Essays from the Margins

These essays emerge from different crucial and complex conflicts: from the memory of a bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, urging the pope of his time to cleanse the church of complicity with violence, oppression, and slavery; from the lament and defiance of so many Middle Eastern women, victims of male domination and too many wars; from the voices bursting out from the colonial margins that dare to question and transgress the norms and laws imposed by colonizers and conquerors; from the emerging and diverse theological disruptions of traditional orthodoxies and rigid dogmatisms; from the denial of human rights to immigrant communities, living in the shadows of opulent societies; from the use of the sacred Hebrew Scriptures to displace and dispossess the indigenous peoples of Palestine. The essays belong to different intellectual genres and conceptual crossroads and are thus illustrative of the dialogic imagination that the Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin considered basic to any serious intellectual enterprise. They are also the literary sediment of years of sharing lectures, dialogues, and debates in several academic institutions in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, and Palestine.

""A unique and far-reaching collection of essays and lectures in which Rivera-Pagan once again shows his unsurpassable ability to combine a passion for justice with academic rigor, intellectual creativity, and a love of literature.""
--Justo Luis Gonzalez, professor emeritus, Candler School of Theology, Atlanta, GA

""Rivera-Pagan's keen theological perspicacity is at its best in this critical and unswerving history that goes from biblical times to sixteenth-century West Indies and twenty-first-century West Bank, reclaiming the memory of the oppressed, the voices of the silenced, and the promises from the margins. This is a rousing read for candid historians and audacious theologians eager to not only learn from and combat tyranny past and present, but also embody liberative transfigurations.""
--Vitor Westhelle¿, Professor of Systematic Theology, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, IL

""A remarkable collection by one of the foremost scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean, Essays from the Margins explores the links between compassion and truthfulness in situations of conflict across geographical regions and social locations. Rivera-Pagan combines historical and analytic depth, poetic sensibility, and intellectual clarity to illuminate the distinctiveness and broad theological significance of each of the examples that he presents. More than explicating, the book enacts a way of doing theology through attentive engagements with sites of human struggles for justice. Timely and provocative, full of beauty and passion--this is a theology everyone should read.""
-- Mayra Rivera Rivera, Associate Professor of Theology and Latino Studies, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA


Luis N. Rivera-Pagan is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, among them A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (1992), Mito exilio y demonios: literatura y teologia en America Latina (1996), and Ensayos teologicos desde el Caribe (2013), and the editor of God, in Your Grace . . . Official Report of the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (2007).