sexta-feira, 30 de julho de 2021

Liberating theological knowledge 1. The Christianity we know, and practice was forged from the 16th century Reformation and the responses of the Catholic Church to it, from the Trentino Counter-Reformation to the self-reform initiated with the Second Vatican Council, abandoned without being completed, and taken up by peripheral Episcopal Conferences and now by the Pope himself, coming from one of the peripheries of the modern world. 2. Well, this world has aged and is dying, its death has different spatiotemporalities, but it is inevitable. What world was this? The world of Eurocentric humanism, of European civilizational values that mixed the greed of capitalism, the violence of colonization, the arrogance of science with the discourse and practice of the Christian Churches. After the Second 'World War', the axis of this new world moved to the USA and is prolonged in the conflict between various pretenders to the center of the world - European Union, Arab World, China, Brics (sic) ... 3. That the world generated resistance movements, diversified, and dispersed, but which can be thought of as one of its attempts at union, in the slogan "Another World is Possible". impactful, but in many ways, we are lagging behind the new world that is already beginning to replace the old world. 4. Another world is possible needs to face, now, a new world that rises, sovereignly disdaining resistance and building its "new impossible world", impossible for those who do not own or control new technologies, new weapons, new forms of domination and subjection - which some call biopolitics and others prefer to call necropolitics. 5. In this impossible new world Christianity needs to be reinvented, for not only have we been unable to break with the unwanted alliance with the old world, but we have also been powerless in resisting the new world that is becoming increasingly hegemonic. In the old world, reform and renewal movements have been constituted and multiplied since the 16th century, but all have, in various ways, been reincorporated and enveloped by clerical institutionalism and its alliance, conscious or unconscious, with the powers of the old world. 6. The most recent theological and libertarian resistance movements, such as contextual theologies and militant theologies in general, were - for practical purposes - nullified by the reactions of the clerical institutionalism and the impossible new world, still bravely resisting the hegemony of neoliberal forms of living the Christian faith - individualists, consumerists, emotionalists, deniers, fundamentalists. Having to face the overwhelming forces of faith reduced to neoliberal worldliness, the renovating and innovative movements still maintain agendas for confronting the old world - important, yes, although insufficient - and little did they realize that the impossible new world is already replacing the old world we fight against. 7. New slogans such as 'post-colonialism' or 'decolonization' are important, but they are still movements gestated in and towards the old world. The new impossible world gradually makes these perceptions of reality and their respective militancy obsolete. Our constituted habits of research and epistemology in exegesis, in theology (and in the sciences of religion, too) need to be rethought and replaced by new habits to be constituted already as forms of resistance against the hegemonic impossible new world, transcending even valuable efforts, but in my view insufficient, of the various 'anti-colonial' epistemologies. 8. Post-epistemological knowledge construction habits need to be constituted. The seed of these new habits has already been planted - but we need to notice the new blooms and allow the new fruiting of the plants that have sprouted and stubbornly continue to tell us to go a step further. The main form of these seeds is the assertion that academically constituted knowledge needs to be subordinated to the ethical-political commitment nurtured by the Messiah's fidelity and fragility and not by the needs and guidelines of political action per se. The challenge, for academics and academics, is the liberation of research from the political university institutionalism in its subordination to the market of sciences and publications subject to copyright. 9. Knowledge in general and theological must be free. Knowledge needs to circulate freely and become common property, no longer privatized and with inaccessible prices for those who most need to participate in the construction of emancipatory knowledge. We need a theology/praxis of liberation from exegetical, historical, theological, scientific research, so that we can think of another possible world in places where 'theological' knowledge can and should be constructed. The knowledge of experience made needs to be heard ... 10. New epistemic places: the house, the street, the Community age, the 'net' in its multimodality... Places of subjection, but also of resistance, places of emancipatory subjectivation that must subordinate the academic place - which needs to give up its epistemological and scientific hegemony and act as a partner and not as a leader of liberating theological knowledge/praxis.

Nenhum comentário:

Postar um comentário

Liberating theological knowledge 1. The Christianity we know, and practice was forged from the 16th century Reformation and the responses of...