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Book Review: The Call of God: Women Doing Theology in Peru by Tom Powers

Powers, Tom. The Call of God: Women Doing Theology in Peru. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. 184. Paper. $18.95. ISBN: 0791457907.

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.

The Call of God has an evangelizing purpose, and the evangelization is directed at theologians. In these pages are voices, Powers suggests, that are so eloquent and important to our theological enterprise that we ignore them at our own peril. Powers steps into this dangerous space – quite alien from his own – to bring us something back which he believes we need. And in this he is right.

Yet, one hazard of being a threefold outsider is that of overcompensating in the other direction, and, although generally balanced and certainly articulate in his writing, Powers sometimes falls into this trap. He romanticizes the women and the transformative power of their enterprise beyond what the women themselves say. Additionally, his effort at trying to valorize what has been ignored sometimes keeps him from a justly critical engagement of what he finds.

The greatest contribution of the book is the first person interviews of Peruvian Catholic women from the poorest sectors of society. These theological voices can become sources, as Powers clearly hopes, that will increasingly be included in the work of theologizing. The book is an invitation to join this task. In the snippets of conversation Powers shares with his readers, facile stereotypes fall by the wayside. The more we read the more convinced we become that these women demonstrate a profound theological and historical sophistication. “We see that the Spanish,” explains one of the women, “came here with two goals: they wanted to conquer our country and they wanted to spread Christianity. Through our communal reflection we understand that the two do not go together. They are opposites. So now, we are trying to rebuild something new; something that we discover for real in the Bible” (99). It is an astounding statement from one of the many women quoted in the book, yet this reviewer’s inability to say any more about this Peruvian woman than her name, María Ramos Vega, points to one of the very few shortcomings of the book—the lack of personal descriptions of the women, a feature that would provide more extensive context for their theologizing.

Powers is diligent in providing information about the general situation of the neighborhood where he lived and worked while writing this book; El Agostino is one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Lima. He also gives a well-documented overview of the country’s recent political history, but we are never able to get truly close to the women and their work. Even the programs the women started like Vaso de Leche (A Glass of Milk, apparently a program for feeding children) are described only scantily. So, although Powers is telling these women’s stories through recording them and passing them on, he is not telling them as women would tell them, as embedded inside quotidian life, where one’s history, family and even details like music and food become part of an entire person, not just a sequence of thoughts.

I called Powers a brave scholar, and indeed he is, and we are enriched by his courage. The Call of God is a powerful reminder of God’s largesse in calling all people to ministry. As the women recount, the call comes accompanied by God’s abundant generosity in providing insights, opportunities and sustenance, all indispensable to answering the call. For the faithful courage of the Peruvian women who speak in these pages, and for Tom Powers’ commitment in gathering their theological work, we must likewise be grateful.