ABSTRACT
Oscar Romero is perhaps the best-known victim of two decades of ruthless civil war in El Salvador, a largely one-sided struggle in which the country’s landholding oligarchy directed its US-trained and -equipped military against peasants, workers, and their supporters. Over 70,000 people were killed, as bombings, midnight “disappearances,” torture, machine-gun fire on unarmed demonstrators, rape, and countless other forms of brutality became commonplace. A world-famous theologian and political commentator, Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the last great public intellectuals of American life. At a public lecture, the Dalai Lama said: [T]here may be difference in cultural background or way of life, there may be differences in faith, or may be of a different color, but human beings, consisting of the human body and the human mind. The Dalai Lama’s desire to treat everyone “just as a person” expresses the Buddhist view that psychology is both the core of human identity and the same everywhere.
