Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T14:39:28.430Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Liberation Theology and the Bearers of Dangerous Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Mary Grey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Liberation theologians, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even from North America and Europe, are actively engaged in responding to massive human rights violations in countries where revolution has either been a success or a tragic failure. The inspiration for this commitment is the Church's ‘Option for the poor’, originating in the historic Conferences of the Latin American Bishops at Medellin and Pueblo. But twenty years on, in a changed global context, there is a need for Liberation Theology to develop more than a praxis-oriented focus: there needs to be a further development of that epistemic shift on which Liberation Theology was originally constructed, as well as a new sensitivity as to how knowledge itself is attained. This new sensibility must extend to those who have withstood and suffered the violation of human rights, and include reflection on who has the right to know, and the de-humanisation process on both individual and communal levels. I will briefly explain what I mean by this epistemic shift before exploring the whole notion of ‘dangerous memory* and its bearers.

I consider this to be a theo-political task: theology has always been concerned perhaps over possessively with the location of truth and its formulations. But since the work of Michel Foucault, philosopher and social historian, and his call for the ‘insurrection of the subjugated knowledges’, it is no longer possible to ignore the power factor in theological expressions. The call to listen to oppressed peoples as the ‘bearers of theological truth’ must be woven into the struggle against the dominant ideology.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 75 , Issue 887 , November 1994 , pp. 512 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self, Cambridge, CUP, 1986Google Scholar.

2 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge/Selected Interviews 1972–7, New York, Pantheon, 1980. p. 131Google Scholar.

3 Foucault, ibid., pp. 81–2.

4 Kyung, Chung Hyun, Struggle to be the Sun Again, Orbis, Maryknoll, 1990Google Scholar.

5 Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, New York, Vintage, p. 216Google Scholar.

6 Welch, Sharon, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity, Orbis, Maryknoll, 1986Google Scholar.

7 Rich, Adrienne, “The Spirit of Place”, in A Wild Patience has taken me this far. New York, W, & W. Norton, 1981.Google Scholar

8 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations ed. and introduced by Arendt, Hannah, New York, Schocken Books, 1969Google Scholar.

9 Ibid. 257–8.

10 The phrase became significant through the work of Morton, Nelle, The Journey is Home, Boston, Beacon, 1985Google Scholar.

11 Rich, Adrienne, “Natural Resources”, in The Dream of a Common Language, New York, Norton and Norton, 1979Google Scholar.

12 Halkes, Catherine, Zoeken naar wat verloren ging, Baarn, Ten Have, 1985Google Scholar.

13 Wiesel, Eli, Hope, Despair; Memory, unpublished text on receipt of the Nobel Prize, Oslo, December 1986, p.6Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p.1.

16 Wiesel, , A Beggar in Jerusalem, New York, Random House, 1970, p.113Google Scholar.

17 Dubois, Marcel, “The Memory of Self and the Memory of God”, in Wiesel, Eli: Between Memory and Hope, New York, New York University Press, 1990, ed. Rittner, Carol, p. 72Google Scholar.

18 Ibid. p. 72.

19 Adrienne Rich, “Integrity”, in The Dream of a common Language, op cit.

20 Russell, Letty, Lan, Kwok Pui et al., Inheriting our Mothers' Gardens, Westminster, John Knox, 1988Google Scholar.

21 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Pan, Picador, 1988Google Scholar.

22 McCaughey, Terence, Memory and Redemption, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1993.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. p. 119.

24 Taylor, Marie Kline, Remembering Esperanza: a Cultural and Political Theology for N. American Praxis, Orbis, Maryknoll 1990Google Scholar.

25 “For Memory”, in A Wild Patience has Taken me thus far. New York, Norton and Norton, 1982Google Scholar