As an undergraduate student, I was briefly attracted to liberation theology while never completely signing on. At the time I fancied myself something of a campus radical, relishing the responses I received from my fellow students at our American Christian university in the upper midwest. To be sure, we weren’t UC Berkeley, and I wasn’t Abbie Hoffman or Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I searched through Karl Marx’s writings to find a pithy slogan to put on my dormitory wall, but, to my disappointment, found nothing worthy of even the bare plaster of a monastic-like cell. I genuinely believed that the Christian faith in which I was raised demanded structural social change. Liberation theology was not the first choice in my efforts to apply my faith to the ills of society, but I believed I had to take it seriously and at least look into it.
