Introduction

Summary

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

These lines by the nineteenth-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins stress the importance of what today we might call praxis. For Hopkins, life is discovered and revealed not in the syllogisms of the Scholastic manuals, but in the joyful uniqueness of each individual coming to be that to which it is called. And yet this individuality is not fragmentary, for what unites each is its loveliness to God, who sees in each the presence of the Son.

At heart, my study is about the recognition of the truth Hopkins captures so beautifully in the lines quoted above. I ask how liberation theologians can allow the poor to be iconic, to be encountered as Christ at play “in ten thousand places”, to address and challenge us as grace, as gift from the Father through the Son in the dynamism of the Spirit. Or, in other words, how can the poor be allowed to remain always other?