Menes, Orlando Ricardo, ed. Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred. Edited Tempe: Bilingual Press, 2004. Pp. v + 157. Paper. $14.00. ISBN: 1931010153.

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.

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.

Pablo Gargallo

The Prophet (1933)

Washington, DC

Some twenty-five years ago, Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s daily living was cut short at the age of sixty-three, as he celebrated a memorial Mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence cancer hospital in San Salvador. Last year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Romero’s death (March 24) fell on Holy Thursday, a significant moment in a sacred week during which Christians recall and retell the narratives that ground the foundations of our faith. His eerily prescient words also remind us, that like the Jesus he followed to his death, Romero’s prophetic ministry—the legacy we remember and try to live today—was only three years in the making. Romero once observed, “As a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people…” In addressing the prophetic legacy of Monseñor Oscar Romero I propose four images for consideration.