Religion is one of the most enduring products of human culture. All religions include diverse to quote Troeltsch that have proved capable of legitimizing a wide range of social formations in diverse historical, ecological, and cultural contexts. This diversity is perhaps the key to their long-term survival. They can and have been forces of stability, change, domination, and liberation. Religion has been used to justify the status quo of corrupt economic and political rulers. It has been used by these rulers to colonize and, to use a more contemporary expression, enculturate other societies and cultures. Religion, also, has motivated people toward revolution. This issue is going to discuss examples of liberation theology. Liberation theology is a response to the phenomenon of poverty. It works not only to improve the social, economic, and environmental conditions of poor communities, but to eliminate the structures that produced poverty in the first place. It is a kind of ethos, world view, that promotes the idea of being satisfied with having enough food, a comfortable shelter, good health, and meaningful work in the context of a caring community. Liberation theology stands in contradistinction to any ideology that fosters greed and acquisitiveness for its own sake. Worldwide, liberation theologies are religious examples of a global trend towarcl the development of social and religious alternatives to the hegemonic discourse, symbols, and economic structures of modern capitalism and, until recently, totalitarian socialism. They emerged in reaction to traditional theology, which proved to be in too close a relation with the economic powers of oppressive and dictatorial regimes. They aimed to establish a necessary connection between religious truth and social and economic justice. This is well illustrated in the first article of this collection by Maura Mitchell, who examines the liberation theology behind the movement that led to the demise of Banda's dictatorial regime in Malawi. Banda ruled Malawi from 1964 to 1993 through a dysfunctional mixture of terror and ritualized paternalism, using religious institutions to buttress his own moral authority. In the changing global and regional climate of the 1990s, however, a group of local Catholic bishops wrote a series of pastoral letters (1992-1993) that denounced the Banda regime for being authoritarian. These letters were read by clergy to their parishioners across the nation, who, in turn, helped mobilize the people to overthrow the dictator. Like Christian liberation theology, engaged Buddhist movements combine tools of social analysis with psychological introspection suited to social, cultural, political, economic, and local traditions. Cultural tolerance, religious pluralism, and the practical concern for equity and justice are synthesized into a unifying theme in these movements, which have international linkages. In the second article, Kathryn Poethig analyzes the Dhammayietra, an annual peace walk in Cambodia that originated at the historic repatriation of refugees in the Thai border camps at the U.N.-monitored transition to democracy in 1992. Inspired by the teachings of Mohadma Gandhi, Thich Naht Hanh, and Sulak Sivaraksa, the Cambodian monk, Maha Ghosananda, yearly leads a Zen-like, step-by-step repatriation walk back into Cambodia with the aim of securing a renewed time of peace. Poethig argues that this living procession moves the boundaries of nation-ness