orthodoxy.” Liberation theologies in the Americas have given rise to several new expressions in other global contexts, such as against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia, Minjung theology in Korea,… Click to show full abstract
orthodoxy.” Liberation theologies in the Americas have given rise to several new expressions in other global contexts, such as against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia, Minjung theology in Korea, Dalit theology in India, and Palestinian liberation theology. The influence of liberation theologies continues to find vitality through new expressions in North America through the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements and in Latin America through critiques of neoliberal economics and Roman Catholic renewal under Pope Francis. “As liberation theologians asserted claims on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, they were the avant-garde entering a newly defined theo-political space and unleashing previously quiet religious passions they did not anticipate” (255). The central conclusions of Barger warrant further examination. She argues that although liberation theologies shattered the cordon sanitaire previously separating religion and politics by validating the political sphere as an arena for religious activism, at the same time their emergence invigorated analogous forces on the religious right, in the forms of the prosperity gospel and political mobilization by evangelicals and fundamentalists. Most importantly, she contends: “Reintroducing questions about the goals of political life and the relationship between religious values and their actualization in history, liberationists helped forestall the predicted demise of religious influence in the political sphere” (263). These are substantive arguments that locate liberation theologies, as the author claims, inextricably within Western intellectual history.
               
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