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Orbis author receives prestigious
Prince of Asturias Award 2003. |
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 The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuciski and the Peruvian philosopher and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino have been given the 2003 Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanities in its XXIII edition. The award is named for the heir to the Spanish throne and is endowed with fifty thousand Euro (approximately $55,000), a sculpture created and specially donated by the renowned Spanish artist Joan Míro, a diploma and an insignia. The Prince of Asturias Awards aim to recognize and reward "scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic work performed by individuals, groups or institutions world-wide." Consonant with this spirit, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanities "will be bestowed upon the individual, working group or institution whose creative work or research represents a significant contribution to universal cultural in these fields." |
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 Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino was born in Lima, Peru, in 1928 and is the founder and director of the Bartolomé de las Casas Institute, in Lima. A man with a solid humanistic, theological and pastoral training, presently he is a parish priest in Lima's slum quarter of Rimac. Guitiérrez was the first person to synthesize and draw together the ideas of the Theology of Liberation, coining and defining the term in a conference given in 1969 and in the book A Theology of Liberation published by Orbis Books two years later.Father Gutiérrez is considered one of the most spiritual of the writers on the Theology of Liberation, managing to avoid the radicalism of other theologians. He bases his ideas on solid Biblical foundations; and proposes that the liberation preached by Christ, rather than being purely spiritual, also involves liberation from earthly injustice. Such liberation, then, requires profound reform of the present-day political structures of Latin America, the continent at the hub of the Theology of Liberation. Doctor honoris causa at several universities (including the University of Nimega in Belgium, King's College and Haverford College in the U.S.A., Switzerland's Fribourg, Germany's Tubingen Universities, and Quebec University in Canada), he is the author of more than ten books. These include A Theology of Liberation, On Job, and The Truth Shall Make You Free. He has been awarded such distinctions as the Juan Mejía Beca Prize (Peru, 1993) and the Order of the Knight of the Legion of Honor (France). He has been a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language since 1995 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. |
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| This year a total of 21 candidates from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Puerto Rico, Qatar, United States and Spain were considered. Previous Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanities award-winners were Globo Communication Group from Brazil, EFE News Agency, Indro Montanelli, Václav Havel, Cable News Network (CNN), Reinhard Mohn, Umberto Eco, George Steiner and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, among others. |
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Gutiérrez's books available through Orbis Books include:
A Theology of Liberation Gustavo Gutiérrez On Job The Density of the Present The God of Life The Truth Shall Make You Free We Drink from Our Own Wells (new edition to be published in Fall 2003) Fundación Príncipe de Asturias |
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