Inter-American Theology: Reflections on Violence, Insurgency, and Revolutionary Epistemologies Across Continents

There has been a productive interdisciplinary dialogue during the past decade about the relation of American philosophy (and pragmatism especially) to liberation theology in the Americas. Both pragmatists and liberation theologians share a focus upon contextualism in the generation of concepts, the synthesis of the aesthetic and ethical, and an emphasis upon articulating ideas in terms of their practical import upon lived experience. As a mode of theological inquiry, liberation theology emphasizes the presence of God in history, the preferential option for the poor and oppressed, and the need for various forms of social analysis to understand and overcome institutional and systemic forms of sin. For liberationists, experience precedes theory; liberation theology aims to articulate the lived experience of the poor and marginalized, and its significance with respect to the Christian Gospel. The function of liberation theology is ultimately to cast a theological vision that leads to concrete action, ameliorating the lives of members of oppressed communities and thereby building up the Beloved Community of God in the here and now.

In keeping with the conference theme of “Inter-American Philosophy,” this panel will explore thematic elements of liberation theology, emphasizing a diverse array of thinkers and their various approaches to the central socio-political problem of systemic violence in the Americas. While Latin America is traditionally the focus of discussions of liberation theology, the term is apt for describing various intellectual movements throughout the hemisphere in the 1960s and beyond, including Black Liberation Theology, North American Women’s Liberation Theology, ecofeminist theology, and Womanist Theology, among others. These movements all share a common approach to the task of theologizing out of the lived experience of poor and marginalized peoples. The three papers presented here all address the topic of violence and visionary responses to it.