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Critical social analysis seeks, amongst other things, to delineate and foster more emancipatory types of discipline and practice. In so doing, it appropriately turns to and can come to be informed and influenced by a broad range of subject areas and empirical focuses, including some that substantially parallel its own emancipatory project. The concern of this article is to explore the case of liberation theology as a social discipline and practice, including as a practice attending to the spiritual and theological. The article's intervention is consistent with the inspirational and insightful character of the theological and reflection upon religious beliefs and values. The concern is to reflect upon the possibilities and potentialities of analysis for accounting. The article explores the sense in which a review of liberation theology can provide critical researchers concerned to locate and promote a more emancipatory accounting with new insights and inspiration.

The purpose of this paper is to present Latin American liberation theology, a contextual theology, as a radical perspective to inform and critique accounting and issues of accountability.

The notion of sacred and secular is explored as a dualism that limits theological insights at the socio‐political level. By rejecting dualism, liberation theology presents an alternative ontological stance.

Studies in critical accounting have focussed on the repressive nature of accounting. This paper provides critical accounting with a theological insight that has the potential to inform an emancipatory or enabling accounting project.

Enabling accounting has been studied from the perspective of gender, class, ethnicity and environment. Adopting liberation theology as a critical perspective provides a means of critiquing extant accounting practice from the episteme of the economically marginalised and a Christian mandate for who to enable and why

Latin American liberation theology has become one of the more dynamic and controversial intellectual forces of contemporary Latin American politics. Although identified with a minority left‐wing perspective, liberation theology constitutes an important component within the larger context of progressive change in the political orientation of the Church in recent years. The chief inspiration for liberation theology stems from the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin in 1968. The central theme of the Medellin conference was that Latin America lives beneath a tragic sign of under‐development: hunger, misery, illness, infant mortality, inequalities of income; tension between classes and outbreaks of violence; the lack of participation of people in decisions affecting the common good; an external position of neo‐colonial dependency. The privileged classes, it alleges, are insensitive to the miseries of the marginal sectors and frequently resort to force to repress opposition with “anti‐communism” or “keeping order” as the justification for their actions.

This chapter offers a speculative essay regarding how religion may foster intellectual humility in public life, drawing on case studies from faith-based community organizing in the United States. and liberation theology in Latin America. Despite a plethora of religious teaching about the virtue of humility across a variety of traditions, I do not think there is anything inherent in religious belief – in any tradition – that predisposes believers toward authentic humility in their personal or public lives. I argue instead that religious conviction – when embodied in particular kinds of religious practice – does help drive us toward the balance of confidence and intellectual humility required for vigorous engagement in democratic public life. My argument draws on the concept of focal practices and insights from philosophy, theology, and social theory as I consider religious practices, religious conversion, and the nature of human passions as they relate to democratic life.

In considering the historic writings of Marx, the article seeks to show that as religion has become institutionalised in the form of the Catholic Church it becomes simply another component of the edifice of the superstructure. This position is challenged chiefly through the emergence of the Liberation Churches. The roots, institutionalisation, and establishment of the present‐day church are described. The role of the Liberation Churches in serving those suffering oppression is also discussed in comparison with Marxist thought, and in some areas the two views are seen to be irreconcilable.

Illustrates and explicates the proposition that the critique of exploitation and injustice found in contemporary Liberation Theology is theologically grounded, in that these phenomena are rebuked as discordant with God′s will, as revealed by textual re‐examination of the Bible, notably the Old Testament, not merely as socially undesirable, by examination of four central themes: (1) the Old Testament characterization of God as hater of exploitation, lover of justice, and Liberator of the oppressed; (2) the Biblical depiction of the character and methods of oppression and exploitation and the identification of oppressors and oppressed; (3) the Old Testament model of stages in the liberative process and vision of a future society characterized by peace, freedom, justice, equality, community, and prosperity; (4) significant elements of continuity between Old and New Testament on these issues.

In previous efforts I have indicated that Social Catholicism, qua Roman‐Catholic Social Economycs or Économie politique chrétienne, is now at the one and a half century mark, given its formal introduction with the publication of Charles de Coux's Essais d' économie politique at Paris/Lyon in 1832. This was soon to be followed by Alban de Villeneuve‐Bargemont's Christian Political Economy, or Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Poverty in France and Europe, etc, (1837), the subsequent founding of the Société d'Economie Sociale in 1856 and publication — inter alia — of La réforme sociale (1864) and Exposition of Social Economics (1867) by P. G. Frédéric Le Play; and, contemporarily, by the separate but related efforts of a host of other “thinkers and doers” to both the left or more radical (“Catholic/Christian‐Socialist”) and the right or “individualist” (cum Christianised individuals!) of Le Play's more centrist‐traditional (and, hence, “reactionary”) position. All this was well prior to the promulgation of the first great social encyclical, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (RN), in 1891.

Introduction We would like to make it clear at the outset that the present essay is not an essay in theology. Theology deals with the articulation of some symbol of the Ultimate or All, i.e. some “Theos”, or God. Rather, our concern is with humans and their perceptions and experiences of some Ultimate or All; this concern is typical of a religious studies approach. The approach of contemporary religious studies is much like the social scientific, only much more self‐conscious of the implicit cultural presuppositions and deductive principles that control its mode of producing facts from data. The social sciences usually treat data and facts as though they were one and the same. We use the religious studies approach in order to discern and assess the implications, consequences and/or impact of religion and its central symbols on human beings. In this essay our focus will not be simply on human beings, but on their ideologies and the behaviors flowing from those ideologies in the arbitrarily delineated sphere of the social called “economy”.

In this chapter, I examine how religion can serve as an ideology that has the capacity to bridge people of the same faith who hold divergent political stances. Building on Williams’ work (1996), I propose that religion operates as an ideology when it diagnoses the source of social conflicts, proposes solutions, and justifies action. Yet religious ideological appeals are not always effective at bridging political divides. Thus the key question of this study is: under what social conditions are religiously-based ideological appeals effective at winning people’s support for social and political movements? To address this, I examine the relationship of religious leaders to Latin American movements that aimed to nonviolently overthrow authoritarian states. In particular, I analyze the conditions that led some religious elites to become pro-revolution while others sided with the incumbent regime. Using comparative historical methods, I analyze the different political stances of the Catholic Church hierarchy in the 1970s–1980s in Chile (where the church opposed the dictatorship), Argentina (where the church was largely supportive of the regime), and El Salvador (where the church hierarchy was divided). I argue that ideological appeals for religious leaders’ support are most effective when the religious institution receives no financial or political benefits from the regime and when leaders have relational ties to the aggrieved. Two factors had mixed effects on the decision to remain loyal to the state or not; these include the presence of an armed radical flank, and the state’s use of indiscriminate repression.