Theology Today - Vol 48, No.1 - April 1991 - BOOK REVIEW - Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis

76 - Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis

Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis

By Mark Kline Taylor

Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 1990. 292 Pp. $29.95.

This is a most welcome book. It is dense and complex, and deserves to be read slowly and reflectively as its contents work upon the reader. Mark Mine Taylor, Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, has put a great deal of himself into this book. It begins with an autobiographical prologue in which memories of Esperanza, a fourteen-year-old Zapotec girl, serve to evoke the questions of "gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture," as well as of theology, to which the book is addressed. Taylor encountered Esperanza when, as a boy of five, he accompanied his parents on anthropological field work to her village in southern Mexico. She is, in effect, his companion in this book, and "remembering Esperanza" (by a fortunate coincidence, esperanza translates as "hope") is a vivid way of representing the task of the book.

Taylor's objective is to help North American Christians (and particularly Anglo, middle-class, male Christians such as himself) engage in the Christian mission of "reconciliatory emancipation." Participation in this mission, he believes, requires considerable self-understanding as well as an understanding of the cultural and political situation since genuinely Christian praxis in so many ways runs counter to the ways our society teaches us to think and feel about ourselves and others and to conduct our lives. A good deal of repentance (not wallowing in guilt, but sober and deliberate personal change) is in order if such North American Christians are to do anything other than perpetuate the difficulties in which they are enmeshed. Effective Christian witness also requires a renewed understanding of the substance of the Christian message, subject as it is to distortion and

78 - Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis

loss. It is the task of a "cultural-political theology" to enable these sorts of transformed and transformative understanding.

Taylor identifies three corresponding "theoretical practices" necessary to this end. "Reflexive analysis," attending to the specificities of one's identity and social location (as shaped by such factors as ethnicity, sex, and class), yields self-understanding; "portraiture" is the close depiction of the social situation in its religious, cultural, and political complexity; and "address" is the practice of retrieving and reformulating the Christian message so that it will engage effectively with that situation. Though there is a clear progression through the three in that order in the book, they are intermingled throughout and are mutually reinforcing. The prologue introduces and concentrates on the task of reflexive analysis. The first four chapters are then devoted mainly to portraiture: a general diagnosis of the postmodern situation is followed by an account of the sort of hermeneutics adequate to the task of portraiture, and this is then implemented in an extended discussion of several of the key "isms" shaping our lives, centering, for strategic reasons, in sexism. The final two chapters are given over to the task of address, culminating in a rich exploration of the image of Christus Mater as a resource for contemporary christology.

Taylor's strategy is not merely to tell his readers how they should understand themselves, their situations, and the Christian message. Rather, by sharing his own personal and intellectual experience, he invites them to a similar process of reflection and gives them some instruments with which to think. This strategy of exposing a process of thinking accounts for much of the book's complexity and density. The author draws on a broad range of resources-social-scientific, literary and cultural, philosophical, historical, and theological-and incorporates a variety of vocabularies. The book thus exhibits the sort of catholicity and the sort of commitment to conversation as a theological medium that are found in the work of one of Taylor's teachers, David Tracy. It may be a rare reader who is able to accept all of Taylor's assumptions and conclusions. But it would be a rare reader who could not profit from the experience of thinking with him through this book.

The book is most welcome because of the way it exemplifies that aspect of the Christian theological enterprise that has to do with the question of the "fittingness" of Christian witness to its situation. In the current, frequently-tangled discussion of the meaning and methods of "practical theology," one could do far worse than to take this exercise in "cultural-political theology" as a model of what practical theology could be.

CHARLES M. WOOD

Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas