Liberation theologies have always been deeply entangled with questions of time and the future: expectation and endurance, kairos and crisis, memory and imagination. Yet, the future in liberation theologies is never presented as a stable goal. It is rather a site for contestation, denunciation of injustice, and annunciation of justice. In the tradition, future-talk is not prediction, but a form of engagement with the “signs of the times.” Future-talk analyzes the present moment and demands the advent of a new epoch.
Today, as fascist temporalities harden, as techno-futurist markets market artificial inevitabilities, and as institutions grapple with post-DEI retrenchment, the temporal assumptions underlying liberationist discourse demand renewed interrogation. This session invites scholars, organizers, activists, and practitioners to explore how contested visions of time shape the possibilities and limits of liberation in the present moment.
This panel will also consider critiques of capitalist futurity, including analyses of realized eschatology as realized capitalism; examinations of how progress narratives entrench racial, economic, and ecological violence; and reflections on how AI-driven techno-futurism seeks to replace political imagination with algorithmic inevitability.
This paper uses Occupy Candler— the occupation of Candler School of Theology from April 25-28, 2024 as part of the nationwide movement for divestment from the Israeli regime on college campuses—as a case study to examine how various conceptualizations of time are experienced by, and help orient, collectives as they imagine and fight for alternative futures. Written by a co-organizer and spokesperson for Occupy Candler, this paper engages personal narrative and media transcripts alongside various conceptualizations of time in order to examine the ways time moves differently during moments of intense disruption as part of struggles for liberation.
This essay argues that contemporary AI society should be understood not simply as a new phase of automation, but as the generalization of a financialized regime of futurity. Reading Maia’s (2022) Trading Futures alongside Benjamin Bratton’s account of planetary computation (2015), I develop the concept of algorithmic eschatology. Maia shows how financialized capitalism captures the future by commodifying uncertainty and monopolizing the means of prediction. Bratton identifies the infrastructural conditions under which predictive operations become socially ambient rather than sectorally financial. Taken together, they illuminate a regime in which socially consequential futures are rendered as prediction problems, operationalized in allocative institutions, and recursively fed back into present conduct. The result is a differential distribution of futurity: some actors hedge and monetize uncertainty, while others encounter the future through scores, ratings, and preemptive constraints. AI society, I argue, colonizes financialized futurity into algorithmic infrastructure.
We live today amidst a crisis of eschatology. That is to say, we lack the capacity to speak of, envision, and thus call into being, a novel future that breaks with our present conditions. How we conceive of the trajectory of history and the end of time in both theological scholarship and our social imaginary more broadly, is co-constitutive with the colonial project and its afterlife: the endless march of capitalist extraction, transforming life into commodity for profit. This paper posits that Christian eschatological discourse is entangled with the structures of capitalist and neoliberal politics. In order to address this crisis, theological scholarship must break with the dominant frames of eschatology, specifically atemporal, individual and realized eschatology logics. In response this paper offers an alternative conception of time and history through examining the unrealized promise of the apocalyptic, anti-capitalist eschatology of Ignacio Ellacuría.
Do the theological roots of liberation psychology matter? Psychological literature that draws on Ignacio Martín-Baró’s contributions often gives vague or perfunctory treatment to his theological commitments, or even dismisses them outright. This paper aims to illuminate the significance of Martín-Baró’s theology by considering his innovative psychological work in the context of the thought and praxis of his community: the UCA Jesuits, including philosopher-theologian Ignacio Ellacuría. This interdisciplinary paper analyzes Martín-Baró’s interventions in light of Ellacuría's theology. I argue that liberative work in psychology today will benefit from attention to the theological foundations of Martín-Baró’s work, particularly his understanding of historical reality as transcendent, that is, open, dynamic, and disclosive of God’s presence. Recognizing this foundation of Martín-Baró’s psychology can help us to imagine and to open further spaces of dialogue between psychology and theology toward a shared goal of human liberation.