Kyle LAMBELET, ¡Presente!: Nonviolent Politics and the Resurrection of the Dead. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019. pp. 214. ISBN 978-1626167261. Reviewed by Marc TUMIENSKI, Anna Maria College, Paxton, MA 01612.

The sharp focus of this engaging book provides a powerful illustration of the Christian call to peacemaking in our day. This reflects a timeless concern yet one which also requires a deep analysis of the signs of our times, as we are reminded in the Presentation of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of Church: “Transforming social realities with the power of the Gospel, to which witness is borne by women and men faithful to Jesus Christ, has always been a challenge and it remains so today at the beginning of the third millennium.”

Lambelet presents an extensive case study of the School of the Americas (SOA) Watch, a movement founded to advocate for the closure of the SOA. The SOA, now renamed WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) and located at Fort Benning in Georgia, is a training facility for Latin American police and military. The SOA Watch was founded after the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, on the campus of the Central American University in El Salvador. The soldiers who carried out this assassination were trained at the SOA facility.

SOA Watch engages in a number of related efforts aimed ultimately at the closure of WHINSEC, including an annual vigil at Fort Benning, nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, legal endeavors, related campaigns (e.g., to close immigrant detention centers), and engagement with members of Congress as well as Latin American heads of state.

The book sets the stage with a brief history of the SOA. Lambelet also explores the challenges facing the SOA Watch, an increasingly pluralist movement with a core commitment to nonviolence. In response to these challenges and ideals, the author identifies ways in which the murdered victims of SOA graduates serve as moral exemplars, inviting commitment to the movement while also shaping its goals. Furthermore, Lambelet outlines a messianic political theology, which draws upon practical reasoning in order to maintain both faithfulness and effectiveness in its activities, while avoiding the temptations of violence and apathy. The book is well documented and engages deeply with relevant scholarly work.

Theological reflection on the crucifixion and resurrection is woven throughout the entire text, which is one of its strengths. The author focuses on the ¡presente! litany,noted in the title, which is held during the annual vigils at Ft. Benning. The litany encompasses a ritual remembering of the dead (martyrs) killed by SOA/WHINSEC graduates. The ¡presente! litany holds up the martyrs as icons who provide hope for the living as well as judgment of ongoing oppressive and violent structures. Lambelet’s discussion and analysis of this topic is one of the highlights of the book. The author draws upon key principles and virtues, including solidarity and prudence, and brings together topics such as embodied practice, liturgy and memory, nonviolence, political theology and messianism.

Lambelet also explores demanding questions for the SOA Watch, including where to focus its efforts, and how to make decisions, as circumstances change and new people get involved. This analysis is a good example of working through moral and strategic complexity facing a movement that has continued for 30 years. Readers are invited to consider what this might mean for living out one’s faith amidst the realities of globalized structural violence.

A few points in the text raised questions that I would have liked greater clarity on, such as the description of nonviolence as a tradition of moral praxis (86), as well as the strengths and weakness of what Lambelet describes as a bicameral orientation to political life (88).

This book would serve as an excellent text for university students, in light of its thought-provoking topic, the deep analysis that is clearly laid out for the reader, and the structure of the text, which includes a useful bibliography as well as frequent summaries of major points. It offers an inviting mix of personal narrative, history, interviews, political analysis, and Scriptural and theological study that would keep the attention of students.

Lambelet’s text speaks also to Christians wanting to think deeply about how to live as a disciple in the face of today’s political and military structures. Even those not involved in the SOA Watch or similar movements will benefit from engaging with the material about peacemaking and the power of a community of faith to work for effective change within political structures allied with violence and death. Lambelet creates a space for readers to engage with fundamental questions of faith, solidarity with the oppressed, the power of liturgy, hope in resurrection, the place of the martyrs and the practice of nonviolence.