About this item
On November 16, 2017, Pope Francis tweeted, "Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters." With this statement and others like it, the first Latin American pope was associated, in the minds of many, with a stream of theology that swept the Western hemisphere in the 1960s and 70s, the movement known as liberation theology. Born of chaotic cultural crises in Latin America and the United States, liberation theology was a trans-American intellectual movement that sought to speak for those parts of society marginalized by modern politics and religion by virtue of race, class, or sex. Led by such revolutionaries as the Peruvian Catholic priest Gustavo Gutirrez, the African American theologian James Cone, or the feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, the liberation theology movement sought to bridge the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism.
About the Author
Lilian Calles Barger was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and immigrated as a child to the United States. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington and pursued a 20 year career as a certified public accountant. She went on to become the founder of The Damaris Project a non-profit cultural initiative engaging in inter-religious dialogue and creating multiple venues for conversation on faith, feminism, and life. She developed multiple programs to address the life concerns of women by drawing on literature, the arts, religion, and history. Her various social and cultural projects resulted in two trade books, Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body (2003) and Chasing Sophia: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Jesus (2008) . She earned her Master of Arts in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2008. Currently she is finishing a Ph.D. and writing a history of liberation theology in the Americas.
