Blood in the Fields

Matthew Philipp Whelan is assistant professor of moral theology at Baylor University.

Matthew Whelan has penned an essential monograph for scholars and graduate students interested in Romero, Catholic social thought, or, for that matter, Catholic moral theology or ecclesiology. Whelan claims that this book 'approaches Romero from a different angle than much of the existing English-language scholarship on him.' And he's right. This clearly written and well-documented book grounds Romero's work in the concrete realities of the Salvadoran context – particularly the production of landlessness and the struggles surrounding land reform in El Salvador over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing, Whelan illuminates the Catholic social tradition in new ways, making clear Romero's ongoing relevance for Christian ethics and the global church today."-Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics