Religion Dispatches reports:
Liberation theology is alive and well in Belem, Brazil. Where? Did you say Davos, Switzerland, where 2,500 economic movers and shakers recently concluded their annual meeting of World Economic Forum at a cost of a quarter million dollars apiece? (Pricey vacation in these troubled times.) No, I said Belem, Brazil, where the World Social Forum, the antidote to Davos, gathered over 100,000 social activists and academics for 1,500 workshops and presentations in late January.
Get out your map: Belem is in the north of Brazil, in the state of Para, part of the Amazon region which takes up space four times the size of Germany, with Greece tossed in for good measure. More than two thousand indigenous people came for the Forum, some travelling a week on the Amazon.
Apparently, CNN does not do mosquito nets or endangered rainforests, preferring the picturesque ski runs of Davos for winter holidays. So, news on this remarkable gathering was scarce.
Read it all here
More on The World Forum on Theology and LIberation.
Comments from the Anglican Church in Brazil on the Forum here. The Secretary General of the Province of Brazil asks why there is no presence from the Anglican Communion and writes:
Some people asks about why our church is institutionally involved and so continuously with this movement, which still arouses suspicion in the mass media. Here, some arguments to justify the relevance of such commitment.
1. It is a movement that appears to be the opposite side to the World Economic Forum, who includes the most powerful people in the world and that over time has maintained a model socially unjust and responsible for exclusions of billions of people around the world.
2. It is a movement that has no religious characterization and / or ideological control of their actions.
3. It is a movement of convergence around the deep wish for another world possible.
Read it all here.