Liberating the Future: God, Mammon, and Theology

Rating:
Summary: Required reading for a global age
Review: The essays in this anthology collect the reflections of some of the world's leading Christian theologians--for example, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jurgen Moltmann, John Cobb, and Douglas Meeks--on how Christians should comport themselves in the face of a new world order. That order, of course, is globalization, a neo-capitalist reality that progressively draws resources from the developing world to the developed world while at the same time whittling away at indigenous cultures and values. Globalization has created conditions of oppression and poverty that call for creative responses on the part of liberation theologians. The essays in this book aim to begin that response.

All of the essays are insightful. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, for example, writes an uncomfortable indictment of those North American and European liberals who fancy that merely writing about poverty in the world fulfills their obligations as Christians to follow the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. John Cobb continues the theological analysis of the global economy he began so fruitfully a few years ago. Gayraud Wilmore worries about hite-directed and henced forced ethnic reconciliation in the United States. Gutierrez has some haunting things to say about liberation and mysticism, reminiscent of his earlier "We Drink from Our Own Wells."

But Douglas Meeks' article on liberation theology in North America is especially worth focusing on when you read this book. Meeks argues that there's much work to be done in our own culture to convert worshippers of Mammon to a better understanding of their own inauthenticity as well as their partial responsibility for world poverty. Liberation theology isn't something for "those people" south or east of the border. It's for us as well--in fact, maybe PRIMARILY for us--since it's our consumerist lifestyles that fuel the corporate greed that turns the wheels of globalization.

Highly recommended.