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Leonardo Boff was born in Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 1938. He graduated in Philosophy and holds a doctorate in Theology. He joined the Franciscan Order in 1959. For twenty-two years, he was a professor of Systematic and Ecumenical Theology in Petrópolis, at the Franciscan Theological Institute, a professor of Theology and Spirituality in various study centers and universities in Brazil and abroad; as well as a visiting professor at the universities of Lisbon, Salamanca, Harvard, Basel, and Heidelberg.
He was one of the pioneers of the well-known Liberation Theology, a reflection that seeks to articulate indignation at misery and marginalization with the Christian virtues of faith and hope. He was always a staunch defender of the cause of Human Rights.
In 1984, due to his theses related to Liberation Theology, presented in the book Church: Charisma and Power, he was subjected to a trial by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, condemned to a year of "obedient silence," and removed from all his editorial and teaching positions in the religious field. Given the worldwide pressure on the Vatican, the sentence was suspended in 1986, allowing him to resume some of his activities.
In 1992, when threatened again with a second punishment by the authorities in Rome, he renounced his activities as a priest and entered the lay state. In his own words, he "changed trenches to continue the same struggle"; he continues his work as a liberation theologian, writer, professor, and lecturer in diverse audiences around the world, and advises popular liberation movements such as the Landless Workers' Movement, among others.
In 1993 he began teaching Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of more than sixty books in the areas of Theology, Spirituality, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Mysticism, translated and published worldwide.