mc500-Book Report-2

Book Report 2: “The Mestizo/A Community of the Spirit” by Rameses Sorrell

“The Mestizo” concentrates on transmitting the image of the latino community in a new light. However, it is seen that “The Spirit of God, is the central figure… (xii)” that will bring both community and church together. “The narratives of the Pentecost and the cross constitutes the formative juncture informing our ecclesiological understanding of the church as a cruciform community of the Spirit…on which Latino theology of the Spirit is constructed (xii).”

Chapter one discusses how Latino theology is a practical theology of culture. “We see that it flourishes in Christopraxis and Latin American liberation theology. However it is seen that is limited in its transformational mission, in need of revision of its assumptions about culture and the nature of the church (xii).”

Chapter two ventures into “…discerning a more Spirit-friendly postmodern view of culture ;Taking the first step toward developing a latino theology of culture into a latino theology of spirit-by identifying the church as the cultural geography of the spirit (xii).”

In Chapter three the question is asked “…if the church is seen as the geography of the Spirit of Christ, then what matrices are formative in the making of the church, within history and culture, in a way that resembles the authorship of Christ’s Spirit and the authenticity of human culture (xiii)?” It is discovered that within “…the narratives of the Pentecost and the cross, the church originates and lives historically and culturally as God’s communal transformational parlance (xiii).”

Chapter four discusses the “Mestizo/a community of the Manana (xiii).” “Theologically, the latino theology of the spirit and its dynamic methodology-a Pentecost-cruciform-shaped theology; Ecclesiologically, the Mestizo/a community of the Manana pretends to be a latino ecclesiology from a postmodern perspective …embodying Jesus, his message the practices of Eucharist, with proclamatory and pastoral presence (xiii).”