Theology

In The Politics of Jesus, Miguel De La Torre dismisses the promise of hope, positing a "theology of hopelessness" that declares hopes to be "a class privilege experienced by those protected from the realities of [Good] Friday or the opium that is used to numb that same reality until Sunday rolls around." This seems reasonable in light of everything said above, especially when one considers that De La Torre wrote those words more than two years ago, long before Donald Trump and the Alt-Right had barely entered the political consciousness of the United States and the world. However, in this paper, I posit that other Latinx scholars and theologians – specifically (but certainly not exclusively), Justo Gonzalez and Nancy Pineda-Madrid – provide the groundworks for a Latinx theology that also accounts for the suffering and death present in the world, while leaving open the possibility of eschatological hope.
In the end, I bring this together in what I call a theology of eschatologically-hopeful pessimism: a theology that holds deep pessimism about the future of world political and social structures as we know them at the same time as retaining hope about the ultimate aim of God in the world – that of a reconciled humanity, made whole. In doing this, I draw on the powerful work of the Latinx scholars listed above, centering their words about suffering and hope as an acknowledgement of the robust and vibrant Latinx culture in the United States and its ability to speak with more moral force than the deeply compromised white Protestant culture out of which I myself arrive. I also draw on process theology to provide some powerful concepts about God and Creation in constructing this tentative theology of hopeful pessimism.

The argument to be presented in this paper is that a sacramental materiality is a critical component to constructing a bioregional ethic that can hold the tension of divergent economic and ecological goals when set within a particular watershed. Included in the discussion of watershed oikos will be a settler colonial reflection on existing conflicts between farming and fishing prevalent especially within the Pacific Northwest region.

Read at International Conference on Contrasting Values and Multicultural Society, Prague, Czech Republic, September 19-21, 2001. Sponsored by Centre for Research into Sociocultural Pluralism, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences; General Board of Higher Education and Ministry; St. Martin’s College, Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, Lancaster University, Great Britain