History

Presents a dialogue between the Christian Realism and Latin American Theology of Liberation, with the aim of emphasizing the similarities and differences between these two important theological schools. The article shows how the Christian Realism of Niebuhr is widely recognized as one of the most influential theories in the field of Christian social ethics and political philosophy in the twentieth century. A Theology of Liberation had a surprising impact not only on Latin America, but also about other peoples poor and disinherited around the globe. The theology of liberation can, in some ways, be considered a type of Christian Realism, still showing clear differences with the Christian Realism of Niebuhr. The main differences between the two types of Christian Realism are different views on power, as well as their expectations about the possibilities of human beings in history - that is, its eschatological perspective. However, both approaches share a concern with social justice and the structural nature of sin, a strong pragmatism and a serious reading of reality as a starting point. These characteristics make the two theological schools closer to each other than many adimit.

This article presents a perspective on the changes that marked the development of Rubem Alves’s thought throughout his life. In the process of identifying the factors that contributed to those changes in Alves’s intellectual work, it argues that the situation of exile was a key motif in his work and one of the reasons he was never fully understood and appreciated in the U.S. Contrary to perspectives that stress radical ruptures in his thought, it sustains that Rubem Alves underwent an ongoing distancing from the restrictions imposed by the academy, an irreversible return home in his intellectual life.

This article examines the dynamics of the interpretation of the book of Mark with regard to the social location of the interpreter. On one hand, the original meaning of a text is irremediably unreachable, on the other, the text can only have any meaning through its readers, and it changes with them. These dynamics allow for the infinite translatability of the Gospel, which makes possible for it to be 'at home' in different cultures and social contexts. The Latin American movement of biblical popular reading exemplifies the attempt to make such a translation. It seeks to position common people again as themain interpreters of the biblical text, thereby preventing both the danger of developing a pastoral action without biblical foundations as well as the danger of developing biblical exegesis without any pastoral orientation. In relation specifically to Mark, this interpretive practice produces a reading that does not strip the Gospel of Mark from its political contents, that highlights the viewpoint of the victims of the Empire, that fosters a certain identification between the 'third-world' contemporary audiences and the content of the Gospel. Two major themes treated in Mark come to the fore: the Kingdom of God and resistance to the Empire, which continue to represent alternative orders.