Analysis Of De La Torre's Book 'Doing Christian Ethics From The Margins'

De La Torre’s book Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins contributes to the ever growing number of Christian voices on the margins that seeks to challenge the dominant Eurocentric culture in the United States. Although this work is largely geared towards the classroom, it is a work that challenges all people to think and act theologically and ethically from an oftentimes neglected perspective, that of the disenfranchised or those who reside on the margins. To begin, De La Torre has the reader to critically think about the environment in which students study, the classroom. He writes, “The classroom is appropriately named, for it is indeed a room of class – a room where students learn the class they belong to and the power and privilege …show more content…
This framework’s aim is geared to “protect the self-interest of those who are privileged.” It is from this space where De La Torre’s challenges his readers to think critically about the tensions of power, economic structures, and the unwillingness to be challenged by moral ideals from outside Eurocentric moral imperialistic mindset. In an effort to stress the extreme need for real ethical and theological discourse, De La Torre’s lifts up the German philosopher G. W.F Hegel’s concept of “lordship and bondage.” This concept states that the, “master (oppressor) is also subjugated to the structures that the master creates to enslave the laborer.” This is to say that this current society structuring binds all parties involved and to truly be liberated from our bondage than we must engage in ethics from the margins. De La Torre’s notes that to engage in such a process would bring us forth to a more human condition where dehumanizing oppressive structures would be confronted for the sake of the gospel. He continues and suggests that to is an issue of praxis and that it would upset the equilibrium that currently exists. This process, as De La Torre’s notes, calls us to become liberated from our individual as well as social …show more content…
By doing this we must also confront the structures of power that we not only rely on for maintaining positions of privilege, but the structures that reinforces common morals of those within the center. To partake in such an effort does take a considerable amount of personal character in that it requires one to be co-crucified. In co-crucified I mean to say that one must be willing to give up our place of power and the injustices committed, in order to liberate humanity from its captivity to the systems of