Review: Luis Martínez Andrade (2019). Ecología y teología de la liberación. Crítica a la modernidad/colonialidad

Abstract

Dr. Martínez’s work is above all a critique of (what we might call colonized) modernity, particularly in Latin American nations. This first part of the book precedes the exposition of its two great structural axes: liberation theology and the thought of the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. The journey takes us into the life and genius of “a crusader of the New Earth”—the earth of the poor—brother of Leonardo Boff and brother of all: the human being of neoliberal postmodernity, brutally dominated by an industrial-financial capitalism that is unjust to the point of criminality. The book is thus a proposal of unsuspected height that offers an updated vision of the prophetic denunciation on behalf of the marginalized and exploited of the world, in the luminous presence of a new “crusader of the Earth” and his struggle for a truly fraternal life with it, under the horizon of a Christian worldview. The critical view of (colonial) modernity provides a good backdrop for understanding the prolonged enslavement of humans and the earth (in colonialism disguised as modernity) and, alongside it, the contrast of humanity’s kinship with nature through its intimate and essential participation in the cosmic energy that sustains planet Earth.