American dream : three women, ten kids, and a nation's drive to end welfare

Abstract

those who “don’t count,” and so forth. He tries passionately to call attention to those on the margins, but he does not successfully show their capacities and gifts. We are not left with a sense of those on the margins as persons gifted by God with intelligence and freedom and endowed with the capacity to make self-determining choices ordered toward the common good. Although De La Torre seems to want us to see the marginalized with the eyes of Christ, instead we learn to see them with the eyes of nineteenthcentury German philosophers. In a similar way, the issues and case studies are flawed. Scholars committed to the Enlightenment ideals of objectivity and detachment might complain that the presentation of the issues and cases is one-sided. That is true enough; there is no pretense to objectivity. De La Torre makes it pretty plain which side he is on for each issue, and it is always the side that one would expect from a liberation theologian located on the political left. I have a different complaint about the case studies. The cases are so brief (usually only a few paragraphs long) that they make it impossible for college students to understand the issues with any kind of human complexity. In some of the cases, those on the margins are given names to make the cases seem more real, but we do not learn much about the people involved. We never see the people involved as moral agents or as persons created in God’s image. Instead, each one seems like a caricature, a helpless victim—followed by a five-step rational process for how to fix the problem. (Perhaps a violent revolution is justified?) The personal passion, evident at the beginning of the book, quickly transforms into a mechanical analysis of impersonal power relationships. I have found that my students learn most about marginalized people by serving in their neighborhoods, and then, over time, coming to know them not as the oppressed but as neighbors and maybe as friends. For a better book, I recommend John McKnight’s The Careless Society. My sense is that De La Torre’s gifts—as a writer, a teacher, and a theologian—would be developed better with a vision more like McKnight’s. —Gregory R. Beabout Saint Louis University

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