Activist Faith: Grassroots Women in Democratic Brazil and Chile. By Carol Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. 212 pp. $55.00.

In the 1970s and 1980s, civil society–based movements rose up to fight against authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Some of the most unexpected, and inspirational, of the actors involved were poor women. Many of them were mobilized through Christian “base communities,” lay study and action groups organized by the Catholic Church during its liberation theology period.