presence of a third party in many of the psalms of lament or disorientation. These psalms, you might remember, are responses to times in our lives when everything has unraveled and fallen apart. It feels like life has ended so traumatic is our distress or suffering. We tend to read these laments as general expressions of mourning and gri...

  In 1975’s  God of the Oppressed , theologian James H. Cone described how Christian responses to the 1967 Detroit riot revealed not only an insensitivity to black suffering but, as he argued, a larger theological bankruptcy on the part of white theologians. As he saw it, many white theologians of that era were not genuinely concerned about all cases of violence. Worried about the threat of black revolutionaries, they did not see the structure of violence embedded in U.S. law and carried out by the police. Cone asked: “Why didn’t we hear from the so-called nonviolent Christians when black people were violently enslaved, violently lynched, and violently ghettoized in the name of freedom and democracy?” Ferguson, Baltimore, and Cleveland have shown us that not much has changed since the summer of 1967. While Cone proceeded to reimagine theology and American Christianity, many Christians ignored him or rejected his work. The national spotlig...

Clerical Whispers Saturday, July 18, 2009 `Bishop of the slums' -- Dom Hélder Camara and Brazil's church of the poor This year marks the centennial of the birth and the tenth anniversary of the death of one of the most significant religious figures of the 20th century, an instigator of the liberation theology trend in Latin American Catholicism and a campaigner against military dictatorship: Dom Hélder Camara. Dom Hélder could have advanced himself to the position of cardinal and from there, who knows, possibly to the papacy itself. Instead, he stood for democracy in Brazil, despite threats to his life and certainly at the expense of his career. He represented the most extreme point that the Catholic hierarchy could go in standing with the poor in the tumultuous era following the Cuban Revolution and the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Remembering Dom Hélder Camara is poignant in these times when ...