This session considers the provocation “Labor is Not Enough.” Whether we are talking about the violence of the ‘adjunctification’ of the academy ; “right to work” legislation and its affront to full time or unionized labor; the promotion of anti-work or ‘good living’ ideologies; or the varieties of unpaid labor in our institutions and society at large - we are confronted with the reality that labor is not enough. In what ways does our work reflect this reality? In what ways does the religious academy participate in the structures that disenfranchise labor? Where is liberation to be found when labor - as it is hegemonically or counter-hegemonically construed - is not enough to sustain communities and life with dignity? Might there be categories and things that fail to be acknowledged as labor?
This paper argues that Jesus must be liberated from his alienated relationship to his labours of social reproduction. This alienation is mystified by his romantic essentialisation into the “bread of life,” even in such seminal texts of liberation as Enrique Dussel’s 1982 essay on the Eucharist. Inspired by Marxist-Feminist attention to the death-life dialectic in gestation, I observe a similar dialectic to Dussel’s materialist analysis of the Eucharist. This paper redirects Dussel’s essay away from the material conditions underwriting the Eucharistic offering of a martyr’s body, and towards the possibility of liberating Jesus from his labour of love, as then a paradigmatic liberation of reproductive workers. Jesus must be free to eat the bread of life that he now produces, that he now is. What lives must we stop reproducing for Christ to live among us in this way? What might we eat instead? What could we then be?
All those who labor in higher education are intimately aware that we are living through the slow death of the University system. This long decline comes at the hands of the capitalist corporatization of education where schools increasingly function as businesses. From this bleak context of academia’s pending collapse, this paper argues that a different kind of university is not only urgently need but also imminently possible by turning to Ignacio Ellacuria’s vision of the university as a locus of social critique and consciousness development, we can form universities’ anew as institutions that work for social liberation. Drawing on this vision of a different kind of university and in particular its roots in liberation theology, this paper will conclude by illustrating how the groundwork of such a university, is beginning to form in the movements of academic labor organizing across the country.
Hong Kong and Singapore share several similarities. Both were trade entrepôts colonialized by the British. Their populations are predominantly Chinese. Christianity is practiced mainly by persons of Chinese descent. They are faced with authoritarian governments. Given their similar colonial socializations, this paper explores why Christians in Hong Kong and Singapore choose contrasting approaches to authoritarian governance. Christians in Hong Kong have taken to public demonstrations and the use of creative resistance to contest fascist and authoritarian political oppression. Christians in Singapore do not engage in civil disobedience as it is deemed disruptive to socio-economic progress. Their strategy for social change is based on securing political leverage. These strategies represent two different postcolonial approaches – one overt and the other subversive. They reflect theologies of the multitudes in contesting empires of old and new. This paper will compare the strategies of solidarity, protest, and resistance to draw conclusions towards liberative theologies for the twenty-first century.
This paper explores the emergence of Haitian Liberation theology in the context of the Second Vatican and the failure of the Haitian state or democracy in Haiti. Haitian Liberation Theology arose as a criticism, using insights from both theology and politics, to challenge the history of political oppression, human rights violation, and the bankrupt of democracy in Haiti. In particular, Haitian Liberation Theology began as a movement that resisted the Duvalier regime and the problem of structural violence and the abuse practices of the Catholic Church. However, my paper will focus on the history and emergence of Haitian Liberation theology as a theo-political movement of resistance and a criticism of the undemocratic nature of the Haitian state.