The liberation theology challenge

Abstract

"A ghost travels through America: the ghost of liberation theology."
This paraphrase of the initial assertion of the Communist Manifesto of Carlos Marx and Federico Engels comes to mind as I try to confront the present moment of the so-called "Theology of Liberation", which is shaking up the institutional and civil life of America as no other intellectual movement had done in this hemisphere since the liberal tide of the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.
As in every ideological movement, there are not one but several doctrinal versions of the Christian message, which are all presented under the label "Theology of Liberation". But for the most part they seem to have in common an unprecedented mix of solid contemporary theological thinking on the one hand with methods of social and historical analysis of more or less Marxist content on the other.