As a tradition of critical theological reflection, liberation theology correlates freedom with justice, often challenging liberal conceptions of liberty by stressing the material conditions that render freedom possible. Liberationists have stressed that hegemonic understandings of freedom are constructed on the oppression of marginalized communities and populations, through land appropriation, labor exploitation, ecological devastation, and genocide. The papers in this papers session explore the material conditions for freedom, the role of spirituality in confronting injustice, and the connections between liberation and trauma. These critical interrogations and the expected dialogue among the panelists and the audience will create a generative zone to address the theme of freedom from a liberationist perspective.
This paper calls for renewed consideration within liberation theologies of one of the material conditions that render freedom possible in contemporary life: freedom from external compulsion to perform waged labor. Compulsory waged labor is a condition of fundamental unfreedom that significantly curtails many other forms of freedom. Yet while liberation theologies have long called for the abolition of poverty in both Global South and Global North contexts, in recent decades the field has offered very little discussion of compulsory waged labor as one of the systems that creates poverty in the first place nor to what it would take for all people to be able to live free from it. Thus, in conversation with feminist anti-capitalist theory, the paper proposes that compulsory waged labor is not only a sociological epiphenomenon to be acknowledged on the way to doing liberation theology, but a core topic of liberationist theological critique and re-construction.
In what ways can spirituality be a life-giving resource in our death-dealing age? What methodological resources can help to inform our study of spirituality? In this paper, I argue that pragmatic and liberationist methodologies have much to offer. I approach philosophical pragmatism and liberation theology as non-reductive empirical discourses that foreground the role of human intelligence in promoting human flourishing. Such an approach helps to expand our understanding of spirituality as a pervasive quality of human experience, and it sheds significant light on spirituality as an active function of human intelligence. Within a pragmatic model of inquiry, knowing is an “adaptive activity” that involves a dynamic process of doubt, belief, inquiry, and judgment. As I show, in both pragmatism and liberation theology, human intelligence, broadly understood, is a—if not the—primary means by which human beings transact with the world and through which spirituality is, in fact, “activated.”
Shelly Rambo asserts that trauma is “a radical break [that] has occurred between the old self and the new one.” However, what happens when the identity of the old self was already radically broken? Willie James Jennings in Acts, Justo González in The Mestizo Augustine, and Virgilio Elizondo in Galilean Journey investigate the multifaceted identities of three different holy figures - Timothy, Augustine, and Christ - in the midst of traumatic events. In utilizing Rambo’s notion of the Middle, I will examine how these three authors seek to disrupt the binaries of trauma, offering a glimpse of mestizo freedom, healing, and liberation.
The living-body bears the indelible marks of life’s deepest wounds and profound joys. With its scars and beauty, each body speaks of the earthly pilgrimage that one has undergone so far. In spiritual autobiography, the body emerges not just as a vessel of experience—but as the very text inscribed with the ineffable Mystery—experiences of grief, love, loss, and transcendence. This presentation examines how suffering speaks through the body in spiritual autobiographies, drawing from feminist mysticism, carnal hermeneutics, trauma studies, and narrative therapy. It explores the body as both interpreter and articulator of suffering, engaging thinkers such as Lanzetta, Anzaldúa, Kearney, and White. By reframing trauma as an embodied and communal phenomenon, the presentation situates spiritual autobiography as an act of resistance and theological articulation. In dialogue with liberation theologies, we argue that suffering is transfigured through storytelling, revealing the body as a crucible of transformation and a sacred text where the ineffable meets the human experience.