Eko-Spiritualitas Trinitaris: Sebuah Upaya Membangun Spiritualitas Lingkungan terhadap Krisis Lingkungan (Reklamasi Pantai) di Manado

The environmental crisis has always been an endless issue to discuss. Especially in reality, the ecological crisis is already on an alarming level. One of the ecological crises is the beach reclamation that occurred in Manado. Beach reclamation causes damage to marine ecosystems, for example, the destruction of coral reefs on the coastal area. In addition, it also caused flash floods in Manado. The society in Manado then begins to blame nature without wanting to examine it first. The question that arises is why does exploitation of nature, such as beach reclamation, continue to occur? My guess is that there was a theological crisis which later led to an ecological crisis. The theological crisis is related to the concept that God is understood to be distanced from creation. This is exactly what William Johnston and Leonardo Boff, a philosopher and liberation theologian, conducted through the theory of the Communion of God. This concerns the wrong understanding of the trinity of God and assumes that there is power over the others, so what occurs is oppression, deprivation of rights, and exclusion. For this reason, using the theories of Boff and Johnston, we will both see in this paper how the Minahasa trinitarian faith is connected with the concept of the Minahasan God of the ecological crisis, in this case coastal reclamation. However, if we trace back, the relationship between Minahasan and the nature was relatively close. This is based on the concept of a Trinitarian of God whose duty is to protect humans and nature. For this reason, I hope that the results of this paper will be able to build a trinitarian eco-spirituality in the lives of people in Manado to continue to strive to preserve nature, not to damage it. AbstrakKrisis lingkungan (ekologi) selalu menjadi isu yang tidak pernah habis untuk didiskusikan karena krisis ekologi sudah dalam taraf yang memprihatinkan. Salah satu krisis ekologi yaitu reklamasi pantai yang terjadi di Manado. Reklamasi pantai menyebabkan rusaknya ekosistem laut, misalnya, hancurnya terumbu karang yang ada di pesisir pantai. Selain itu, reklamasi pantai menyebabkan terjadinya banjir bandang di Manado. Masyarakat mulai menyalahkan alam tanpa mau mengkajinya terlebih dahulu. Pertanyaan yang kemudian muncul adalah mengapa exploitasi terhadap alam, misalnya reklamasi pantai, masih terus terjadi? Dugaan penulis bahwa terdapat krisis teologi yang kemudian menyebabkan krisis ekologi. Krisis teologi yang dimaksudkan yaitu konsep bahwa Allah yang dipahami berjarak dari ciptaan. Krisis teologi tersebut senada dengan apa yang dikeluhkan oleh William Johnston dan Leonardo Boff, seorang filsuf dan teolog pembebasan melalui teorinya communion of God. Hal tersebut terkait dengan paham yang keliru tentang ketritunggalan Allah dan menganggap bahwa ada yang berkuasa terhadap yang lain, sehingga yang terjadi adalah penindasan, perampasan hak, penyingkiran, dan lain-lain. Untuk itu, dengan menggunakan teori Boff dan Johnston, penulis akan melihat bagaimana penghayatan iman trinitaris orang Minahasa yang dihubungkan dengan konsep Allah orang Minahasa terhadap krisis ekologi dalam hal ini reklamasi pantai. Karena jika merunut ke belakang, hubungan orang Minahasa dulu dengan alam tergolong akrab. Hal ini didasari pada konsep tentang Allah trinitaris yang bertugas untuk menjaga manusia dan alam. Untuk itu penulis berharap hasil yang ditemukan dapat membangun eko-spiritualitas trinitaris di dalam kehidupan masyarakat di Manado untuk terus berupaya menjaga dan memelihara alam, bukan merusak.

Homelessness and Covid-19 in the City of Tshwane: Doing liberation theology undercover – A conversation with Ivan Petrella

Ivan Petrella argues that the goals of liberation theology can sometimes be better served by doing it undercover. This article reflects on responses to homelessness during Covid-19 in the City of Tshwane, describing and reflecting upon it from the perspective of a researcher-theologian as well as activist-urbanist. It employed two lenses in its reflection: Petrella’s notion of the ‘undercover liberation theologian’, as well as what is known as deliberative public administration theory, as possibly complementary approaches. It traces ways in which people of faith/theologians participated in the City of Tshwane through means other than explicit theological discourse. It implies that such engagement was not less theological but perhaps more strategic, describing that task of the undercover liberation theologian as that of making space, making plans, making known and making change. Ultimately, it calls for a subversion of suspect models of theological education, suggesting that it is in losing ourselves in the messiness of public processes and multiple solidarities with the poor, that the unfree might experience freedom, and liberation theological goals might find concrete expression.Contribution: This article reflects on responses in the City of Tshwane to street homelessness during Covid-19. It unpacks the notion and role of the ‘undercover’ liberation theologian in local political processes, and how losing ourselves in public processes and multiple solidarities with the urban poor, might help gain freedom for the unfree.

Liberation Theology: Problematizing the historical projects of democracy and human rights

Liberation Theology and Liberation Christianity continue to inspire social movements across Latin America. Following Michel Lowy’s analytical and historical distinction between Liberation Christianity (emerging in the 1950s) and Liberation Theology (emerging in the 1970s), this paper seeks to problematize the historical projects of democracy and human rights, particularly in relation to the praxis of Liberation Christianity and the reflection of Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology emerged across Latin America during a period of dictatorship and called for liberation. It had neither democracy nor human rights as its central historical project, but rather liberation. Furthermore, Liberation Christianity, which includes the legacy of Camilo Torres, now seeks to ‘defend democracy’ and ‘uphold human rights’ in its ongoing struggles despite the fact that the democratic project has clearly failed the majority of Latin Americans. Both redemocratization and ‘pink tide’ governments were not driven by liberation. At the beginning of the first Workers’ Party government in Brazil, Frei Betto – a leading liberation theologian – famously quipped ‘we have won an election, not made a revolution’. In dialogue with Ivan Petrella, this article suggests that Liberation Theology needs to ‘go beyond’ broad narratives of democracy and human rights to re-establish a historical project of liberation linked to what the Brazilian philosopher, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, calls institutional imagination.

Toward Witnessing the Other: Syria, Islam and Frans van der Lugt

This article addresses issues and questions at the intersection of religion and theatrical drama from the perspective of Muslim-Christian comparative theology. A case study approaching an actual performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from this disciplinary point of view also takes into account the Syrian context, develops a framework for “mutual witnessing”, and the practice of drama therapy. Accordingly, the case-method proceeds to address two interrelated challenges. The first is how to relate to the adaptive praxis and theological sensibilities of performers who inhabit a political and religious situation that is radically different from one’s own. The second regards in a more specific way of reframing a case of Christian martyrdom in terms of witnessing that remains open and hospitable to religious others, and particularly in this case to Syrian Muslims. As an exercise of comparative theology, this case-method approach focuses on notions of “witnessing truth” that appear and are cultivated in the work of liberation theologian Jon Sobrino and in Ibn ‘Arabī’s Fusūs al-Hikam, specifically the chapter on Shuayb. In conclusion, this exercise turns to the performance itself as a potential foundation for shared theological reflection between Muslims and Christians. As such, this article attempts to render how theatrical action creates a “religious” experience according to the structure and threefold sense that Peter Brook observes.

Is Karl Barth a Liberation Theologian? New Perspectives on Barth in Asia

Because of his methodology grounded in “Christology from above,” Barth is often seen as a theologian of revelation, not as a liberation theologian. This article contends that an authentic liberation theology is grounded in both “Christology from above and below.” The article argues that, although Barth’s writings chronologically preceded the birth of liberation theology as a major expression of Majority World theology, he can be hermeneutically reconsidered as a “political liberation theologian” in our contemporary contexts. The article justifies new perspectives on seeing Barth as a political liberation theologian by looking at his Christological models of pastoral advocacy for grassroots communities in Safenwil village, his theo-political hermeneutics of the Barmen Declaration against Nazism, and his liberative hermeneutics of church identity and ethics. The article then brings Barth into dialogue with Aloysius Pieris, who extensively writes Asian liberation and political theology. Using dialectical dialogue as a methodology, the article compares and contrasts Barth with Pieris by synthesizing how each theologian complements what the other fails to say, rather than how one competes the other.

Hydropolitics

This book is a ground-breaking investigation of the world's largest power plant and the ways the energy we use shapes politics and economics. Itaipu Binational Hydroelectric Dam straddles the Paraná River border that divides the two countries that equally co-own the dam, Brazil and Paraguay. It generates the carbon-free electricity that powers industry in both the giant of South America and one of the smallest economies of the region. The book reveals how Paraguayans harness the dam to engineer wealth, power, and sovereignty, demonstrating how energy capture influences social structures. During the dam's construction under the right-wing military government of Alfredo Stroessner and later during the leftist presidency of liberation theologian Fernando Lugo, the dam became central to debates about development, governance, and prosperity. Dams not only change landscapes; the book asserts that the properties of water, transmuted by dams, change states. It argues that the dam converts water into electricity and money to produce hydropolitics through its physical infrastructure, the financial liquidity of energy monies, and the international legal agreements managing transboundary water resources between Brazil and Paraguay, and their neighbors Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Looking at the fraught political discussions about the future of the world's single largest producer of renewable energy, the book explores how this massive public works project touches the lives of all who are linked to it.

Do Black Lives Matter in Post-Brexit Britain?

This article speaks to existential challenges facing Black people, predominantly of Caribbean descent, to live in what continues to be a White dominated and White entitled society. Working against the backdrop of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that originated in the United States, this article analyses the socio-political and cultural frameworks that affirm Whiteness whilst concomitantly, denigrating Blackness. The author, a well-known Black liberation theologian, who is a child of the Windrush Generation, argues that Western Mission Christianity has always exemplified a deep-seated form of anti-Blackness that has helped to shape the agency of Black bodies, essentially marking them as ‘less than’. This theological base has created the frameworks that have dictated the sematic belief that Black bodies do not really matter and if they do, then they are invariably second-class ones when compared to White bodies. In the final part of the article, the author outlines the ways in which Black theology in Britain, drawing on postcolonial theological and biblical optics, has sought to critique the ethnocentrism of White Christianity in Britain in order to assert that ‘Black Lives Do Matter’.

PORTRAIT OF A POLITICAL LIBERATION THEOLOGIAN: LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE MAKING OF ABEL MUZOREWA’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN RISE UP AND WALK

Autobiographical subjects are products of their experiential histories, memories, agency and the discourses of their time lived and time of textual production. This article explores the religious and political discursive economy in which Abel Muzorewa (former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia) narrates the story of his life and how this discursive context constructs his autobiographical subjectivity. The article examines how Muzorewa’s religious beliefs – com­bined with his experiential history of being a colonial subject – are deployed as a strategy of constructing his subjectivity. I argue that the discursive contexts of mass nationalism and his Christian religious beliefs grounded in Latin American liberation theology construct both Mu­zorewa as the subject of Rise up and walk and the narrative discourse. The article posits that the narrative tropes derived from Christian texts that Muzorewa deploys mediate his identity, and that his selfhood emerges with the unfolding of the narrative. What he claims to be politi­cal pragmatism on his part is also inspired by the practical theology which he subscribes to. I argue that his subjectivity is complexly realised through the contradictory relationship between missionary theology and liberation theology.

Spirit of Liberation and Justice in Farid Esack’s Hermeneutics of Qur’an

Farid Esack is an Islamic thinker from South Africa who proposes Liberation hermeneutics in comprehending the Qur’an from the perspective of Liberation Theology to realize justice. This article examines Esack’s hermeneutical method in interpreting Qur’an and analyses how he applies the spirit of liberation and justice as principles of Liberation Theology in his interpretation. This study shows that Esack’s hermeneutics differs from others because, as a liberation theologian, he puts liberative-praxis as the main objective of his liberation theology. His method does not only revolve around textual understanding but also push practical implication. He moves forward from praxis (experience) to texts and then goes back to experience. To him, interpretation must be able to encourage changes within society. Therefore, as the second feature of this method, in Esack’s hermeneutics, interpretation is not just scholarly speculative exercise which has no implication. It has a specific aim, namely is to establish a better life for society in which justice is a fundamental prerequisite. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20414/ujis.v20i1.822

The university, the city and the clown: A theological essay on solidarity, mutuality and prophecy

This essay is informed by five different but interrelated conversations all focusing on the relationship between the city and the university. Suggesting the clown as metaphor, I explore the particular role of the activist scholar, and in particular the liberation theologian that is based at the public university, in his or her engagement with the city. Considering the shackles of the city of capital and its twin, the neoliberal university, on the one hand, and the city of vulnerability on the other, I then propose three clown-like postures of solidarity, mutuality and prophecy to resist the shackles of culture and to imagine and embody daring alternatives.