Focusing on the annual School of the Americas (SOA) protests that arose after the murder in El Salvador of six Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter in November 1989, Lambelet advances a powerful, theologically compelling claim: that “the dead are political agents.” He argues that the ¡presente! liturgy at the SOA protests recall the “crucified people” of El Salvador who are “present as a messianic sign that the current age is being broken open, that the strictures of death are being overturned, and that resurrection is breaking in among us” (4). This messianic reality posits one pole of the tension with which Lambelet wrestles between faithfulness and effectiveness, which, he argues, calls for an account of practical reasoning that ethicists have neglected. Hence his conclusion: “Faithfulness to the resurrected presence of the dead requires responsiveness to the demands of the living, a responsiveness that issues forth into effective political action” (173).

Lambelet buttresses his argument with historical and ethnographic material that make up the story of the SOA protests. It moves from the civil war in El Salvador and the protests of US policy in El Salvador in the 1980s, to the murder of the Jesuit community at the University of Central America in 1989 and the initial SOA protest by Roy Bourgeois and Charlie and Patrick Liteky in 1990, and finally to the annual protests, the founding of SOA Watch, and the forming of communities of resistance. The last stages of this story receive the most attention. Lambelet traces three overlapping phases—coalition building (2000–2009), internal critique (2000–2012), and accountable solidarity (2006–2016)—to show, by interviewing key actors and recording community meetings, how problems are identified and resolved or left unresolved. Into this account of activists in the SOA, Lambelet injects normative ethical analysis. Early on, he credits William Cavanaugh with articulating a Christian theo-politics of Christian practices, such as the ¡presente! litany, but faults him for “evading the necessity of ethical discernment regarding what to do in the warp and woof of politics” (36). This problem stems, says Lambelet, from a unidirectional view of the church-world relationship wherein the church moves to the street, rather than a two-way conception with the church and the streets shaping each other. In successive chapters, he shows practical reason at work in the SOA in multiple ways: its embrace of denominational and religious pluralism, its refusal to set aside normative concerns (higher law) when making practical judgments, and its persistent hopefulness. This exposition culminates in an account of Ellacuria's “historical soteriology” and its invocation of “the crucified and resurrected people” (174–75), which unmasks sin, declares judgment, and reveals God's salvation and enables liberation. Building on Sobrino, Lambelet points to discernment in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius as a means for charting a path of practical reason under a messianic sign. This political performance avoids both quietist disengagement from and violent intervention in history, maintaining a faithful and effective agency and action that provides a true basis for radical hope.

Lambelet's affirmation of faithfulness and effectiveness leads him to engage with the best of scholarship working from one side or the other of this daunting dichotomy. At the same time, he interviews activists whose voices are often not taken seriously by academics, faithfully bringing their concerns into conversation with scholarship. It is refreshing to read in the index the names Cathleen Kaveny and Kathy Kelly, Ronald Dworkin and Jean Donavon. A shortcoming in Lambelet's analysis is his acceptance of the faithfulness/effectiveness dichotomy itself. He acknowledges its Weberian origins (6–7) but does not acknowledge how the dichotomy itself may function ideologically to legitimate the bureaucratic order in which it arose. This is the argument put forth by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, but Lambelet does not that take it up. He appeals to Aristotle's notion of exemplarity in parsing out genuine martyrdom as opposed to a self-aggrandizing, almost magical charismatic messianism, but he does develop other facets of Aristotle's account of the virtues. This is unfortunate because a conflict between a Weberian pragmatic conception of practical reason and an Aristotelian ends-shaped approach will be central in Christian social ethics for years to come. Still, Lambelet provides a compelling account of practical reasoning within the limits of the Weberian paradigm.