Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power

The theology of liberation today stands in a global context. It demands a stretching of the mind beyond the cultural frameworks of all previous human thinking to a new awareness of the universal humanum, which is, at the same time, an appreciativeness of the multiplicity of perspectives of the many peoples in their many situations vis à vis one another. We are called upon to experience what our people look like to the Vietnamese, to the Laotians and Cambodians, to Africans and Latin Americans. We are called upon to learn many languages and to take into our consciousnesses many histories to create for the first time a sense of the human which is beginning to transcend the ideological imperialism of one center and one people's aspiration that totalizes its power and perspective toward the world. It is a great, perhaps the ultimate experiment in human history, and so justifies a certain use of utopian and apocalyptic language.

For Christians, Latin America has a very special role in the

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