Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
In 1981 liberation theologian José Porfirio Miranda argued that the parable of the weeds in Matthew was a clear guide for a radical politics in the modern world. According to the Mexican mathematician and union adviser, Jesus' explanation that “the farmer sowing seeds is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the citizens of the Kingdom” was an injunction to achieve justice and freedom in the present. This earthly incarnation of the Kingdom of God was a central pillar of resistance to capitalism among middle-and lower-class groups in Latin America in the last third of the twentieth century, from human rights activism in the Southern Cone to Central America's revolutionary insurrections.
This paper was first presented at the annual American Political Science Association convention in Washington, August 1986. It was revised for presentation at St. Michael's College, Burlington, Vermont, and Brown University in October 1986 and again for the Mellon Colloquium on Religion in Political Culture at Princeton University in February 1987. The author thanks fellow panelists at the APSA convention, commentators at the subsequent presentations, and colleagues and friends in Princeton and Cambridge, Massachusetts, who have given critical support to this project, most especially Elizabeth B. Clark.
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