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

From the title and subtitle of Christopher D. Tirres’s book, we already ascertain that the work addresses four discrete philosophic disciplines or traditions: American pragmatism, Latin American liberation, aesthetics, and ethics. And at first glance, each of the four does not evoke an immediate connection to the other three, but Tirres is capable of putting them into a genuine conversation. Tirres’s book is organized into eight chapters, with the first and eighth serving respectively as a succinct introduction and conclusion. I will analyze these eight chapters as three separate yet interrelated projects.

In the introduction, entitled “American Faith in a New Key,” we find a concise statement of his wide-ranging project of connecting liberation theology to pragmatism and aesthetics to ethics. He states: “The challenge . . . becomes how best to reconnect a vision of faith practice that takes seriously cultural identity and popular aesthetics, on the one hand, with a vision of faith practice that is tied to the idea of concrete change and civic activism, on the other” (7). In his second chapter, Tirres gives a detailed, practical description of this aesthetics of faith in action. He recalls his experiences as an observer of the Good Friday services at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. The most elaborate of these liturgies is the via crucis, in which actors recreate Jesus Christ’s trial and crucifixion through San Antonio’s streets with thousands of onlookers. Yet Tirres pays just as much attention to a smaller service on Good Friday evening. In the Pésame, an actress portraying the Mother Mary grieves for her son and, in turn, consoles parishioners who lost family members in the past year. Through these liturgies “the aesthetics of ritual blend into ethical concerns” and they serve to “reference the resurrection less as a supernatural event and more as a recurring, everyday reality” (38). I will return to his practical account of ritual later to evaluate this project’s success.

In chapters 3 through 5, Tirres undertakes his bridge-building project between Latin American/American Latino theologies and classical American pragmatism. Chapter 3 centers on the thought of several Latino theologians, such as Alejandro García-Rivera, María Pilar Aquino, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and Roberto Goizueta. Tirres ties these thinkers into the aesthetics of faith by noting that U.S. Latino theology takes an “aesthetic turn” in which these thinkers abandon “a ‘detached’ view of aesthetics or religion” in order to “root [their] work in particular histories, stories, artistic forms, and ways of life within the Latino/a context” (55–56). This chapter ends with an introduction to key concepts in pragmatism, such as habit, problematic situation, and instrumentalism. The focus of chapter 4 is Tirres’s fusing of pragmatic aesthetic experience with Latino theology’s religious experience. Dewey’s empiricism is nonreductive, consisting of qualitative moments in experience’s stream rather than atomistic sense data. Hence, Tirres notes that experience includes intermittent moments of aesthetic “undergoing” and moral faith as ethical “doing” (91–92). At the same time, “pragmatism offers a theory of religious faith that is not beholden to institutional forms of religion” (96). However, Tirres suggests that James’s and Dewey’s accounts of faith fail to disclose the social dimensions of religion, and on this issue, the Latino experience can help to strengthen pragmatism (98). This project continues in chapter 5, where Tirres turns his attention to the Latina ecofeminism of Ivone Gebara. Tirres once again builds mutually beneficial bridges. Pragmatic epistemology’s focus on inquiry complements Gebara’s contextualism and holism. At the same time, her unique insights can aid in projects pragmatists find favorable, such as deconstructing rigid doctrine, critiquing dichotomies, and finding creative solutions to practical problems (128).

Whereas the project of chapters 3 through 5 is building new pathways between pragmatism...