HTI Open Plaza

This OPTalks episode features a conversation between Dr. Yohana Junker and Rev. Dr. Aizaiah Yong exploring the intersections of art, spirituality, and decolonial studies within theological education. Reflecting on their co-teaching experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Drs. Yong and Junker highlight the necessity of cultivating inclusive and compassionate classroom environments. The dialogue highlights how spiritual practices and artistic expression are vital tools for healing and social justice, which enable students to bring their full selves into the learning process while deepening connections.

They discuss the transformative power of relationships within the context of higher education while critiquing Eurocentric individualist frameworks from their chapter, "Contemplative Practices and Acts of Resistance in Higher Education: Narratives Towards Wholeness." They also argue for a holistic approach that honors the interconnectedness of students' emotional, psychological, and vocational lives.

Their collaboration as co-educators emphasizes how mutual support, compassionate listening, and convivencia foster resilience and hope in academic spaces often marked by structural violence and disconnection. Additionally, the ongoing challenges of navigating personal and collective grief while striving for justice and liberation can be met in these spaces. Dr. Junker says she, "…didn't want to just write out of like, oh, here's a spiritual practice, this is going to…help you in these ways, without sitting with the actual grief of working in institutions of higher education, working within power structures that are very asymmetrical, that have perpetrated, you know, historically so much violence against people like you and me,” to which Rev. Dr. Yong responds, “We're also confronting intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, against people, groups done in the name of religion and white supremacy.”

This podcast episode features a dialogue between Stephen Di Trolio Coakley, a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Dr. Edwin Hernández, President of Antillean Adventist University. The conversation chronicles Dr. Hernández' journey from his roots as a preacher’s child in Puerto Rico to his role in sociology, theology, and fundraising, particularly during his tenure at Louisville Institute. Dr. Hernández reflects on his early experiences in ministry, his academic pursuits, and the transformative mentorship of figures like Dr. Caleb Rosado, Dr. Julian Zamora, and Olga Villaparra. Notably, Hernández recounts his involvement in establishing the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI) by taking the lead on writing a significant proposal that he co-authored, which addressed funding gaps in Latinx theological education.

The discussion underscores Dr. Hernández' commitment to fostering inclusive theological spaces as opportunities for scholars and communities while adapting to the changing educational environment. He asserts, “It’s important for us to reinvent who we are, to connect to, to challenge institutions, to be more faithful and responsive to the needs of our community.”

In this episode of OP Talks, Rev. Dr. Joanne Rodríguez, HTI Executive Director, talks with Boston University doctoral candidate Daniel Montañez about directing the national Mygration Christian Conference that he founded in 2019. Montañez credits his mentorship and relationship with Dr. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas as integral to this work. 

Regarding migration, Montañez relates that “...as people who are along the way, and as we find ourselves from the moment that we're born to the moment that we die, we experience this type of temporal movement, movement through time. What does it mean to treat those who we come into contact with who may actually be going through some type of refugee experience or asylum-seeking experience or just in a new country? What does it mean for us to care for them, and to love them as sojourners along the way?”

The Mygration Christian Conference is a space where pastors, scholars, practitioners, and community leaders who serve their communities can gather to have conversations about their experiences, their beliefs, and how their faith can serve all immigrant communities better.

The conference takes place October 4-5, 2024, at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA. This year’s keynote speakers will be historian and theologian Dr. Justo L. González and Daniel Yang, National Director of Churches of Welcome at World Relief.

Dr. Felipe Hinojosa talks with fellow historian, colleague, and good friend Dr. Johanna Fernández, Associate Professor at Baruch College, about Latino history and the exhibit on youth movements that was put on hold by the Smithsonian National Museum in the fall of 2022. Dr. Fernández teaches 20th-century U.S. history and the history of social movements. Dr. Hinojosa is the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America and Professor of History at Baylor University. The scholars’ curated show was widely billed as the “largest federally funded Smithsonian exhibit on Latino Civil Rights History.”

“But after pushback from conservative Latinos in the private sector and the halls of Congress,” writes Olivia B. Waxman in TIME, “that exhibit is on hold.” And Dr. Fernández and Dr. Hinojosa found themselves embroiled in the political turmoil. 

In this episode of OP Talks, the two scholars take us behind the scenes–from the selection of Latino youth movements as an exhibit theme, to the work entailed in creating the exhibits and what ultimately brought the project to a halt.

“This question that we were going to answer through the Smithsonian exhibition on Latino youth movements…‘Who am I?’ That's the quintessential existential question that everyone asks themselves,” says Dr. Fernandez, author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panther Party. ”Who am I, and what's my relationship to the nation? And what's my relationship to my community?” she continues. “That was one of the key questions we were going to ask and answer through that exhibition.”

In this episode of OP Talks, Amanda Bolaños talks with fellow graduate student Amirah Orozco about mujerista theology, pneumatological ecclesiology and lo cotidiano (the everyday). Bolaños asks Orozco to imagine a conversation with late activist and theologian Ada María Isasi-Diaz for whom lo cotidiano was central to her work. Bolaños and Orozco are close friends and theology doctoral students at Duke Divinity School and the University of Notre Dame, respectively. Orozco credits the work of Isasi-Diaz as part of the foundation that led her to ”understand what mujerista theology was more directly and become sort of aware of the different style and the different flavor that mujerista theology gives us.”

If she could talk with the late Isasi-Diaz, Bolaños asks Orozco, what would she ask? “I think that my big conversation with her would be [about] Pope Francis,” said Orozco. “I think it is a real tragedy that we don't have her around to be thinking with us in this moment where the [Roman Catholic] church is opening up in a new way.”

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Neomi De Anda talks to 2023 HTI Book Prize winner Dr. Marlene M. Ferreras about her book Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

Through practical theological and anthro/gynopological methods, Insurrectionist Wisdoms offers an analysis of the situation of working-class Maya mexicanas living in Yucatán, México who work on the assembly line of a multinational corporation. Relying on in-depth, firsthand interviews, Dr. Ferreras brings to light the exploitation of women of color by large, multimillion-dollar corporations and delves into the ways these women can, and do, fight back. Drawing on a decolonial approach to pastoral theology and feminism, Dr. Ferreras proposes Lxs Hijxs de Maíz as an image for pastoral care and counseling.

In this episode of OP Talks, Jacob Leal talks with his mentor Dr. Filipe Maia, Assistant Professor of Theology at the Boston University School of Theology, about his book, Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022), and pivots to the power of the imagination, ancestors and the interruption of linearity. Dr. Maia argues that a language of active hope, or “future-talk,” is critical as a mode of critique, particularly with the financial market’s need to control future outcomes and its sacrificial nature, especially for the oppressed. The scholars’ conversation recognizes the importance of liberation theologist Ruben Alves and the Brazilian/Portuguese concept of saudade, which captures the essence of absence and deep longing for return. Leal, a third-year PhD student at Boston University, illustrates these points by describing his research about the dreams of the ancestors and about the Mesoamerican ballgame Ullamaliztli, which is having a resurgence in present-day Mexico.

As a testament to his willfulness and longing to summon a different future, Dr. Maia states: “My motion in the direction of hope is fragile, mournful, and tentative, but is also quite stubborn. The hope I embrace persists. It keeps coming back, haunting me forward...I remain within the language of hope, not to simply profess that I have hope.”

In this episode of OPTalks, PhD candidate Rebecca Mendoza interviews PhD candidate Anthony Trujillo about his mixed heritages as a member of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and Mexican Catholic traditions on his father’s side, and the white settler Baptist ministers on his mother’s. This conversation was held at the 2023 American Academy of Religion in San Antonio where they talked about identity markers that appear as contradictions or convergences between Indigeneity and Christianity. Mendoza also comes from mixed ancestry, of a Mexican American Catholic father and white settler mother. Trujillo shares how his grandmother insisted that his identities are “so closely tied that you can't be one without the other and in fact that it would almost be a violence to my grandma and her siblings to extricate those things from each other.” The experience of doctoral work has allowed him to delve into “how we think of ourselves.” 

Mendoza and Trujillo discuss the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the interdisciplinary nature of Indigenous studies, the Native American paradox of simultaneously holding the importance of place with the ability to move and change, and the religious relational work of the “Terralogian” to understand  “spiritual beings and the spiritual body politic” to land or place.

Dr. Alejandro Nava and Dr. Raúl Zegarra converse about their respective books, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and A Revolutionary Faith: Liberation Theology Between Public Religion and Public Reason (Stanford University Press, 2023). Both writers were students of David Tracy and they share the concern of public theology’s impact on broader society. Dr. Zegarra embraces what he considers the sophisticated philosophy of John Rawls, in particular, “the way he thinks about justice…for the poor.” Conversations at the interface of diverse traditions and the public is of utmost importance to his interests. In his practice, Dr. Nava’s work at the “hyphen that connects the mystical and prophetic” comes to life through hip-hop as “a voice of disenfranchised communities” that “...emerged out of the cracks and corners of the modern world.”