Poetry as Liberation Theology: A Comparative Theological Reflection on Kim Chi-ha and Ravidas

precis: This essay reads two poets as theologians of liberation: Kim Chi-ha, writing under Korea's 1970s dictatorship, and the North Indian bhakti poet-saint Ravidas. Taking Kim's satirical Ojeok [The Five Bandits] and Ravidas's utopian Begumpura as primary texts, it brings Minjung and Dalit perspectives into conversation. The central claim is straightforward: Poetry can bear theological argument; han and pathos , though sourced from different histories, can move wounded feeling toward shared agency; and satire and hymn work together—the first stripping power of its moral sheen, the second schooling the imagination in a just common life. I outline a reparative arc by showing how Ojeok names structural sin in the entanglement of state, capital, army, and media, how communities convert grief into solidarity, and how Begumpura gives a usable picture of a casteless city that sustains practice and hope. I also register two tensions that recent scholarship has made impossible to ignore: critiques of Minjung discourse, especially around gender and essentialism, and the controversy surrounding Kim's later conservative endorsements. Even with these cautions, the poems still do theological work on the ground. They unmask, they gather, they keep hope from running dry. The methodological consequence for comparative theology is simple: To hear how the oppressed tell the truth about God and the world, we must attend not only to elite prose but also to vernacular poetics—lament, satire, hymn, testimony—where theology is already being made.