Candelaria's work is ambitious in scope: the author sets out to investigate the “diverse and unconventional ways prominent Latina/o writers and artists represent Christ in art, literature, and theology” (1). In the introduction, the author identifies a number of studies in historical cultural studies and theology that have neglected an in-depth focus on how Christ has been depicted in the Hispanophone and Lusophone worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. In so doing, Candelaria argues for the need to study the diverse ways in which artists, writers, and theologians of Latin American, Spanish, or Latino origin have been reformulating representations of Christ to negotiate distinct traditions in historically and culturally determined contexts.

For methodology, the author relies on tools borrowed from hermeneutics, historical materialism, and art, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and theology. The emphasis on a “Latino Christ” becomes a shorthand to bring together in nine chapters figures as diverse as Salvador Dalí, José Clemente Orozco, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel de Unamuno, Leonardo Boff, Virgilio Elizondo, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Chapter 1 focuses on Dalí's mixture of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealism, a basic knowledge of quantum physics, and Spanish Catholic mystic traditions to understand the artist's “nuclear mystical” style of paintings in the post World War II period 1948-1955. The second chapter focuses on Fray Angélico Chávez and his contentious dialogue with Dalí's production. The third chapter focuses on select murals that Orozco painted in Mexico and the United States, highlighting his pessimism regarding salvation and redemption. The fourth chapter shifts to Unamuno's contrasting optimism through the embodied philosophical-religious concept of living faith to negotiate contradictions between skepticism and religious faith. In the fifth chapter, the reader's attention turns to Borges's views on religion, intermixed with skepticism and philosophical discourse as they appear in fiction and essays. In chapter 6, Candelaria focuses on Argentine journalist and political figure Ricardo Rojas, who worked primarily in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter 7 focuses on post 1970s work by Latin American theologians such as Hugo Assman, Leonardo Boff, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. The eighth chapter places in dialogue Virgilio Elizondo, José Vasconcelos, Gloria Anzaldúa, and work by philosophers Jorge Gracia and Linda Martin Alcoff with an emphasis on their disagreements on the terms Hispanic or Latino. The final chapter is a brief coda that brings together some of the central and divergent arguments in the preceding chapters to underscore that there can only be a multiplicity of representations of the Latino Christ, rather than a single one.

The author makes it clear throughout the book that he does not aim to focus on representative figurations of Christ in the Hispanophone or Lusophone worlds, nor does he aim to write a theological work. Therefore, the book becomes a study of heterogeneous representations in a host of literary authors, painters, theologians, and cultural intellectuals in the Americas and Spain. It is also important to note some glaring absences in Candelaria's discussions on Christ, or a conflation of Christ with God, as often appears in Latin American arts. These absences range from Ernesto Cardenal's extensive body of poetry, including his psalms, to Mario Benedetti's strained relationship with Catholicism (seen most notably in his poem “El padrenuestro latinoamericano”), or the work of nueva canción musicians. Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara both delved often into religious imagery as a mode of critique through art by emphasizing el canto a lo humano y a lo divino (songs dealing with quotidian or religious topics).

Candelaria's book can be used in advanced undergraduate or specialized graduate level courses. As a whole the book remains a welcome contribution to the cultural studies of transatlantic visual arts and literary texts with an emphasis on aesthetic and theological discourse.