Demographically and spiritually religious Diasporas have gained purchase from the practice and cosmological impulses of the physical, ideological, and imagined Global South. In and outside dogmatic Christian-dom, Asia, Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and in the folds and crevices of the West, the increased agency and labor (physical, spiritual, and epistemic) of the Global South provide African Diaspora religious adherents tools to critically challenge Western stigmatizations of Divinity/divinities, reinterpreting, resurrecting, and refashioning practices of faith. Those historically marginalized, have catalyzed devotion through antiracist, decolonial, and anti-colonial perspectives, refusing the monstrous scripts from the West that demonizes, dehumanizes, and alienates their bodies, practices, and faith. Brazil’s Candomblé and Umbanda communities and Ethiopian immigrants of Lutheran heritage in North America are among those who actively reimagine theological, sociological, and pedagogical discourse that emphasize the polysemic nature of their practice. The papers in this panel amplify the voices of feal populations of the Global South who are intervening on the dogma, ethos, and practice of Western religious hegemony that works to dictate relations within and between faith communities.
Contemporary Afro-Brazilian theologians are challenging Western stigmatizations of their divinities by reinterpreting historically marginalized devotions through antiracist and decolonial perspectives. In Candomblé and Umbanda, the reimagining of Exu and Pombagira decolonizes theological, sociological, and pedagogical discourses, emphasizing their polysemic nature. These devotions serve as liberating narratives that empower marginalized communities by sacralizing their survival, independence, and resistance. This presentation explores three examples of Afro-theologians reworking colonial legacies. First, Hendrix Silveira (2012, 2024) reinterprets Exu as Hermes and develops exunêutica to center Black epistemologies. Second, Luis Rufino’s Pedagogia das Encruzilhadas presents Exu as a disruptor of intellectual arrogance, essential for education resisting cognitive and social injustices. Lastly, Alexandre Cumino’s Pombagira A Deusa: Mulher Igual Você (2023) reinterprets Pombagira through Black feminist thought, portraying her as a symbol of women’s self-empowerment and resistance, challenging patriarchal, racist, and sexist structures while promoting decolonial and social justice struggles.
This paper deals with doing theology in context—diasporic theology, which, in its first section engages in a constructive conversation with Stephen Bevans’s Synthetic and Countercultural models of contextual theology. The second section, under the theme of diasporic theology, is committed to establishing a more flexible working definition of the term diaspora through analyzing its origin and diverse usages in interdisciplinary scholarships in its first subcategory. Then the fundamentals of the diasporic theology, an example of critical integration and hybridization of traditions, cultures, and experiences within which the Lutheran grammar and charismatic experience acquire a new synthesis, are discussed in the second subsection. I would argue that diasporic theology is the antidote for the crisis of self-alienation arising from fear of assimilation with others, which enables us to leave our comfort zone in obedience to the Holy Spirit and leads us to transition of thoughts from fear of contamination by others’ culture toward embracing people in love and treating their culture with respect for the sake of the gospel.