I wonder if I am the only reader of Emerson who weeps over the death of his son in 1842. I have never heard anyone else confess to this reaction, although the story of how Emerson's “Experience” refers to Waldo Emerson's death is told briefly by Emerson himself, in the willfully perverse third paragraph of the essay. Then it is narrated repeatedly by twentieth-century scholars and critics, who treasure this moment as the most dramatic autobiographical reference in Emerson's published prose: 'In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, - neither better nor worse.'

In the I 830s and 'qos, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau engaged in a prolonged series of meditations and dialogues on the meaning of friendship. At key moments, each writer decided that fundamental issues of human development could not be articulated without taking into account the role of friends. But Transcendentalist models of individuation cannot be completely reconciled with theories of social relationship; for the demands of self-reliance, especially the intuition of the “divine” depths of the self, often pull one out of the social orbit into an intense introspection. As a result, Transcendentalist discussions of friendship often emerged in response to moments of crisis (whether encounters with death, separation, or personal misunderstanding) that laid bare the specter of isolation underlying their theories. This tension (between friendship and isolation) poignantly dramatizes one of the paradoxes of Transcendentalist literary expression: its central subject matter - profound moments of imaginative and spiritual intensity - could only be described in retrospect, from the vantage point of someone who had passed through and remembered the experience.

Without superstitious reference to the Bible - indeed, without the slightest veneration of any scripture - Emerson yet writes in the tradition of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He is concerned, as the prophets were, with the relation of spirit and human behavior, of right seeing and right living, the perfection of justice, and the power that comes into human beings when they yield to the truth. Too polite and civilized to be a Jeremiah in style, Emerson nevertheless sees his audience as worshiping false gods and as laboring under a compensatory punishment for their general disloyalty to the regime of spirit. His work is restoration. He finds the sacred quarantined in small religious redoubts, calls it out, makes it credible, and broadcasts it lavishly over the landscape. We watch this process in astonishment.

Is there a “late” Emerson? Certainly there was an elder one. Emerson lived a long and extraordinarily prolific 79 years. It seems only natural and reasonable to assume that his thought - like his life, like the metamorphic history of his times - can be divided into chronological periods. Emerson seems, in fact, to invite us to read him in terms of early and late phases. In the opening pages of The Conduct of Life, generally considered his last important book, he speaks of a former naiveté (the optimistic assurance that the world is all “positive power”) and a new realism (the chastened acknowledgment that “negative power” is really something to be reckoned with): “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.”

My purpose here is to say something about Ralph Waldo Emerson as a figure in American culture. It was Emerson who, in literary terms at least, really put America on the map; who created for himself the practically nonexistent role of man of letters, and for about a half century - from the golden age of Jackson to the gilded age of Grant - criticized, cajoled, sometimes confused, but mainly inspired audiences in America and abroad. When Emerson died in 1882 he was indisputably a figure - for some a figure of fun, but for most one to be spoken of with reverence approaching awe. Matthew Arnold declared that Emerson's was the most important work done in prose in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche called him a “brother soul.” One of his disciples, Moncure Conway, likened him to Buddha, and twenty years later William James would pronounce him divine.

On a transitional November day, in the year 1872, a pair of American gentlemen could be seen roaming the rooms of the Museum of the Louvre. The elder of them was clearly in the scanning mode, moving his tall, spare frame briskly through the rooms. His younger, fleshier partner frequently would urge hesitation in the midst of one or another masterpiece, to which his companion would give friendly but only momentary assent before moving on once more, like a steer of the Western plains avoiding the rope. Again the younger man would linger with his all-absorbing gaze, then respectfully touch his friend's elbow. He would softly exclaim and modestly explicate, progressively but pleasantly puzzled by his companion's polite impatience and clear desire to gallop on, taking in everything at large yet nothing in particular with his strong, frank stare.

In 1833, Waldo Emerson (as he still called himself) gave a talk at the Unitarian chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least one member of the audience remembered it ecstatically: 'The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effect, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner . . . made a deep impression on me. . . . His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.' The enthusiastic auditor might have added that the go-year-old visiting American speaker did not receive any sort of fee.

In a journal entry of 1859, Emerson expressed satisfaction at having successfully imbued would-be students with the doctrine of self-reliance: 'I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twentyfive or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. . . . This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.' This passage offers a glimpse of a precursor's perspective on the problem of literary influence. Instead of expressing anxiety about receiving influence, or, for that matter, an anxious desire to be influential, Emerson boasts (albeit perhaps ambivalently) of having declined to exert a personal influence on others that might have warped them from their own orbits.

“The ancient manners were giving way,” Emerson recalled in 1867, looking back some three decades to the beginning of the Transcendentalist movement. As he tried to explain the milieu in which his early work emerged with such impact, he concluded that “the key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness” (W 10: 325-26). Emerson wanted to explain the movement's sense of newness, of what many felt to be the initiation of a new era in human history. But now at some distance himself from these earlier hopes, he placed the fervor of this movement in a larger framework of the cycles of human history, part of the necessary and inevitable process of reform and renewal. Transcendentalism represented one of the recurrent periods in which “the party of the Past” and “the party of the Future” collide. “At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs” (W 10: 325). Transcendentalism was thus a moment in history containing both expansive hope and a sense of strife and embattlement, and marked by the emergence of new intellectual categories, new relations among persons and classes, and new ethical and political imperatives.'

Consideration of Emerson's writings without significant emphasis on his verse would in some ways produce Hamlet without the prince, for Emerson seems to have identified himself primarily as a poet. During his New York lecture tour of March 1842, he wrote to his wife Lidian of feeling alienated from and misunderstood by his dinner companions, the social reformers Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane: 'They are bent on popular action: I am in all my theory, ethics, & politics a poet and of no more use in their New York than a rainbow or a firefly. Meantime they fasten me in their thought to “Transcendentalism” whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known & fixed element like salt or meal: so that I have to begin by endless disclaimers &explanations - “I am not the man you take me for.” (L 3: 18)'

Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth into a lineage of New England clergy - seven generations stretching back to the Puritan migration - has long offered food for thought to biographers and historians. To his earliest interpreters, genealogy itself had explanatory value: James Elliot Cabot could claim that Emerson received from his father “the blood of several lines of 'painful preachers.'” Recent scholars have returned to the family not as a blood influence so much as a cultural, psychological, and textual field around Emerson's written work. Most important, his writing itself includes a scrutiny of family heritage. As Emerson commented in 1841, after eight pages of journalizing on his aunt, brothers, and ancestry, “I doubt if the interior & spiritual history of New England could be truelier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of M.[ary] M.[oody] E.[merson] & the boys, mainly Charles” (JMN 7: 446). The memoir that he proposes here never took full shape, but occasional addresses before and after 1841 drew from the well of family memory, as even more deeply did the ongoing, six-decade record of thought in his journal.

Liberation theology - an umbrella term embracing a number of particular movements, including African, black, feminist, and womanist theologies - is self-consciously contextual. While having certain characteristics in common, specific liberation theologies need to be understood in terms of their particular contexts. In this chapter attention is first given to the broad and inclusive tenets of Latin American liberation theology. The second part explores some of the challenges facing liberation theologians in the wider context defined by the post-cold war period; in particular, the situation of the poor in the changing contexts of debate. Specific attention is given to the changing South African context within which the present writer is located.

There is, of course, no one prevailing context in any particular Latin American country or in South Africa. Divisions of class, race, gender and choice continue to ferment the liberation theology debate, and each of these is, in turn, profoundly affected by the changes that have taken place in different regional contexts since the 1960s. The Medellín and Puebla conferences of 1968 and 1979 gave formative expression to Latin American liberation theology, which formed part of the revolutionary milieu that swept South and Central America during this time. In Europe 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring. In North America the 1960s were the time of the Black Power movement. In South Africa, Black theology and liberation theology were born in the late 1960s, reaching their highwater mark with the publication of the Kairos Document in 1985, while Black theology regained a sense of prominence in the debate at more or less the same time. The divide between the forces of resistance and liberation, throughout this period, was crisp, clear and relatively uncomplicated.

Readers of this book may wonder whether its subject-matter is merely a phase of modern political theology at a time when a critical Marxism, unfettered by the rigidities of its Eastern European manifestations, pervaded the social teaching of late twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, only to be snuffed out by a determined reaction from a more traditionalist papacy. That would be a superficial assessment. We are dealing with a movement whose high point as the topic of discussion on the agenda at every theological conference may now have passed, but whose influence, in a multitude of ways, direct and indirect, is as strong as ever. The issues which concern liberation theologians today are more inclusive and extend to questions of race, gender, popular religion, and, more recently, the environment, and have taken root in other situations and religions apart from Christianity. So when the leaders of Roman Catholicism can proclaim that liberation theology is dead, sentiments echoed by some who hitherto have been exponents of liberation theology, they miss the enormous impact that this way of setting about the theological task continues to have in many parts of the world, not least in the citadels of Catholicism itself: 'the fundamental tenets of liberation theology had - almost surreptitiously - been broadly accepted in many parts of the Catholic church'. So, having flourished in the Third World many of the fundamental tenets of liberation theology are firmly established in the First World, sometimes in institutions of higher education, more often in the life of the Church at the grassroots, in popular education and among groups working for justice and peace. In thinking of it as a mere epiphenomenon of the radical social movements of the sixties and seventies, we miss the extent of its impact.

Medellín and the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council

It was from a situation of dependence on Europe that liberation theologians sought to free themselves. In so doing, they could call upon original tradition worth reviving. But the awareness of the tradition grew slowly. In 1968, the conventional date for the start of 'liberation theology' in the modern sense, the stress fell on what was new. The Latin American bishops, meeting at Medellín, made the crucial move. How was the Christian doctrine of 'salvation' to be presented in terms that would be intelligible to the suffering peoples of Latin America? 'Salvation' always implies a metaphor, whether of restoration to health after sickness or 'redemption' from slavery. The Latin American bishops decided that the best translation of 'salvation' for their oppressed peoples was liberation. To be meaningful, however, they would have to stand with their oppressed peoples. The phrase 'option for the poor', first used in a letter from Pedro Arrupe to the Jesuits of Latin America in May 1968, expressed this truth.

‘Liberation theology’ came into being to expand on and explain these two insights. Its originality consisted in the fact that it was not just a theology about liberation, as the theology of ‘grace’ was about grace. It was for liberation, promoting and propagating it. Likewise, it was not just a theology about the poor, it was theology for the poor. So it would be an active practical theology intended to make a difference in the real world: the Marxist concept of praxis indicated that. The stress of liberation theology lay as much on orthopraxis (right action) as on orthodoxy (right thinking). But despite these claims to practical effects, liberation theology could only qualify as serious theo-logos, discourse about God, if it spoke relevantly of God.

Feminist theology is a global theology, or rather, a family of contextual theologies committed to the struggle for justice for women and the transformation of society. It is therefore a critical theology of liberation engaged in the reconstruction of theology and religion in the service of this transformation process, in the specificity of the many contexts in which women live. Whereas in European and North American contexts the term 'feminist theology' is most frequently accepted, in other parts of the globe, in order to heighten visibility, recognise identity and respect the diversity of experiences and goals, the different theologies of Asian, African and Latin American women have acquired their own distinctiveness, together with Womanist theology (the theology of the United States black American women and women of colour), and Mujerista theology (the liberation theology of Hispanic women). Increasingly emergent is the spirituality of, for example, indigenous American Indian women and indigenous Indian women in Latin America, as well as of aboriginal women in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

If there is a commonality of purpose in all this diversity, it is the liberation of humankind together with all sentient life. The words of the American poet Adrienne Rich are widely inspirational:

May Day in 1983 will always remain indelibly etched on my memory. It was my first Saturday in Brazil, in the middle of a period of military dictatorship in that country, and I was taken to visit some theologians working with base ecclesial communities in São Paulo. I recall entering a large building which served as a community centre for one of the shanty towns on the periphery of this enormous city. Inside there were about forty men and women listening to a woman expound the first chapter of the book of Revelation. She was standing at a table at which were sitting two men. Her lecture was constantly interrupted by her audience sharing their experience of situations parallel with that of John on Patmos: witness, endurance, and tribulation. One man who had been active in trade unions spoke with me after the meeting describing the way in which the book of Revelation spoke to his situation: he had been imprisoned without trial, and a Church which had seemed so irrelevant and remote had become a shelter and inspiration for his life. There was an atmosphere of utter comprehension of, and accord with, John's situation, as trade union activists, catechists and human rights workers shared their experiences of persecution and harassment as a result of their work with the poor and marginalised. They found in John a kindred spirit as they sought to understand and build up their communities in the face of the contemporary beast of poverty and oppression. It was readily apparent as I listened to their eager attempts to relate Revelation to their situation that they had discovered a text which spoke to them because they had not been desensitised by an ordered and respectable life of accommodation and assimilation. The woman and one of the men at the front of the meeting were teachers at the local seminary and the other man the local Roman Catholic bishop. They had been conducting a regular training day for representatives from the hundreds of base ecclesial communities who had gathered for training in Scripture and its interpretation.