Abstract
In his ambitious and carefully argued book, Tirres seeks to develop deeper methodological and philosophical foundations for the type of “integral liberation” that liberation theology has always envisioned. Specifically, T. wants to bridge US Latino/a theology’s “‘aesthetic’ discourse around culture, daily life, and popular religion with Latin American liberation theology’s ‘political’ discourse around “transformative praxis” (107).
To bridge this gap, T. turns to the thought of North American pragmatist John Dewey. T. believes that a reconstructed version of Dewey’s aesthetics offers a metaphysics of experience that demonstrates not only the inherent relationship between personal and communal forms of religious life and practice with direct ethical and political engagement, but also the necessary connections between these aspects of human life. In T.’s analysis it is precisely the aesthetic dimension of life, often represented by religious faith and spirituality, that enables and empowers ethical and political engagement in the first place.
In chapters 1 and 2, T. offers a thoughtful and cogent “inductive” account of the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic aspects of religious faith through an ethnographic account of the Good Friday liturgies at San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. In chapter 3, T. provides an extensive and well-balanced analysis of the attempt by contemporary Hispanic Latino/a theology to define this relationship. He ultimately finds these accounts lacking a secure and coherent logical grounding in the notion of experience itself. In the remaining chapters, he turns to US pragmatism and specifically to Dewey’s work to develop a constructive response.
T. attempts both to analyze Dewey’s thought and to propose a creative reconstruc-tion of the relationship between religious faith and aesthetics rooted primarily in his lifelong work on the connections between psychology, education, and ethics. In so doing T. gives a remarkably clear and accessible account of the underlying epistemology and philosophical method of US pragmatism. T.’s impressive reconstruction of Dewey’s thought bridges the gap between personal and social/cultural religious practice, and between faith and direct ethical action. Thus T. arrives at both a philosophical and metaphysical account of what he calls an “embodied faith in action” (chap. 7), as well as a surprising and intriguing integration between the inductive method that initiates his study and the more theoretical and deductive method that comprises the body of the work.
This exemplary study deserves a place in the emerging canon of Hispanic Latino/a theology. T. successfully articulates one of the most complicated and important contemporary challenges facing Hispanic Latino/a theology, and proposes a clear and constructive proposal in response. This text presents an insightful and creative dialogue between Hispanic Latino/a theology and US pragmatism. As such, the book should be of interest to both students and seasoned scholars attempting to interpret theology, spirituality, and philosophy in a North American cultural context.