The Aesthetics and Ethics of Faith: A Dialogue between Liberationist and Pragmatic Thought by Christopher D. Tirres (review)

U.S. Latino/a theologians share much with Latin American liberation theologians, but they have also explicitly differentiated themselves from their southern partners. One prominent focus in this effort is U.S. Latino/a attention to popular religion, in contrast to a Latin American stress on political, structural change. On this interpretation, U.S. Latino/as’ practice of everyday life (lo cotidiano) is a form of “aesthetic resistance” to, and freedom from, WASP hegemony—quite a different situation and response from the south. However, the question has been raised whether, in turning to the aesthetic dimensions of lo cotidiano, U.S. Latino/a theologians had not abandoned a critical, ethical edge essential for any liberative project that might actually change the lives of poor and marginalized Latino/as and others. In eight chapters, Christopher Tirres adopts pragmatist philosophy, especially the thought of John Dewey, as a resource with which to honor both Latin American and U.S. Latino/a insights by integrating the aesthetics and ethics of faith.

In the first chapter, subtitled “American Faith in a New Key,” Tirres introduces Dewey, beginning with A Common Faith. The inadequacies of the treatment of religion in Dewey’s Terry Lectures, and the resources elsewhere in his corpus for a more adequate treatment, have been noted before. Tirres agrees with those assessments (Melvin Rogers’s Undiscovered Dewey appears especially important for him), marking his dissatisfaction with “a pervasive suspicion of institutional religion and religious authority, a simplistic view of the supernatural, and a general underappreciation of religious faith as an ongoing, developmental process. Liberationist approaches patiently work through these issues in a way that A Common Faith does not” (10–11).

The argument of the book begins ethnographically, with chapter 2, “Viernes Santo” (Good Friday). Tirres describes the Good Friday liturgy performed in and around San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. San Fernando is famous for its liturgical embrace of elements of popular Mexican American piety. The centerpiece of the liturgy is the via crucis, a “re-enactment” of the way of the cross undergone by Jesus. In San Antonio, an estimated fifteen thousand to thirty thousand participants accompany the via crucis through the downtown. Tirres describes how the faith enacted on Good Friday integrates aesthetic appreciation of a popular culture that endures despite marginalization, with moral judgment of official powers that openly or covertly do the marginalizing. On the principle that actuality entails possibility, the “ritual pedagogy” of Viernes Santo must contain lessons as to how aesthetic and ethical evaluations may sustain each other in a liberating way.

Chapter 3, “Liberation in the Latino/a Americas,” reviews the work of U.S. Latino/a theologians who have argued for the integrality of aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Latino/as’ faith. The main figures considered are the late Alejandro García-Rivera and Roberto Goizueta. García-Rivera drew on Peirce and Royce to develop an account of the beauty he perceived in Latino/a popular faith as sign of divine Beauty. Goizueta has tried to plumb how everyday symbols and rituals of popular faith may be liberative in their own right, apart from conscious political activism. Tirres argues that despite their stated intentions, both theologians fail to mend discontinuity between aesthetic and moral qualities of experience. A pragmatic theory of action promises to repair these qualities by articulating their real, experienced continuity. Indeed, pragmatism helps us identify those affections as modes of “intelligence at work” (81). In this way, Tirres corrects a too-decisive distinction widely shared by liberationist theologians between theology and faith: theology is a “second act” of theorization that, because it abstracts from the “primary act” of faith, necessarily diminishes faith. Deweyan instrumentalism shows how theoretical intelligence is a concrete engagement of the world that enriches experience.

Thus chapter 4, “Pragmatism and Latino/a Religious Experience,” highlights the continuities Dewey saw between “natural piety...