A review by rienthril
The Violence of Love by Oscar A. Romero

5.0

Read this for the first time last year, and it utterly changed my conception of what Christianity is. Currently re-reading with a neighborhood group. - Finished sometime in November, 2011. Romero has become incredibly important to me. The Violence of Love is a selection of his homilies during his tenure as Archbishop of El Salvador, which, at the time, was in the throes of violent civil war. The general populace (Romero's congregation) was caught between the fear campaigns of the ruling oligarchy and leftist guerrilla groups. Torture and disappearances were commonplace. In this setting, Romero metamorphosed from a conservative apologist for the status quo into a radical advocate for the common Salvadoran, and was ultimately assassinated for his stand. He views the maddening complexity and desperation of political and religious systems of injustice through the lens of Christ-inspired love: Straight-up 1st Corinthians 13 stuff. He tears down the veil of man-made Christian tradition to expose the true call within Christianity, the call to the conversion of the heart. For Romero, no injustice, no violence is tolerable, because it always creates victims of individuals who are the image of God, namely, for Romero, the poor of El Salvador. This book is a wake up call for any self-proclaimed Christian, and an encouragement to Christians who are sick of being misrepresented by hate language and repressive tendencies in popular strains of western Christianity.