Gustavo Gutiérrez

The Wikipedia article on Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest and advocate for Christian socialism, gives the reader a strong understanding of his philosophical arguments, with both detailed summaries and his own quotes explaining them more or contextualizing them when necessary. This is the source of a lot of the article’s strengths and weaknesses, as it answers a lot of questions one might have about liberation theology, but it does this at the expense of discussion about his life’s work and influence on revolutionary movements in Latin America. Liberation theology already has a Wikipedia article – and it’s far longer than this one – so I feel it would benefit the article to focus more on Gutiérrez the person.

When I looked at the talk section, there wasn’t a ton of contention – I’ll explain more in the next paragraph – and some editors agreed with me that the article lacks detail on his life and another saying that the Spanish language version is far more detailed. These were from a little over a decade ago so I assume it’s made some improvements in this time, but I feel it could still use more discussion beyond liberation theology.

Flaws aside, there’s a lot more I like about this article. Its fairly unbiased, with its editors doing a lot of work to explain concepts he helped popularize within Christian and leftist discourse and exploring how his background and education shaped his politics and interest in theology. The article, I think, would benefit from even more discussion of this and how his experiences post-graduation shaped him and how specifically his concepts influenced revolutionaries throughout the 20th century.

The article offers a detailed list of his important works and has 25 references, ranging from biographies about Gutiérrez, newspaper articles, books and articles about liberation theology, not to mention three books and articles as further reading. Obviously the article has room for improvement, but looking at it makes me pretty confident that past editors have given me ample resources to help me improve it further.

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