Liberation Theology Alive and Well in Paraguay?

After Paraguay elected a Catholic leftist-bishop (who, it turns out, you could call "father" for more than just his job description) they really dropped off the religious radar screen (and political radar screen) for many followers of Latin America. While that Catholic president is in a world of hot water with the congress (a whole other post), the Catholic Episcopate Conference of Uruguay has declared on the side of the ava guarani people of the Itakyry district in the department of Alto Parana (SE Paraguay).

It turns out department officials and land owners are jockeying to seize land owned by the state of Paraguay considered ancestral territory for the ava guarani, and the Paraguayan bishops consider it a violation of the "derechos de los pueblos indígenas" and would cause a massive migration to Paraguayan cities of landless indians.

A couple of years ago I got into a professional scrape with an "independent scholar" who claimed that liberation theology was dead and that its last academic proponent, Edward Cleary, was a deluded old Dominican whose scholarship needed ignoring because of his religious affiliation. I maintained that Cleary's studies demonstrated liberation theology alive and well in places like Bolivia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. I still stand by Cleary (unless some great new piece of research points me in a new direction) and I would argue that the case of Paraguay demands some attention in terms of the persistence of the left-leaning church in Latin America.

And yes, the ava guarani are the ones displaced by the presa de jasyretä dam (called the monument to corruption in Paraguay) that is set to rise another several meters and displace another 80,000 people.

(Click on the picture to see some great flickr.com photos of the ava guarani and the Itykary area).

Religion in Latin America

As a member of the Religion in World History group headed by David Lidenfeld that works to promote the discussion of religion in world history, I compiled a list of ten books on Latin American religion that world historians might find useful.

Why ten? I admit to using the “cutesy list” approach, and it seemed to fit the nature of the H-World list that I had sent it to.

I picked most of these works for two reasons: Either they serve as overviews for those looking for an introduction (such as the Creole Religions book) or they serve as specific cases in Latin America that I’ve noticed make good connections to similar processes elsewhere in the world (such as Diacon’s book on Brazil). Also, while Gustavo Gutierrez's book is the founding Bible of liberation theology for scholars, I chose the Boff brothers for readability.

If nothing, perhaps there will be some comments on the books selected that will prompt some to think of Latin American history as a place to look for comparative cases for their own interests.

• Creole Religions of the Caribbean by Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New York University Press, 2007.
• Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America, edited by Timothy Steigenga and Edward Cleary. Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World by John Leddy Phelan. University of California Press, 1970.
• Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprisings of 1835 in Bahia by Joao Jose Reis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912-1916 by Todd Diacon. Duke University Press, 1991.
• The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia by Elizabeth Brusco. University of Texas at Austin Press, 1995.
• Peru’s Indian People and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest by Steve J. Stern (SECOND EDITION). University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
• God and Production in a Guatemala Town by Sheldon Annis. University of Texas at Austin Press, 1987.
• The Church in Colonial Latin America, edited by John F. Schwaller. Scholarly Resources (now Rowman and Littlefield) Books, 2000.
• Introducing Liberation Theology by Leonardo and Cleodovis Boff. Orbis Books, 1987.