By Harvey Cox

Why, on a cold evening in February 2014, did more than four hundred students and townspeople crowd into First Church, Cambridge, to listen to Dr. Paul Farmer be interviewed by Professor Davíd Carrasco of Harvard Divinity School? This book helps to answer that question. It is true that Farmer, chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, enjoys a well-earned reputation as a pacesetter in world health. He is also the founding director of Partners In Health, an international nonprofit network that provides health care services and undertakes research and advocacy for people suffering from both illness and poverty. His group’s innovative practices in Africa and Haiti model new, even revolutionary, approaches to health care.

Harvard is already replete with people doing extraordinary things, so why should Farmer draw such a throng that included not only medical students, but church people and divinity students? The answer is that Farmer makes it explicit that his ongoing motivation comes from liberation theology in particular, which he calls “an inexhaustible font of inspiration” (19). He told the audience that, like many college students, he had drifted away from his Catholic faith. But, as he began to work among the poorest in the global South, he “kept running into people who seemed to be guided by liberation theology,” especially the example of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, and by the writings of Peru’s Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose book A Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1973), with its focus on “a preferential option for the poor,” is often considered to be the intellectual fountainhead of liberation theology.

Farmer met Gutiérrez in the early 1990s in Lima. The two quickly became friends, and this book, a conversation between the two, is the fruit of this long interdisciplinary and intercontinental friendship.¹ In the first chapter, “Reimagining Accompaniment: A Doctor’s Tribute to Gustavo Gutiérrez,” Farmer says he learned three things from Gutiérrez that have guided his work ever since. “First, that real service to the poor involves understanding global poverty,” which means it must be seen as structural and systemic (19). “Second, an understanding of poverty must be linked to efforts to end it,” and this suggests that praxis is the key (21). “Third, as science and technology advance, our structural sin deepens” (22). Farmer translates this into medical terms; using the example of cholera, which has now become “a disease exclusively of the poor,” he says, “the pathogen has made a far more radical preferential option for the poor than have those fighting it” (33).² Gutiérrez suggests that the church and theology today must frontally engage world poverty, and writes: “poverty for billions on this planet means an early death. We need to be clear . . . that poverty is an evil” (29).

Probably the main reason why the event at First Church drew such a huge crowd is that, often, the many young people who are determined to do something to alleviate sickness and destitution become discouraged. They hunger for something or someone to inspire and encourage them. And many students of religion want to find a way to apply their spirituality in a concrete way. The examples of Farmer and Gutiérrez respond to these needs and desires. As both men acknowledge, working amid those who are suffering is “hard and often painful” (24), but Farmer writes that he also learned from Gutiérrez “to look for the hermeneutics of hope that might follow the hermeneutics of generosity” (19).

From my perspective as a religion scholar, the well-attended event and this book also signal something else: the reinvigoration of liberation theology. Already in 1968, the Latin American bishops had issued a document that became the Magna Carta of what is among the most influential theological movements of the twentieth century. When a death squad murdered six liberationist Jesuits, gunmen killed four women church workers, and Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered while saying mass in El Salvador in 1980, instead of giving up, liberation theology refused to die. Instead, the “preferential option for the poor” rapidly spread throughout Latin America, where it inspired both laypeople and clergy to wade into the struggle against political and economic injustice. Meanwhile, the message spread to Korea (Minjung theology), to India (Dalit theology), and all around the world. Soon Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Evangelical liberation theologies appeared. Still, however, liberation theology was censored by the Vatican and treated dismissively by most academic theologians.