Translation of Gracia y condición humana.

Includes bibliographical references.

What Name Do We Give To Christian Existence? -- Length: The Pre-Human, The Human Condition -- Height: Eternal Life, The New Earth -- Breadth: Humanity, The People of God -- Depth: Love, The Definitive Power

Over the past several centuries, many theologians and preachers have accomplished the all-but-impossible: they have embalmed the subject of grace. For Paul and the early Christians grace was a personal encounter with Christ–always illuminating, always strengthening, often sudden, sometimes awesome. For the last scores of generations grace has been presented too frequently as a packaged product rather than a Person "who sets us free" through the tender terrible sharing of his own life. In this volume J.L. Segundo and his collaborators do more, however, than simply restore the original understanding of grace. Their theology comes from the harsh, often inhuman realities of Latin America, and they ask what meaning grace can have in that blasted landscape of the spirit. (The same question could be asked in Harlem, Appalachia or the sharecroppers' shanty towns of the South.) NOr do the authors bypass scholastic distinctions or the still-relevant controversies over Pelagianism or Jansenism–but they examine the past in light of the questions raised by Marx , Freud, Teilhard de Chardin and such pivotal literary figures as Bernanos, Sartre and Camus. If grace brings total liberation the liberated Christian must strive to capture every stirring of the SPirit, who breathes where he wills and can convert salon or slum into a Pentecostal upper room. Collaborators with Father Segundo in the teaching- learning preparation of this volume are ANdres Assandri, Ricardo Cetrulo, Dario Ubilla, Roberto Viola and Mario Kaplum.