Community Psychology and Liberation Theologies: Commonalities, Collaboration, Dilemmas

Abstract

Community psychology and liberation theologies share an emphasis on personal and social transformation through a process of liberation. Emerging in the 1960s in the climate of social change movements, both fields serve to challenge the dominant discourse of how and why to perform the tasks of theology and psychology. My purpose in this article is to put these fields into dialogue, with a focus on commonalities, collaboration, and dilemmas. After presenting an overview of the fields and their commonalities, I posit that liberation theologies can enrich the why and where of liberating structural change, whereas community psychology can enrich the how with conceptual tools such as multiple levels of analysis and social change strategies. I conclude with dilemmas internal to these fields and inherent in collaboration. My goal is to promote theoretical and practical collaboration in the quest for liberatory social change.