In her essay, S. Lily Mendoza grapples with the question: What happens when the “one true story” encounters other faith stories? Subtitled "Christian Formation Meets Indigenous Resurrection," her work in this volume tracks her autobiographical journeying out of the absolutisms of her born-again Christian formation into the radicalizing challenge of her schooling into deep ancestry and indigenous tutelage.
As a white settler colonial educator/poet, partnered with a diasporan Filipina activist/scholar, and schooled by Black activist challenges over more than three decades of living and working in inner city Detroit, my work seeks to learn from the margins. In this piece, indigenous Filipino wisdom in re-baptizing a local Manobo community in older traditions of dwelling on Mount Apo, provoke a re-imagination of Jesus’ own “immersion” in his local ecozone, claimed by a storm, guided by a dove, tested by rocks, as the prerequisite to resisting settler colonialism in Roman occupied Palestine.
Jamina's chapter in this book outliness the deployment of major Marian narratives at different stages in the Philippines' political development, with a special focus on how they impact, but are also claimed by, Filipinas. She shows how Marian motherhood promotes but can also exclude Filipinas' empowerment in both public and private, with the latest iteration of these dynamics at play in the OFW phenomenon as well as the latest national elections.