The ambitious and accessible essays collected in this volume were presented by John Howard Yoder during an extensive visit to South America in 1966. Reflecting and also subverting the acknowledged "faddish" attempt to address the revolutionary nature of Christianity, these lectures provide an illuminating snapshot of Yoder's vibrant initial encounter with Latin American Christianity. In these lectures, he thematically addresses the shape of the free church, the Christian practice of peace, and the place of the church in the midst of revolution. In a manner that betrays his confidence in the eventual triumph of faithfulness, Yoder concludes that the peace-witnessing free church is, by definition, always the community that is the soul and conscience of our revolutionary age.

John Howard Yoder taught at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and later became a professor of theology and ethics at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He is the author ofThe Politics of Jesus (1972),The Priestly Kingdom (1984),For the Nations (1997), and several other books.