Radio Golf (2005) is both August Wilson's Old Testament to the past and his New Testament to the future. Never one to mince words, even in the last few months of his life, he sounds his challenge to the black middle class to engage in the battle for the black man's soul.

Wilson selects a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history to illustrate a 'state of emergency' which Walter Benjamin in Illuminations (1969) calls the rule rather than the exception for those who subscribe to the tradition of the oppressed. Radio Golf depicts Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1997, a year which marks the critical moment of its possible extinction in the name of progress. As the city proceeds to rid itself of blight, it also creates a 'moment of danger' which affects both the historical content of the African American tradition and its receivers.

The playwright August Wilson lives in a leafy, genteel part of Seattle intended by the city's founding fathers to be the site of the state capitol, and so named Capitol Hill. He moved here in 1994, with Constanza Romero, a Colombian born costume designer who is now his third wife, and they share a rambling turn-of-the-century house with Azula, their three-year-old daughter. Azula has her father's ear and number, as well as total control of the living room, which, apart from a jukebox and a piano - props from Wilson's productions - hasn't a stick of adult furniture. Wilson, who doesn't drive, is more interested in the inner terrain than the external one; writing, he says, 'is for me like walking down the landscape of the self. . . . You find false trails, roads closed for repairs, impregnable fortresses, scouts, armies of memory, and impossible cartography.'

Wilson does most of his pathfinding below the living room, in a low-ceilinged basement, lit by neon bars, where he goes to sneak cigarettes, listen to records, and wait for his characters to arrive. He writes standing up, at a high, cluttered pine accounting desk, where he can prop his legal pad and transfer his jottings to a laptop computer. Pinned on a bulletin board, just beside where he stands to write, are two quotations, as bold as street signs: 'TAKE IT TO THE MOON' (Frank Gehry) and 'DON'T BE AFRAID. JUST PLAY THE MUSIC' (Charlie Parker). When Wilson looks up from his desk, at the dingy wall with its labyrinth of water pipes, he sees honorary degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, his home town, and from Yale, where his career as a playwright began in 1982 - just two of twenty-three he has accumulated so far, which is not bad for a fifty-five-year-old writer who quit school when he was fifteen.

What time or period is the setting for The Piano Lesson (1987)? That was the first question asked by the late great Chinese actor and director Ying Ruocheng (1921-2003) after he read the play in 1991. The question surprises those who know that each play in August Wilson's ten-play cycle depicting African American experience is set in a different decade of the twentieth century. If the historical period is part of the basic concept underlying each play, the temporal setting should be evident. Indeed, a stage production communicates the time of the action to the spectator almost immediately through period-specific details like the appliances in the kitchen and the dresses the women wear. Wilson's printed text, however, is curiously reticent in conveying such information. The reader of the play does have an advantage over the theatre spectator. He or she can pause and calculate, as Ying eventually did, using the data woven into Doaker's story about the piano. Doaker's older brother, Boy Charles, 'would have been fifty-seven if he had lived. He died in 1911 when he was thirty-one years old.' If the action of the play occurs twenty-six years after 1911, it must be 1936 or 1937.

A reference to 1930s America usually conjures images of the Great Depression: breadlines, Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl, WPA projects. That Wilson sets his play in the latter part of the decade and hoists none of those cultural flags is surely deliberate. The economic depression of the 1930s hit hardest those who had bought into the prosperity of the 1920s, but African Americans - not having experienced much, if any, of that prosperity - moved into the 1930s under already familiar financial constraints. The view from inside the Charles home in Pittsburgh is one of cultural continuity; there is no reason for them to talk about changes that affect people outside their culture.

Gem of the Ocean (2003) ends with the benediction and instruction offered by Mr Eli, Aunt Ester's gatekeeper, over the newly deceased body of his friend Solly. As he pours a drink and raises it in a toast, he says, 'So live.' It is a noble petition of hope for the future of the gathered community and a purposeful plea for African Americans to live a life founded on personal integrity and committed to the collective struggle for truth. 'So live.' And so ends the beginning of August Wilson's history plays, the first play in his ten-play cycle, set in 1904 at the dawn of the first migration of blacks from the South to the North. Wilson has situated this play at this precise moment just as he has positioned every work within the cycle at critical historical junctures, key transitional moments in the story of Africans in America. Within such moments Wilson reviews the choices that blacks have made in the past. Yet in Gem, as well as his other works, Wilson is not simply reviewing this past and reevaluating history. His project is so much more proactive as he considers how this past now impacts on the African American present.

In Gem of the Ocean, Citizen Barlow is haunted by his past. He comes to the home of Aunt Ester, at 1839 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh, seeking her assistance. There he finds her tended by Mr Eli, who maintains and watches over her and Black Mary, who cooks and cleans for her. The desperate Citizen has heard that Aunt Ester has the ability to wash people's souls and, racked with guilt, he badly needs some form of spiritual sustenance and moral forgiveness. In order to help Citizen save himself, Aunt Ester, with assistance from Mr Eli, Black Mary and her friend and suitor Solly, a former conductor on the Underground Railroad, takes him on an eerie, symbolic and spiritual journey, back through time and space, to the City of Bones, a place deep down in the middle of the ocean, where, we are told, African slaves who never made it across have built a kingdom of bones. Through the psychic process of travelling to this city, by confronting his past in this site and making his peace, Citizen Barlow is able to move forward.

Feminist theology is a global theology, or rather, a family of contextualtheologies committed to the struggle for justice for women and the transformationof society. It is therefore a critical theology of liberation engaged in thereconstruction of theology and religion in the service of this transformationprocess, in the specificity of the many contexts in which women live. Whereas inEuropean and North American contexts the term 'feminist theology' is mostfrequently accepted, in other parts of the globe, in order to heighten visibility,recognise identity and respect the diversity of experiences and goals, thedifferent theologies of Asian, African and Latin American women have acquiredtheir own distinctiveness, together with Womanist theology (the theology of theUnited States black American women and women of colour), and Mujerista theology(the liberation theology of Hispanic women). Increasingly emergent is thespirituality of, for example, indigenous American Indian women and indigenousIndian women in Latin America, as well as of aboriginal women in Australia, NewZealand and the Pacific.

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

This interview was conducted in London, in November 1991, on the occasion of the National Theatre's production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

August Wilson was one of America's most gifted storytellers. His plays read like fiction, the narrative drive, symbolic settings, evocative stage directions, music, and characters themselves propelling the action with a sparkling performativity. This sense of storytelling is nowhere more evident than in Fences (1985). No wonder Lloyd Richards, who directed so many of Wilson's plays throughout their careers, suggested one year before its Broadway premiere, on 26 March 1987, at the Street 46th Theatre, that the playwright was 'one of the most compelling storytellers to begin writing for the theater in many years'. Following the success of his first Broadway play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences, which in 1987 won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, confirmed the arrival of a theatrical voice of genuine originality.

Fences concerns the lives of the Maxsons, an African American family whose struggles are chronicled from 1957 to 1965. The dates, of course, encompass a key period in the civil rights movement, but this was also the time in which Wilson was a teenager and high school student, and experienced the full force of white racism. Ostensibly a fairly straightforward domestic drama, Fences, by the final blackout, has expanded into an enabling fable of rebellion and recovery, of myth and history, and of confrontation and expiation. Asked two years before his death if he considered Fences his 'signature play', Wilson commented that that accolade would go to Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986). But, most theatregoers and critics feel, Fences remains one of his finest achievements.

Introduction

It seems that for every commentator who has put pen to paper or given voice uponthe lecture circuit, there is set forth a different, and supposedly conclusive,definition of the base ecclesial community (comunidade eclesial de base). Ever since the emergence of this innovative and challengingecclesial phenomenon within the Latin American continent, ecclesiologists andsociologists alike have fallen over themselves in an attempt to explicate theconcrete, lived experiences of those within the base communities by way of theirown preferred analytical vocabulary. The precision with which etymologicalorigins, epistemological status and theological significance is sought, whilstlaudable in terms of theoretical rigour, often belies the haphazard, disjointedand sporadic nature of much of the actual pastoral practice and tangibleexperience of those engaged in the day-to-day struggle to survive at the base ofLatin American society.

As the above intimates, it is not our intention here to understand the baseecclesial community by means of dissecting the words comunidade, eclesial, de base. Rather, we shall explorethe character of the comunidade eclesial de base (hereafter, CEB)by way of highlighting a number of landmark events and experiences which, over thecourse of at least a decade, played a constitutive part in the emergence of theCEB phenomenon. To this end, we seek to understand the CEB, not as a neatlydefinable entity, but rather as an ecclesial tool and lived experience which hasemerged out of a prolonged series of pastoral crises, perceived threats,ecclesiological shifts, theological refinements, and historical exigencies born ofa whole gamut of economic, political, social, and theoretical upheavals. In short,there can be no unilineal representation of CEB development, nor can there begiven a singularly conclusive definition.

Introduction

There are several ways of approaching Black theology. One approach seeks tocharacterise it in terms of its history, that is, of its origins in the CivilRights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. It maintains that the demands forracial justice embodied in these two movements provided the basis for theemergence of Black theology. I shall not follow this approach here since it is notthe aim of this chapter to offer a detailed description of the relationshipbetween movements of protest and Black theology in the 1960s. This has been doneelsewhere.

The second but related approach starts from an interpretation of the differentways in which African-American slaves appropriated and reworked Christian faith inthe context of their experience of slavery. According to this understanding Blacktheology represents not just a faddish attempt to redefine Christian teaching inthe light of the demands of the social and political forces of the 1960s but acritical search for a historically black Christian form of reflection on issues ofracial justice and liberation. The materials for such reflection come from thetwin realities of slavery in the past and the experience of racism in the present.One important difference between these two approaches is that, although they bothshare the same understanding of Black theology, the first is very much shaped bythe politics of the recent past whereas the second locates its point of departurein the history of slavery itself, with the latter being seen as a historicalexpression of racism.

August Wilson has often been described as a dramatic historian because of his quest to document the experiences of African Americans in the twentieth century. In truth, though, he is no more a historian than Shakespeare. Given that he chose to set each of his plays in a different decade of the twentieth century, history clearly constitutes the context in which his characters live their lives, but it is those lives that he places centre stage, not the public events which defined those decades. He had altogether a different version of history in mind, one which sank its roots in mythology. It is there that he looked for the symbols, metaphors and tales that embodied and expressed the hopes, fears, aspirations, and religious and civic yearnings of communities who laid down their true history in legends, poems, songs, prayers and, in Wilson's hands, plays.

Wilson was alive to, and tapped into, African myths, often codified in music. He was a storyteller recounting the history of his people but, as he was aware, he was not alone in that. In some senses he played the role performed by the griot in West Africa whose function it was and is to recount the history of his tribe and thereby to preserve and celebrate it. In an African context history is deeply implicated in storytelling, song and myth.

Wilson was in this tradition. Devoid of their mythological dimensions, his characters, Levee, Troy and Boy Willie, in their separate plays, are merely destructive forces at odds with their world instead of agents of change challenging the status quo and reordering their universe. Within the full context of their cultural ancestry, they are the warrior spirit reincarnations of self-empowered trickster deities, figures which recur in myths from the Yoruban Eshu to the Hindu Krishna, from Bamapana the Australian Aborigine, Prometheus in ancient Greece and Sun Wukong in Chinese lore, to Reynard the French fox, Coyote the Native American, Maui in Hawaii, Susanowo in Japan, Loki the Norse god and even Jacob of the Old Testament.

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.

It is not for nothing that Harry J. Elam, Jr.'s 2004 book is entitled The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, in that it acknowledges the extent to which Wilson's plays, set in the past, nonetheless address current concerns. Wilson may not have been interested in conducting historical research but he was concerned to trace the history of individual lives and the unfolding story of the African American community in such a way that present attitudes and values are seen in the context of past experiences.

Some critics have chosen to treat the plays as if they were written in the era in which they are set. So, for example, a number of articles approach Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) in terms of the history of the blues (Adell, Crawford, Gener, Mills, Plum, Smith, Snodgrass, Taylor), or jazz (Hay, Werner, Wolfe); the Great Migration (Anderson, Bogumil, Gates, Pereira, Shannon 'Transplant'); the conflicting views of African spirituality versus African American Christianity (Richards, Shannon 'Good Christian'); patriarchal roles (Brewer, Clark, Hampton, Sterling); women's roles (Elam 'Women', Kubitschek, Marra); 'Southernness' (Gantt) or 'folk traditions' (Harris).

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.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Kim Pereira points out,

Pereira's description, however, applies not only to Ma Rainey but, more generally, to Wilson's approach to drama. As I have written elsewhere, because his plays resemble

Nor is it only a matter of style. Wilson's use of the blues instantiates an alternative form of historiography so that a blues rendition can have the same status for African American culture as a history text. 'The thing about the blues', Wilson has said, 'is that there's an entire philosophical system at work. And whatever you want to know about the black experience in America is contained in the blues.' If Wilson's drama is fundamentally structured by blues performance, his ten-play cycle can be thought of as a record (or CD) album that orchestrates and arranges the American twentieth century as ten versions of African American blues, played by a combo with one to three singers.

Chairs for everybody: on inclusivity

Only a few weeks after giving what was going to be his last public homily, FatherRutilio Grande was assassinated by paramilitary troops in his native land, ElSalvador. I am beginning this reflection on liberation theology and sexuality bypaying homage to him and to the many Christian martyrs from Latin America in thetwentieth century, as a way to ground my reflections on Liberation Theology in thetwenty-first century. This is a debt of love and gratitude that we have for thosepioneers who liberated the Gospel in that continent during the difficult politicalclimate of the 1970s.

It is tempting to think that two different projects, theological as well aspolitical, were symbolically confronted in Father Grande’s assassination.One was the project of liberation theology, the project of the alternative Kingdomand integral salvation from private and structural sins such as hunger andpolitical persecution. The other was the hegemonic project from the dictatorialregimes which flourished during the Cold War, which curiously mixed the nationalsecurity doctrine with their own theological discourses.

[Translated by Judith Condor] The urgency and the richness ofthe commitment that many Christians in Latin America and the Caribbean began tofeel in the 1960s as part of the struggle for justice and solidarity with the poorraised new questions, as well as pointing to fertile new pathways in the discourseabout faith. These circumstances helped convert such reflection into a theology ofliberation; that is, a way to understand the grace and salvation of Jesus in thecontext of the present and from the situation of the poor.

From the start, therefore, this theological perspective is bound up with the lifeof grassroots Christian communities and their commitment, as well as with theevangelising mission of the Church. This is the reason for its great impact, alsofrom the outset, in the magisterium of the Church. Medellín and other LatinAmerican Bishops' conferences, as well as many other texts, bear witness to thisfact.

The theology of liberation, like any theology is about God. God and God’slove are, ultimately, its only theme. But since for Christian revelation (thestarting point for any theology) the love of God is a mystery, the immediatequestion is how to talk of a mystery? The humble and respectful advice of ThomasAquinas remains valid: 'we cannot know what God is, only what he is not' (ST1.9.3 introd.) It is in this context that, nearly thirtyyears ago, we asked ourselves what path the theological task ought to take in thecontext of Latin America.

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

There is, of course, no one prevailing context in any particularLatin American country or in South Africa. Divisions of class, race, gender andchoice continue to ferment the liberation theology debate, and each of these is,in turn, profoundly affected by the changes that have taken place in differentregional contexts since the 1960s. The Medellín and Puebla conferences of1968 and 1979 gave formative expression to Latin American liberation theology,which formed part of the revolutionary milieu that swept South and Central Americaduring this time. In Europe 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring. In NorthAmerica 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 theirhighwater mark with the publication of the Kairos Document in1985, while Black theology regained a sense of prominence in the debate at more orless the same time. The divide between the forces of resistance and liberation,throughout this period, was crisp, clear and relatively uncomplicated.