Abolition Theology: Notes on Time and Eschatology

Oriented by critiques of Christian eschatology emerging from liberation theology, this paper argues that the imagination of liberative futures can be facilitated by thinking alongside the temporality of resurgent life. Drawing upon abolitionist thought, this paper suggests that resurgent life takes place and makes place within the future anterior of abolition time: a temporal orientation involving practices that work against carceral logics and cultivating present forms of life that anticipate liberative futures not yet existent. Abolition thus involves quotidian practices of building communal relations that make liberation partially present now, organizing life around what should or must be. As such, this paper suggests that everyday practices of abolition instantiate a temporal grammar that parallels an eschatological expectation for life’s persistence amidst devastation and harm.