HTI Open Plaza

No atual turbilhão de incerteza política, os protestantes assumiram um papel central no desdobramento da fusão da política e da religião no Brasil. O livro recente do Dr. Wanderley Pereira Da Rosa, Por uma fé encarnada: uma introdução à história do protestantismo no Brasil (Editora Recriar, 2022), reinterpreta a missão protestante – suas raízes históricas, teológicas e ideológicas – e oferece uma análise através do prisma da teologia social e política sem desconsiderar a pluralidade do mundo protestante.

Neste episódio do OP Talks, o Dr. Pereira Da Rosa e o Dr. João Chaves ajudam a situar o cenário político atual. Eles discutem a natureza de ser protestante no Brasil hoje e o desenvolvimento contínuo da fé ao longo da história, desde o movimento inicial do protestantismo no país até sua iteração nacionalista mais recente.

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In the present turmoil of political uncertainty, Protestants have taken a central role in the unfolding nature of Brazil’s merging of politics and religion. Dr. Wanderley Pereira Da Rosa’s recent book, Por uma fé encarnada: uma introdução à história do protestantismo no Brasil [Towards an Incarnated Faith: An Introduction to a History of Protestantism in Brazil] (Editora Recriar, 2022), reinterprets the Protestant mission—its historical, theological, and ideological roots—and offers an analysis through the prism of social and political theology without disregarding the plurality of the Protestant world.

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Pereira Da Rosa and Dr. João Chaves help situate the current political landscape. They discuss the nature of being a Protestant in Brazil today and the faith’s ongoing development through history, from the initial movement of Protestantism in the country to its most recent nationalist iteration.

READ MORE

Chaves, João B. and Raimundo Barreto. “The shared religious roots of twin insurrections in the U.S. and Brazil.” The Washington Post, 18 January 2023.

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Jorge Juan Rodríguez V and Rev. Dr. Lis Valle-Ruiz discuss digital platforms for popular theological education. Drawing from his academic training in history and biblical studies, Dr. Rodríguez V offers tips, such as identifying "the one thing you want people to walk away with," and describes how different digital platforms have shaped his writing. He finds life in translating what he has learned to others: "How can I take this knowledge and make it accessible?" Rev. Dr. Valle-Ruiz shares her experience of "being a social media presence" as a scholar who studies worship and preaching. She not only understands the challenges ‘digital immigrants’ may encounter when engaging digital platforms but also recognizes how important having a multimedia presence is to ‘digital natives.’ Learn more from these Puerto Rican scholars and their call to public scholarship.

Everything Black includes rage, love, family, futures, magic, revolution, dignity--as suggested in the table of contents for Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Vincent Lloyd, Director of Africana Studies at Villanova University.

In this episode of OP Talks, Matt Vega talks to Dr, Lloyd about the book, which delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Black writing and action, including the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement. He explores the way Black writers like Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde have dealt with themes outlined by the items in the table of contents. Dr. Lloyd argues that Black dignity is the paradigm of all dignity.

READ MORE

“Black Dignity: A Conversation with Vincent W. Lloyd.” Yale University Press, 15 November 2022.

Sirvent, Roberto. “BAR Book Forum: Vincent Lloyd’s Book, “Black Dignity.” Black Agenda Report, 19 October 2022.

Tinner-Williams, Nate. “Interview: Dr. Vincent W. Lloyd, on his new book 'Black Dignity'.” Black Catholic Messenger, 22 November 2022.

Vega, Matthew. “Vincent Lloyd’s Dictionary of Black Dignity.” Sojourners, 22 December 2022.

Financialized capitalism is “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production,” according to Greta R. Krippner.

In this episode of OP Talks, liberation theologians Dr. Jung Mo Sung and Dr. Filipe Maia discuss his recent book Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022). Dr. Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy.

Can the biblical prophets speak into our world today? In The Lord Roars: Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), Old Testament ethicist Dr. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas demonstrates that learning from the prophets can make us better prepared for Christian witness.

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Jean-Pierre M. Ruiz—a Catholic—talks to Dr. Carroll—an evangelical—about the role of prophets in Christianity. A self described “Old Testament guy,” Dr. Carroll Rodas explores prophets as “ethical resources,” hoping that the book serve as a guide to the ethical material of Old Testament prophetic literature. The Lord’s Roar highlights key ethical concerns of the three prophets most associated with social critique—Amos, Isaiah, and Micah—showing their relevance for those who wish to speak with a prophetic voice today.

“The Old Testament prophets are powerful literature,” says Dr. Carroll Rodas. He wrote the book in appreciation of “the punch of what [prophets] are saying, [of which] you need to get at the rhetoric… and talk about their ethical concerns, which are kind of timeless.” This conversation includes introducing the prophetic voice to readers as literature. "A lot of the Old Testament prophets are poetry,” he says. “No one even reads poetry anymore. So they don’t know what to do with it.”

READ MORE

Open Plaza exclusive excerpt from The Lord Roars—“Prophetic Critique: Deconstructing the Unacceptable” (Ch. 2) and “‘Let Justice Roll Down’: Worship and Social Responsibility” (Ch. 3).

Rev. Dr. Doris García-Rivera is former president of the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico (ESPR). The private mainline Protestant seminary in Río Piedras was founded in 1919 by a group of theological schools and biblical institutes of the Protestant denominations that arrived on the island after the Spanish-American War. Nearly a century later, in 2014, Dr. García-Rivera became the first woman president in the history of ESPR.

Today, she is Professor of Old Testament and Mission and Evangelism in the Certificate in Hispanic Ministries at Lexington Theological Seminary, where she also serves as Academic Coordinator for Pathways for Tomorrow Grant. In this episode of OP Talks, HTI Executive Director Rev. Joanne Rodríguez talks to Dr. García-Rivera about the women who inspire her and the experiences that shaped her.

They discuss Dr. García-Rivera’s commitment to service, including her experience of being a missionary in rural areas of Latin American, and how she braved long roads, floods, and landslides to reach those areas. Her experiences as a missionary helped prepare Dr. García-Rivera for the natural disasters to come in her native island of Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, she did not think twice about getting into her Toyota Rav 4 and heading to the seminary, where Dr. García-Rivera had already been serving as president for three years. “Even in the midst of this situation,” she says “we really still have the grace of God and the mercy of God.” Dr. García-Rivera would bring the seminary back to life after the hurricane, collaborating with multiple institutions and volunteers, as well as promoting continuing education and improving the seminary’s information technology infrastructure. “I understood being well meant that I must move forward to be the leader needed at that time.”

Her spirited grandmother Monserrate influenced Dr. García-Rivera in big and small ways. “She was the main model for me because of her resilience,” says Dr. García-Rivera. After becoming a widow at a young age and losing a child at birth, Monserrate did everything in her power to give her remaining four children an education and to expand their possibilities. She washed and ironed shirts for a wealthy family and later worked in the kitchen of a public school until retirement. Dr. García-Rivera remembers her grandmother as always servicing others—with a plan in mind. “She was very small, but you could not dare defy her. She was a strong woman.”

Rev. Dr. Tony Lin talks to Miguel Escobar about his new book The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today (Forward Movement, 2022). "Here is a book that inspires, yes, but also challenges and unsettles all who would take seriously Jesus’s Way of Love,” writes The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, XXVII Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church

and author of Love is the Way (Penguin, 2020). “Weaving together words of wisdom from spiritual giants of early Christianity with profound reflections from his own life, Miguel Escobar pulls back the curtain of wealth and poverty to reveal our longstanding complicity with systems of injustice and calls us to make better, more humane choices, reflective of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, that can change the world."

Escobar wanted the book to be, as he says, “accessibly-written.” The Unjust Steward offers information meant to help us think differently about money and how it has been filtered through Christianity at the congregational level. “You have to have conversations to expand the moral imagination of what’s possible,” says Escobar.

Chicana/o studies scholar Dr. Adriana Nieto talks to Rev. Dr. Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, Director of the Office of Professional Formation at Iliff School of Theology, about the volume Explore: Vocational Discovery in Ministry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), which Rev. Dr. Lizardy-Hajbi co-edited with Matthew Floding. The book is ideal for ministerial leadership students in search of paths to follow.

“It’s really a book offering options for individuals thinking through, ‘what is my vocation in relation to my identities, my experiences and what I feel are my strengths and my gifts and my passions,’” says Rev. Dr. Lizardy-Hajbi, who is also term assistant professor of leadership and formation at Iliff. The volume includes personal stories from 45 contributors of all backgrounds and professions, serving as a discernment tool that she hopes “expands the imaginations of students rather than create limits'' when it comes to ministerial work by faith leaders, such as pastors, varieties of chaplaincy, clinical pastoral educators, academics, and nonprofit leaders.

“[Ministry] is a sacred task no matter what one’s beliefs or meaning-making frameworks are,” says Rev. Dr. Lizardy-Hajbi. “It is something that should be considered with care, that is holy, and that is done, I think, in mystery, often because we don’t know…where someone is going to end up in a call."

In this episode of OP Talks, Stephen Di Trolio interviews Chicano educator, administrator, and institutional strategist Dr. Patrick Reyes. He is the host of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) podcast “The Scholar’s Guide to Writing,” a series of guided practices to assist scholars in the art of writing a dissertation.

Dr. Reyes is also Senior Director of Learning Design at FTE, a leadership incubator founded in 1954 that inspires young people to make a difference in the world through Christian communities. In addition to providing oversight for organizational learning and resource development around vocational exploration, leadership and innovation, he manages FTE’s doctoral initiatives. His “Scholar’s Guide” podcast was born out of questions like, "What is the challenge doctoral students face? What is the internal resistance beyond the committee?" Step-by-step, the podcast aims to help doctoral students through the dissertation-writing process—from writing the acknowledgements and the conclusion to editing the manuscript, and more.

ADDITIONAL LISTENING

Chapter 1: Writing the Acknowledgements First, The Scholar’s Guide to Writing, FTE, 26 January 2022.

In this episode of OP Talks, doctoral candidate César "CJ" Baldelomar talks to his teacher and mentor Dr. Mark Jordan, whose work focuses on Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. The wide-ranging conversation touches on Dr. Jordan's teaching practice, on what led him to theology, and on his devotion to the act of private writing, which he believes helps him understand God.

Whether or not the work ever gets published, Dr. Jordan feels compelled to write “for protest and assertion, for pleasure and politics, but especially for self discernment,” because “I don’t know what I think or what I feel or what I hope until I can write some way into it.” His most sustained writing comprises hundreds of thousands of words in a journal he has kept since he was 16, one that “has taken all kinds of forms that I never expect to see published.”

The criterion of originality--in the humanities, at least-- is “highly overrated," Dr. Jordan tells Baldelomar. "At a most basic level, most of what we say is repetition. Language is all about repetition. Very occasionally, one of us can come up with a phrasing that is absolutely new or invent a word or something like that for good or for ill [but] a lot of theological words have done a lot of damage...The question is how artfully we do the collage."

When it comes to theology education, Baldelomar asks his mentor, what does he see as the power of fragmentation?

"Teaching in fragments is the condition of theology," explains Dr. Jordan. "Because of our ignorance and the limits of our language, we're incapable of giving a complete coherent exhaustive account of divinity, even of what divinity is doing in our individual lives. So one way to keep reminding ourselves of that is to write in fragments, because to write in clean connected systematic text, numbered propositions....encourages the illusion that you have a system. And the one thing you can be sure of in theology is [that] you don't have a system or, if you have a system, it's not theology."