These papers address futurities that take shape amid colonial spectrality, necropolitics, and racial capitalist dispossession. They engage with efforts to transform futures in ritual work, theological imagination, aesthetic practices, and abolitionist epistemologies.
This paper examines the MAGA movement as a theological and temporal struggle over the meanings of history, progress, and national belonging in the United States. By invoking a nostalgic vision of a mythic American past, MAGA political discourse often frames movements for racial justice, immigration reform, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights as evidence of national decline rather than democratic progress. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization alongside the liberationist theologies of Gustavo Gutiérrez and James H. Cone, the paper interprets these conflicts as struggles over colonial memory and the haunting presence of unresolved histories of slavery, racial violence, and exclusion. Engaging the theme of “Haunting Future/s,” the paper develops a Pan-Africanist Fanonian pneumatology of liberation in which ancestral memory and diasporic spiritual practices challenge Christian nationalist narratives and reimagine the ethical promise of the Kingdom of God.
Indigenous communities globally have produced a precise but unstudied diagnostic figure: a human outsider who extracts vital substance from invaded communities and commodifies it through transcontinental networks. This paper proposes the term extractivore—extraneous, excessive extraction and consumption—as the analytic capable of including the myriad historical iterations of this figure while excluding its common conflations with supernatural or chthonic beings. Following a Derridean pharmakon approach to the social sciences, religious studies uniquely enable this analysis by taking seriously what secular-scientific commitments foreclose: the prophetic traditions that diagnosed extractivorism before colonial contact materialized it, transmitting ancestral warnings as memory-work and future-work alike. Reviewing key cases from Central Africa, the Andes-Amazon region, and Native North America through this lens reveals that extractivorism haunted colonial futures before they arrived—spectral presences named in advance of their necropolitical embodiment—and that the countermeasures these traditions prescribed constitute the most rigorous antiextractive methodology available to contemporary scholars.
Are ICE renditions reminiscent of slave patrols or Nazi Gestapo? The answer to this timely, critical question is a bilateral yes. Comparisons of ICE and DHS tactics which link them to the consolidated police power of Nazi Germany and to slave patrols in the United States bear much fruit by way of historical analogy. Yet one must also recognize the white supremacist political theology shared by both of these historical precedents if one is to appreciate the gravity of ICE renditions in the 21st century. This paper explores the anti-Black necropolitical theology of chattel slavery and demonstrates its genetic link to Nazi fascism through Jim Crow, before demonstrating the continuity of both with contemporary secret police in the US. The paper simultaneously traces the role of white Christian nationalist imaginaries that, in turn, must give way to a Christian abolitionist politics of friendship.
Theologies of conversion are haunted. Christian conversion exists in a complex temporality, haunted by echoes of the past and specters of the future. Hauntings are recognized by their ghosts. This paper will identify three kinds of ghosts that evidence how conversion is haunted. Engaging with Elaine Enns and Ched Myers’ Healing Haunted Histories as well as Homi K. Bhabha’s “Our Neighbours, Ourselves” essay, this paper will examine the ghosts of conquest, ghosts of doubled identity, and ghosts born out of conversion. Identifying these ghosts and reckoning with their ambivalent hauntings enables conversion to regain a sense of complexity, which will open up possibilities for how it can become a more useful resource in theological inquiry as we find our way to “futures for which we hope.”
This paper examines the way Puerto Rico’s neocolonial status reverberates from the myth and political memory of its first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. By examining the theological import of Muñoz Marín’s poetry, political rhetoric, and his party symbol this paper demonstrates how el jíbaro became synonymous with the governor and how he became a messianic figure against which Puerto Rican leaders are evaluated (whether in formal political office or not); even artists like Bad Bunny cannot escape the specter of Muñoz Marín. To imagine a future for Puerto Rico, therefore, begins by contending with the long and institutionalized shadow of its first governor. This paper deconstructs the mythology around Muñoz Marín’s history, ideology, and political project, before briefly proposing a Puerto Rican future rooted in Afro-diasporic spirituality (life in the Spirit).