Nicolás Panotto and Luis Martínez Andrade. Decolonizing Liberation Theologies: Past, Present, and Future. Switzerland: Springer Macmillan. 2023. eBook ($129.00). 281 pp. 978-3-031-31131-4
Encouraged by the premise that “liberation theology was to build a method that allows the constant resignification of theological work from a set of axes that enable the reformulation of discourses, narratives, and hermeneutics” (p. 3), Panotto and Martínez Andrade gathered contributions from a variety of voices in Latin American liberation theologies (LALT) that represent and engage its origins, contemporary challenges and trends, and possible futures from decolonial/decolonizing lenses. Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, the ten-year anniversary volume in the Postcolonialism and Religions series, seeks “to do justice to the justice-seeking originality of Latin American liberation theology, philosophy, and sociology as it emerged in the 1960–70s and developed into the present, and justice to the peoples and cultures liberating themselves not only from outside economic programs set for them, but from theological programs too, including projects aimed in name, spirit, and practice at “liberation” (p. 4). Through its fourteen essays readers encounter multidimensional snapshots that assess the trajectory of LALT since the 1960s through current struggles for recognition, democracy, rights, and justice amid various marginalized and impoverished subjects, and that reassess LALT’s potential for furthering liberatory theories, critiques, and practices that can concretely contribute to peoples’ and nature’s struggles today and into the future.
The result of the invitation to contributors to consider how LALTs “opened the door to the construction of diverse types of articulations, methodologies, and processes of subjectivation” (p. 219) is a collection of essays that energize and challenge what some today might consider a stale theological endeavor. I approached this collection from the perspective of a Christian liberationist ethicist, committed to its central premise of the preferential option for the poor, the “teologal” concept that claims that the God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Isaiah, and Jesus expresses themself in history partial toward those who suffer and seek liberation. For the past 25 years, I have labored convinced of the possibility that history witnesses the option for the poor as the “incarnational principle of divine love”, love becomes entrenched and active in the world specifically in struggles for justice and liberation simply because that is who God is in godself. 1 On this possibility activists, thinkers, theologians, changemakers, clergy, popular movements, “social poets”, 2 and martyrs have wagered that the struggle for liberation is worth our blood, sweat, and tears. I admit that my comment above, “what some today might consider a stale theological endeavor”, very much refers to myself. I approach new works in liberation theology with a mixture of skepticism that we will be covering the same ground of the past 50 years, hope for new commitments and insights in a field I am deeply in love with, and apprehension that new voices will challenge both my professional, theological, and moral positionality. The contributions to Decolonizing Liberation Theologies spoke to me on all these counts, sometimes excitedly, sometimes affirmingly, and sometimes soberly.
The chapters by Luís Rivera-Pagán, Jung Mo Sung, Maria Clara Luchetti Bingemer, and Ivone Gebara anchor the volume on the first 50 years of the development of LALTs, with Rivera-Pagán going much deeper into the colonial past of the Americas in relation to the quest for liberation. These elders of the tradition take to heart the decolonizing task that Panotto and Andrade hope is an innate instinct of LALTs. They both report and scrutinize how the original expressions of LALTs, while inspired by the cry of the poor and integrating methodologies that developed from their experiences of unjust suffering, sustained epistemological and hermeneutical approaches that betray an unwavering commitment to European religious, economic, and political projects. Gebara’s contribution goes deep into how liberation theology’s original ecclesial grounding failed to question the gender bias of the clerical class. She states, “Today, something different is appearing on the horizon, something much more complicated and that I sense does not fit into the theoretical and cultural framework of twentieth century liberation theology” (p. 54). She goes on to propose four contemporary challenges to LALTs as they were developed: “1. The confrontation with human sexuality”; “2. Confrontation with feminist anthropology”; “3. Confrontation with Ecology”; and “4. Confrontation with new politics and new ethics” (p. 54). These are, indeed, the challenges taken up by the authors in the rest of the volume, some more effectively than others.
It’s worth quoting Gebara to consider an aspect that I am missing from the bulk of the contributions to the section on “Liberation in Contextual Focus”. Gebara states,
There are no significant ruptures in relation to the contents and the model of Christianity that the fourth century bequeathed to us despite the many historical upheavals, protests, and ruptures that took place. We continue with the same Christian metaphysics, and from it, we deduce the ethical postures justified by an idea of good according to the divine will. We forget that this metaphysics, whose summit is “God the Father Almighty creator of Heaven and Earth”, has a doctrinal aspect that is fixed and ends up valuing the principles that emanate from it more than the daily life of people. (p. 56)
Essays by queer, Indigenous, eco-activists, and others cleverly and creatively develop the interdisciplinary and intersectional questions that must concern LALTs today. Hugo Córdova Quero, for example, pushes Marcella Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology proposing that what is really needed “is to sexualize theologies in Latin América” (p. 90). Sofia Chipana Quispe presents a challenging argument for Indigenous theologies as central to a decolonial approach to liberation theologies. Jorge Aquino problematizes Latinx theologies in the United States by describing the Cuban community’s failure to resist Trump’s false narrative of love for the disaffected and asks theologians to read their Marx and Marxist theorists for help in uncovering “America’s” false promises.
Yet, these essays leave me longing for a second act, one that dares to make concrete theological proposals that arise from these authors’ very astute development of the literary, gender, sexual, ecological, and other dimensions that need to be present in the praxis and reflection on liberation. Where is God? Problematized, decolonized, deconstructed, incarnated in those impacted by the suffering and violence our systems cause, YES!, where is that God? What concrete proposals do we have to wrest theology from its ecclesial trappings as Gebara suggests? This set of essays puts before us not only existing crucial voices and questions from the multiple undersides of a history run by systems of conquest, acquisition, and consumption, but also propels us to express and live into daring theological experiences and experiments.
Mention must be made of the standout essay by Iskander Abbasi, which does for Islamic liberation theology what Rivera-Pagán, Sung, Bingemer, and Gebara do for Christian LALTs. Abbasi’s contribution is a careful yet critical review of the history of the field, and its grounding and sourcing in specific experiences of colonial violence, persecution, and racial and economic caste systems that have impacted the Muslim world for centuries. Abbasi’s excellent sourcing is truly global and expansive in scope. He takes risks in identifying the margins of gender in its various constructions as a challenge for Islamic liberation theology. Given the thoroughness of his analysis, in the future I would like to see engagement with the question of Muslim ethno-nationalism as it relates to centering certain geographies and experiences, and consequently certain economies and participation in global systems and markets that harm vulnerable communities and the environment.
In looking toward the future, we must take seriously the critique of modernity – the very context in which LALTs first arose, and one squarely grounded on European projects of conquest – in proposing decolonial reformulations of the subjects of liberation. Panotto argues for “building a movement that instrumentalizes the contradictions of modernity as a reactive way in the face of hegemonic powers from the dissident voices and spaces that inhabit, and that raise questions from new discourses and practices” (p. 222), what Walter Mignolo would call “border critical thinking”. 3
I agree with Panotto that doing this without reproducing systems of conquest and the acquisitive drive that center the European, the consumer, the militarily powerful as universals, requires “the radicalization of the episteme” (p. 228), considering “a divinity that interrupts” (p. 229), seeing history as “a history of disruptions” (p. 230). Two theologians/activists who work in precisely this modality are María Cristina (Tirsa) Ventura from Costa Rica, and Claudia Montes de Oca Ayala from Bolivia. Both question the meaning of radical solidarity from the perspective of Indigenous and Afro-Latin American women’s experiences, in particular their construction of liberation that impacts their well-being and the survival and thrival of their communities. Tirsa Ventura develops una ética atrevida (a daring or audacious ethic) that is not satisfied with spiritualities that place God outside of their plan for liberation. 4 Indeed, in Ventura’s and Ayala’s experiences, the theological examination of the sacred must include not only these women’s suffering in the face of sexual brutality, public neglect, market abuse, ecological rape, and religious demonization, but a reconstituted sense of empowerment that comes from knowing that God’s incarnation declares an interruption and disruption to their histories of marginality.
In my estimation, Decolonizing Latin American Liberation Theologies needs a second act, a follow-up volume dedicated to constructing new theologies of liberation that seriously engage the observations and declarations of this first act. Specifically, this second act will wrestle with the challenge of powers (ecclesial, economic, imperial, health, gendered, cultural, linguistic, scientific) as it develops theological visions of people’s encounter with the sacred that are audacious and liberative; a second act that begins to actualize the “something different” that is “appearing in the horizon”.