Diego Irarrazaval

4 December 2006
Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book History and Politics in Latin American Theology (SCM, 2007) explores the work and life of Diego Irarrázaval. In his latest work in Spanish, still not translated into other languages, Irarrázaval has made a significant contribution to the connections between very complex spectrums of liberation theologies in Latin America. His personal context has changed from Peru to Chile but his wide reflections continue making an impact on a wider Latin American theological and pastoral praxis.
For Irarrázaval, if liberation is part of a process of inculturation and liturgical adaptation, such inculturation is only part of a more diversified typology of themes and contexts that require social liberation and a theological praxis. This theme already expanded by Támez and Richard, presumes a surprising presupposition: processes of globalisation have created semantic fields that are terribly unified and through which notions of identity have been labelled in practice as monogenic. Thus, according to Irarrázaval, the universal process of globalisation has not conduced to the joys of semantic freedom but has actualised an authoritarian model of mimetic identity.