Born of an interdisciplinary project between Jesuit universities around the world, Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents is an edited volume which seeks to address the relationship between Catholicism and democracy. Are they compatible? How do they affect one another? Writing from fields ranging from economics to theology to anthropology, the authors argue that Catholicism and democracy are not only compatible but are potentially mutually beneficial. Reflecting the Jesuit backgrounds of the editors, Michael J. Schuck and John Crowley-Buck, the volume is an overtly political one: it is as strongly concerned with Catholicism's role in democracy as it is with democracy's place within Catholicism.

Organised into geographic areas, the book covers a range of different contexts for the Catholic Church, from places where Catholicism is the majority religion (Peru) to places where it is a minority – whether the majority be Muslim (Indonesia) or Protestant (United States) – or places where it bears the marks still of Soviet repression (Lithuania). In gathering together such diversity, the editors bring out the historical and socio-cultural specificities shaping the Catholic Church in each country, which in turn guide the themes running through each section.

For instance, the authors of the Lithuania chapters are concerned with the consequences of Soviet occupation on Lithuanian Catholics and their engagement with democracy: the resulting social trauma (Gailiené), the change in the historical imagination of the Church (Streikus), the lingering effects of Soviet atheist ideology on contemporary Catholic communities (Putinaité), and the ways in which successive occupations have caused theological imbalances in the Lithuanian Church (Šimkunas) are all explored. The following section is likewise centred on regional contexts, foregrounding Indonesia's status as an emerging democracy and considering how the minority Catholic population might help or hinder this development. The authors trace Catholicism's history in Indonesia and its associations with colonialism (Wardaya); investigate the influence of the Indonesian concept of pancasila, the official philosophy of the Indonesian government, on lay Catholic activism (Wiryono); link Catholic social teaching to the concept of corporate social responsibility (Yudianti); and argue for an overlap between Ignatian spirituality and kethoprak, a form of performing arts which acts as a popular form of participatory democracy (Susanto).

The Peruvian chapters reflect most notably the Jesuit and liberation theology influence in their concern with how the Church has used its influence to support or oppose historical and structural oppression of democratic values and practices. Thus, Escalante offers a historical overview of the entanglement of the Catholic Church with longstanding relations of patronage – a legacy of Spanish colonialism. In discussing the effects of the recent decades-long Peruvian civil war, Gamio criticises as morally and ethically wrong those members of the Church hierarchy who sought to suppress the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In turn, however, Espinosa praises the Catholic bishops in the Amazon who have, in recent years, been public voices in support of indigenous and environmental rights. Taking a look at lay political participation, Aragón discusses Protestant versus Catholic engagement in politics.

Likewise, as a reflection of the particular form of the regional Catholic Church, the chapters on the United States do not shy away from criticism of the Church hierarchy or of US democracy. Linking Catholic social teaching to contemporary democratic issues in the United States, O'Neill argues for Catholic support for restorative over punitive justice, which worsens pre-existing US structural inequalities such as the disproportionate imprisonment rate of black men. In a critique of the US Catholic hierarchy, Murphy's chapter explores and emphasises the key importance of US women religious in educating US Catholics as both Catholics and US citizens, while Sullivan argues that although Catholic social teaching supports institutional transparency as essential to representative democracies, there has been an element of inconsistency when it comes to the internal workings of the Church particularly regarding the hierarchy's public reaction to sexual abuse scandals.

While the range of Catholic contexts show the breadth and depth of the Catholic engagement with democracy and vice versa, the volume also works to link Catholicism to other religions, fields and themes, such as the roots of modern human rights in Catholic writings (Araujo), the current engagement of Islam with democracy (Hermansen, Powell), Montaigne's writings about religion and the idea of the ‘Other’ (Posner), or the tension and battle over influence between Catholicism and leftist populist regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia (Klaiber). The final chapters in particular take a comprehensive view, comparing the position of religion in democratic reform in Lithuania, Peru and Indonesia (Ingram) and analysing the transition to democracy across 55 predominantly Catholic countries (Schraeder), ending with a conclusion which reflects upon the hope the authors hold for democracy as a response to social suffering.

It is important to keep in mind that Democracy is written by Catholic scholars about Catholicism, and as such takes a different tone to many secular academic works on the same subject. However, it is hardly of interest only to Catholic readers. Because they are Catholic scholars writing about Catholicism in an often critical yet hopeful fashion – the tone of Catholics who love their Church but are nevertheless cognisant of its faults – the volume not only makes itself of direct interest across interdisciplinary and regional boundaries, but also contributes implicitly to an academic understanding of Catholicism as full of diverse and often competing voices. It illustrates the thriving discussion and argument within Catholicism about the values and directions the Church should take, and in doing so demonstrates the wide reach and influence of the Catholic Church as both as a global institution and as a regionally rooted and historically specific power.

The book is thus also of direct interest to scholars of Latin America: as Klaiber argues in his chapter, the Church is the only institution that is large and powerful enough to compete with the state in Latin America, and this volume aptly displays the multiplicity of voices and agendas in the Church. Particularly, as Latin American countries grapple in different ways with the practices and values of democracy, this volume provides highly valuable comparative material which provokes analytical reflection on the link between Catholicism and democracy, and especially its implications for Latin America's developing relationship with the latter.