Noah Oehri. Landscapes of Liberation: Mission and Development in Peru's Southern Highlands, 1958–1988

A fascinating chapter of contemporary Latin American history is the development of Liberation theology as a new intellectual correlation between religion and politics that interprets the Christian faith as a vital force at the service of social change, political reform, and the defense of human rights amid military dictatorships and internal conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, the topic has received significant attention from North American, European, and Latin American scholars who saw in the phenomenon a transformation of the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church, elites, and the state in a continent where Catholicism played a foundational role in the instauration of the colonial order and the legitimization of unequal power dynamics that were advocated or contested by the political cultures of modern Latin America. Several of these studies fostered a militant narrative of Catholic activism in the light of liberation, presenting the image of a church that broke its alliance with economic and political elites to opt for union with the poor and their struggles for liberation.