Emancipatory Theologies

Enquadramento

Policredos – Observatory on Religion in Public Space  is organising an Advance Training Course on Emancipatory Theologies. The course aims to discuss new languages and new hermeneutics useful to build a critical thinking about different (and sometimes even incompatible or at least contradictory) discourses and practices that use religion as an important pillar to perpetuate forms of submission, eurocentrism, and discrimination. However, religions also inspire forms of emancipation and creative ways of giving voice to experiences considered to be “marginal” and “non-orthodox”. Talking about “emancipatory theologies”, means putting at the centre of discourses on religion groups, people, visions and experiences rooted in the Global South, and in languages of this Global South existing also in the North. Topics like gender and feminist theologies, postcolonial theologies, theologies of liberation are not only still relevant: they gain even more relevance nowadays, in a world of mutual exclusions based frequently in the use of religion as a way to legitimate exclusion.

Building emancipatory theologies demands for a hermeneutical dialectical movement of de-construction and re-construction. De-construction of systems of religious power or of forms of power that create abyssal divides; and re-construction of core elements of religions that arise from silenced voices. This hermeneutic exercise received a very significant impulse with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a Catholic theologian Professor at Harvard University, who has developed a hermeneutical thinking about the “kyriarchical” structure that placed God at the top of a pyramid of oppression and submission. Her work is recognized and her hermeneutical proposal is used by Christian, Muslim and Jewish feminist theologians.

This Advance Training Coursereceive Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her first visit to Portugal. The course will also count with contributions from CES’s researchers, in order to turn visible and alive a discussion that is a “must” in most part of the world but remains silenced and fragile in Portuguese academy.

Registration mandatory

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