Brief Review: Hope In An Age of Despair by Albert Nolan
A Brief Review of
Hope In An Age of Despair.
Albert Nolan.
Paperback: Orbis Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by R. Dean Hudgens.
Fr. Albert Nolan has been an important figure in South African liberation theology for several decades. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his book Jesus Before Christianity was published in 2001. This smaller volume (edited and introduced by Stan Muyebe) brings together articles, essays, and homilies from a variety of sources. It represents a helpful introduction to Nolan’s life and work and contains a “selected bibliography” of his writings dating back to 1976. Nolan has been a notable leader in the Catholic church and the Dominican Order in South Africa during the difficult years of apartheid and beyond. He chose to remain there even when offered a distinguished ecclesiastical position in Rome. He was a primary contributor to the 1985 Kairos Document which protested South African apartheid policy and provoked much attention around the world. Nolan’s liberation theology is strongly christocentric in theory and mystical-prophetic in practice. This collection provides a very wholistic perspective on his work as Nolan addresses the biblical basis for justice, the need for a life of prayer and contemplation, and the concrete spiritual and physical needs that continue to be manifest in South Africa today. Speaking from a situation that once seemed so thoroughly without hope; a situation in which for so long the world saw the church at its oppressive worst; Nolan continues to speak with a unique authority as a representative of a faith-filled and courageous church, that has demonstrated the gospel at it’s liberating and reconciling best. This is not a great book, but it comes from a great man with a great faith and an enduring hope.
