Reviewed by: Cecilia González-Andrieu
Graduate Theological Union

Tom Powers is a brave scholar. The Call of God crosses many boundaries and steps into at least three potentially explosive areas. First, he relates the “talk of God” and the very personal “call” voiced and lived by women. Yet, Powers is unable to share in many of the formative and normative experiences in these women’s lives—being mother, being wife, being daughter, and being excluded and oppressed in both church and society. Second, the women who are the theologizing subjects in the book speak and live out of a culture which is not his. These Peruvian women share a series of cultural markers and cues, traditions and values which Powers can also only record externally. In this too, he is in danger of placing himself as interpreter and thus reducing the women’s reflection to what his interpretation will yield.

However, the third and perhaps greatest challenge Powers faces is that these women represent a lay church. They have been disenfranchised from leadership because of their sex, yet feel called by God to actively minister to the urgent needs that surround them. Powers is a Jesuit priest, and as such represents a level of authority, access and agency within the official church these women cannot attain. He is then, in many ways, the archetypal “enemy”—a male, an Anglo-American and also a priest. It is by problematizing his location that Powers begins. He knows this will be difficult to do, but he also knows it is important to attempt it.

Reviewed by: Jeffrey Gros, F.S.C.
Memphis Theological Seminary

This important volume on Christianity in Peru includes four quite ambitious sections in one volume. The author, a lay theologian and sociologist, demonstrates both scientific clarity and a pastoral concern in the descriptions and analyses laid out here.

The first section of the book is a primer on Catholic ecumenism, one of the better kept secrets in the Latin American Catholic Church. He surveys the basic Catholic documents, the historic Eastern and Reformation churches with the factors responsible for the divisions, the institutions of the ecumenical movement, ending with a short section on the interreligious mission of the Church. This will be a helpful introduction, though unfortunately it does not treat of the forty years of Catholic dialogues with these churches and ecclesial communities since the Council.

Reviewed by: María Teresa Dávila
Boston College

Ivone Gebara constructs a theology of suffering and salvation from the perspective of poor women. Using a feminist phenomenology Gebara describes the experiences of evil that women suffer, the evil that women do, and poor women’s experiences of salvation in their everyday lives. She uses the category of gender to explain how the cultural, religious, and social understandings of male and female are part of women’s understanding of suffering, evil, and salvation. Her central goal is to construct a theology of suffering and salvation that sustains a unified vision of human life where evil and salvation are present in interrelated ways. Sustaining this goal leads her to make statements about suffering and salvation that confront traditional notions of the suffering of Jesus Christ and the salvation present in the cross and resurrection.

Gebara’s feminist phenomenology keeps the text close to the women’s stories used. These texts describe situations of evil (illness, hunger, sexual exploitation, and meaninglessness) and salvation (finding enough trash to burn for fuel, a conversation with a supportive friend, the smile of a dying child) as experienced by women. Her commitment to gender analysis enables her to evaluate the ways in which traditional notions of suffering and evil have been manipulated throughout history to sustain and empower the experiences of men and those in power at the expense of women and the poor. By choosing stories of poor women, Gebara sustains the preferential option for the poor and therefore contributes to the corpus of liberation theology with a feminist volume.

Reviewed by: Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C.
University of Notre Dame

This collection of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s homilies and other works is meant to facilitate knowing this man of faith and experiencing the power of his words. Published a few years before the twenty-fifth anniversary of his martyrdom, the book is a valuable and comprehensive contribution to a fuller appreciation of Archbishop Romero’s deep spirituality, revealing in Romero’s own words his commitment to Christ in the living body of his people.

The late James R. Brockman, S.J. was previously the author of the definitive biography, Romero, a Life (Orbis, 2005). The Violence of Love expands on this work by bringing a deeper appreciation of Romero’s spirituality via Brockman’s meditation on the written thoughts of Archbishop Romero.

The title may warrant a brief explanation. As Oscar Romero said on November 27, 1977, “The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work” (p. 1).

Reviewed by: Alberto López Pulido
University of San Diego

This anthology brings together the writings of Latina and Latino poets who explore spirituality and expressions of the sacred within the pan-Latino world. As suggested by the title, a major focus of the project is to highlight how works of poetry by Latinas and Latinos rename sacred and spiritual “ecstasies” for this community and, as a result, serve to redefine what constitutes our communion with the divine in a multicultural America.

Renaming Ecstasy represents an innovative project because it is the first of its kind to examine the spiritual dimensions of Latina and Latino poetry. As a scholarly work that comes out of the humanities, the written word and metaphors representative of Latino spirituality intersect with a range of intellectual boundaries and provide invaluable insights into the lived religious expression of Latinos for scholarship being produced in religious studies, theology, history, and women, ethnic and Latino Studies. Orlando Ricardo Menes imagines and organizes sixteen Latina and Latino poets into five different categories that celebrate, question, and probes the “polyphonous chorus” of the sacred in the Latino community. From Crucifixes to Babaláwos, the Latina/o sacred world is depicted as multidimensional, blended, and transformative.