Miniseries E4 - The Jesus of Victims

I still drive by my old church. The building looks the same as when I was in high school. The cross still feels large, it is still painted white, and still noticeable from the road. But it has taken on new meaning, and that is because Christianity is a religion of liberation tainted by a legacy of oppression. When Columbus and other explorers sailed to the New World, they settled it under the symbol of the cross, proclaiming a God whose providence had handed them the lands and peoples they found. The white cross exposes and embodies this contradiction.

For this reason, Christian symbols risk devastation. As we grow conscious of Christianity’s complicity and participation in oppression, we can lose their liberating meaning. Colonial conquest, white-supremacy, and racism, class-based indifference to the suffering and precarity of the poor — these histories can obscure the liberating meaning of these symbols entirely. This is how Christian symbols became devastated to me.

Symbolic devastation is not about an outright rejection of Christian symbols. I didn’t want to make myself an enemy of faith; quite the contrary, I held the conviction that in Jesus there was something of liberation and yet felt as though the dominant Christianity had nothing to offer. I wanted to hang onto faith yet couldn’t find a way out of the lapsed theology. So, I wrestled.

Can the cross signify anything other than colonial violence and its continued legacy? Can the cross be a liberating symbol? What does it look like it to interpret the cross after symbolic devastation? My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. In this final episode for this series on symbolic devastation, it is these question that we explore.

In communities devastated by the violence of colonialism and racism, there arose a different way of viewing that symbol. As Jon Sobrino says, God reveals Godself not only for the suffering world, but in it. If we are to locate the liberating meaning of the Gospel, we must turn to the contexts of the suffering world, for it is there that we find the symbol of the cross being drawn upon to bear witness against injustice, and whether implicitly or explicitly, it is in this witness that we find the very presence and power of God at work. In the cross, these communities discovered a God who affirms their struggle for genuine liberation. One example of this tradition can be found in Cuidad Juárez, a city on the border of Mexico and Texas.[1]

The past twenty-nine years, Cuidad Juárez has been the site of a series of rapes and murders of women. The theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid describes this violent phenomenon as feminicide, to emphasize the fact that it is women who are the targets of this “ritualized violence.”[2] Between 1993 and 2009, officials have confirmed upwards of 600 women victim to feminicide.[3] There are multiple reasons why Cuidad Juárez is a site of this domination. Pineda-Madrid blames it first on the vulnerability created by economic exploitation. Following the North American Free-Trade Agreement, US company-owned factories moved to the border for cheap labor and were willing to exploit women for it.[4] When women began to disappear, many police, religious, and government officials remained indifferent, refusing to investigate larger social and systemic causes. Paired to cultural expectations that women are supposed to be silent about their suffering, this has created a culture ripe with exploitation.[5]

But not everyone in the city has been indifferent to this violence. In response to feminicide, protestors marched into downtown Juárez and placed a cross at the Paso de Norte bridge.[6] Pineda-Madrid describes this cross as a “shrine for grieving families, friends, and others who demand that the violence end.”[7] It represent the deaths of women whose bodies are tortured and mutilated by a culture of exploitation and violence. And in remembering these deaths, the protestors have called for accountability.

But the cross also suggests more than that. Pineda-Madrid sees in the cross a theology of divine solidarity with these women. This is a theology of the cross from the other side of domination. Here, the cross has been reappropriated and integrated into calls against injustice. Here is Pineda-Madrid’s whole quote:

The use of the crosses in these practices suggests parallels between the murder of these girls and women and the murder of Jesus. Both were victims of the unjust practices of the state and of the reputedly compromised complicity of their local religious leaders. Both knew the horrific angst of feeling abandoned by God and allowed to persist. The horrific execution of both were intended as public billboards. Jesus’s crucifixion served as a warning and threat to anyone who would dare challenge the Roman Empire’s authority. The dead bodies of these girls and women were often left in public places, flaunting the fact that poor females could be brutally killed with impunity, ultimately as a warning to any woman of modest resources who sought to stand up for herself. She could be killed and no one would be held accountable. Implicit here is the message that, like Jesus, poor girls’ and women’s bodies are disposable and have no standing before the state or, apparently in the eyes of church authorities.[8]

Pineda-Madrid’s insights here tell us much about the protestors and the implicit theology of the cross. For them, the cross is not a dead symbol. Rather, it is an icon into the paradox of God’s presence with and in a feminicidal world. If God is God of the cross, the one revealed in a Jewish man whose body hung in vulnerability on an imperial torture device unto death, then the Good News is about and for people suffering at the hands of injustice.

More recently, a memorial of pink crosses was built to remember the murders of twenty-five women. Their bodies were found just outside of the city during 2013 and 2014.[9] They too are victim to the violence of feminicide. And yet, like the protestors who installed the cross at Paso de Norte, this memorial invokes a theology of the cross at odds with domination and oppression. It recalls to mind the liberating potential of Christian symbols.

These protestors who struggle against feminicide invoke the cross and in so doing announce a God who abides in the struggle for liberation. That the victims were identified in the cross and that Jesus was identified in them does not justify their suffering. Rather, it exposes the evil we commit against women is an evil that strikes at the heart of God. The pink crosses bear witness to the God enfleshed in the victims of feminicide. This is radical divine solidarity.

But they are not the only ones who have found in the cross a radical theology of God. Such a theology was also elaborated among enslaved African Americans in the early American era. The Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland has pointed out that rather than rejecting the cross completely, enslaved African Americans interpreted the cross through their own experience of the violence of slavery. As Copeland writes: “caught in the labyrinth of the social oppression of slavery, black people fixed their eyes on Jesus and his cross as they grappled with the absurdity of” it.[10] She adds: “We should not be surprised that many spirituals focus on the suffering, the crucifixion, and the death of Jesus. The enslaved folk knew in their bodies and minds, hearts and souls what it meant to endure suffering and abuse, and in Jesus’s suffering and death they recognized their own.”[11]

For Copeland, the cross was not abandoned. Rather, it gave theological meaning to the dehumanizing conditions of Black life within the plantation system. Their suffering was crucifixion-like violence. Take, for example, these lyrics which Copeland records: “They nail my Jesus down / They put him on the crown of thorns / O’ see my Jesus hangin’ high! / He look so pale an’ bleed / so free: / O’ don’t you think it was a shame / He hung three hours in dreadful pain?”[12] Copeland sees in a theology of the cross the unity of the enslaved and Jesus. The crucified God of Jesus of Nazareth is the God who is companion to those who struggle against and are victim to the chattel slavery system.

The white cross of the megachurch I attended represents a Christianity bent on domination, a Christianity that helped generate the violence that still haunts our world - European conquest, indigenous genocide, Black enslavement, and white supremacy. But the protestors against feminicide and the enslaved African Americans who conjured up the lyrical theology of the spirituals have found another interpretation of the cross. Here the cross stands for God’s presence with the least of these; a God who sides with the poor; a God who journeys with them unto the very end, into death and out of it; a God who works for liberation here. This is the God who, I believe, is revealed in the life of Jesus.

Born to Mary, a young woman outside of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, an insignificant town to a family of insignificant standing, God descended into and entered a human world burdened by oppression. Jesus was the child of this descent.

One can see the influence of his mother in Jesus’s teachings. Mary, was a student of the prophets and somebody who maintained the most radical elements of the traditions of Judaism. When God promises that she will conceive of a son, she shouts out and praises the God who looks after the lowly. For her God was God of the least of these, the one who raged at the violence brought by the powerful and whose glory was found in God’s commitment to this world, not merely the next.

As a child, Jesus must flee from Herod who, threatened by the boy-messiah, executes children under the age of two hoping to slay the right one. This makes Jesus and his family refugees in Egypt until Herod’s violence had ended. It is a breathtaking and astounding narration of Divine activity: God on the run as a child escaping the violent will of Herod.[13] For the New Testament writers, God is a fugitive.

When Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, he calls the people to repentance, to turn away from their sin, and to embrace God’s coming kingdom. In his three-year ministry, Jesus’s vision of freedom from sin and freedom for life with God and others   contains this-worldly implications, no doubt shaped by his childhood.

His first students were fishermen, people who work near the sea, which in the Jewish traditions was a symbol of chaos. The sea represented the fragility of creation, its ever-present possible destruction, its utter contingency. The fishermen beheld this reality daily, for the sea was source of their wellbeing. When Jesus comes to them, their tools are broken, they have been maimed by this vulnerability. Here the precarity of the sea is met by Jesus and his invitation for these workers to follow him and find God. And there he was: the God who tamed the chaos of the seas at the beginning of creation was now dwelling among them.

Where he went, Jesus challenged those forces that oppressed human persons. Jesus healed the sick; he proclaimed a divine love for the poor; he exorcised demons who truncated the people they possessed; he condemned Israel’s religious elite for their exploitative use of Torah; he called out temple corruption and greed; and he heightened the affirmation that love of God requires a love for one’s neighbor. If you want to know God, he tells them, act like the Samaritan who helped the man stranded and left for dead in the ditch. This love and care for persons and bodies was a sure sign of the presence of God.

And in this sense, Jesus’s very being pointed to a liberation utterly concerned with this life. In the life of Jesus God’s kingdom arrived in history. And as biblical scholar Morna Hooker writes, Jesus was “the embodiment of God’s kingdom,” his practice of taking care of persons making visible God’s will to face and overcome that which oppresses creation.[14]

It is this message that threatened the powerful of Jesus’s own context.[15] When Jesus preached the kingdom of God, he envisioned God’s identity being revealed precisely in those who were traditionally considered outside of Divine communion. For Israel’s leaders, this meant a God not bound by the temple, a God who was flexible in the expectations of following Torah, a God found among the sick, outcasts, and gentiles. Paradoxically, this was a God faithful to the Old Testament’s own traditions which speak of a God who hears the suffering cries of the poor, who attends to the abandoned, and who will not be bound by human custom. For the Roman magistrate, this meant a God who wasn’t identified with Caesar; a God who stands with the very people Rome colonized and conquered. God, Jesus seemed to think, dwelled in the backcountry of the empire.

Still, many of Israel’s religious elite colluded with Rome to help murder Jesus (Mark 11: 18), an intent that formed when he healed on the Sabbath and when he called out temple corruption. When Jesus was in Rome’s hand, some of the leaders instigated the crowd to support Jesus’s crucifixion. It was a violent spectacle. The soldiers tore away Jesus’s clothes while they mocked and beat him, they then hung him upon a cross, his body mangled unto death (Mark 15:15). We are told that Jesus cries out in agony: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” “My God my God why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15: 24). In Jesus on the cross, God drew near to absolute injustice. To use the language of Vincent Lloyd, God drew near to a “primal scene of domination,” not as a divine justification but as divine solidarity, as Divine Life encountering, condemning, and overcoming Oppression and Death.[16]

Situated within the context of Jesus’s own ministry and teachings of the kingdom of God, the cross represents the radicality of the New Testament’s confession of God’s nearness in the face of injustice. Far from being a symbol of domination, the cross stands in as a symbolic reference point for the whole of Jesus’s life in relationship to the kingdom of God and the consequences this embodied proclamation carries. This is the subversive power of the cross and crucifixion of Jesus. Where Rome intended the cross to signify Jesus’s inferiority and fragility before the empire’s totalizing power, the cross — integrated into Jesus’s life — points to God overcoming domination. Rome lost their possession of the cross as God brought it within the Divine Life. In the cross God reveals the ultimate value of creation, so potent of a value that God would take up creaturely life even if it meant confronting a power that was content to torture and murder God’s own self.

The cross is a symbolic witness to Jesus’s teachings and life: his radicalizing of Torah’s command to love God and neighbor by focusing on loving the poor; his ministry of healing and exorcism; his condemnation of religious and political abuse; and his solidarity with human beings through excruciating and catastrophic death and into revolutionary new life.

What does this suggest about symbolic devastation?

In these four episodes I have wrestled with the potential loss of meaning of Christian symbols in the face of their corruption and abuse. This abuse is sewn deep into history with each cross planted in the name of conquest, domination, and indifference. And yet, if we follow the invitation of liberation theologians like Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino who encourage us to search the suffering world for a different theology of the cross, one comes up deeply surprised.

Many harmed by the cross did not abandon Christianity and its religious symbols totally. Rather they reworked the symbols according to their own context. In the context of feminicide, protestors invoked the cross as a matter of calling for accountability and in so doing bore witness to the nature of divine presence: God with, in, and revealed as these suffering victimized women. Divine revelation through solidarity today. The same is true for the Spirituals, for in them we encounter what Copeland calls the “dark wisdom” discovered by the enslaved - that Jesus was not the slave master, nor that Jesus was indifferent to slavery - but rather that Jesus was “one of them.” The cross symbolized and gave witness to an abolitionist vision of union with God. Their yearning for freedom was God’s yearning for freedom.

What I’m trying to suggest is a crack in the violent history of the cross. There exists a multiplicity of traditions from the margins of the suffering world that bear witness to a God working for freedom. And for many who live and move within those contexts the cross has been a symbol for giving theological meaning to their experience. This was not meaning that condoned nor justified the violence they experienced; rather, it was meaning that energized resistance and filled them with life and hope in the face of near inevitable death. They did not suffer alone; the victimized did not die absent of God by themselves; those suffering at the hands of colonization were not left to squalor but were, like Hagar’s son, held by God even in death, and in that there is the alluring call of freedom and liberation, the discovery of God’s desire for a freedom that is not other-worldly but this-worldly, a freedom here now.

Symbolic devastation is about coming to terms with the legacy of the tainted nature of Christian symbols. But it is also about entering eyes wide-opened into that legacy with the anticipation that God can be present in absence, alive and energizing movements toward liberation in a world built around domination. This is, after all, the ultimate confession of Christian proclamation: in death, life. Jesus crucified, yes, but also risen, wounded yet somehow more fully alive then before. Because, in the end, God is the God of life. And if one can acknowledge and confess the silence caused by symbolic devastation, they can perhaps discover the voice of God.


Jesus’s death was the ultimate form of symbolic devastation. The embodiment of God’s kingdom entering history, he was grossly silenced by Rome. After his crucifixion, Jesus’s silent corpse laid in a tomb still and gone. His disciples were defeated. One of his most devoted disciples, Peter, was so devastated that he denied knowing Jesus altogether, weeping to himself because of the failure of God and the death of his teacher (Luke 22:54). Peter represented what they all felt: emptiness after the messiah they felt and touched became a corpse. They too experienced the trauma and loss of meaning as they watched their friend and teacher hang dead.  

Mary was one of those devastated disciples. The third day after his death, she visited Jesus’s tomb at dawn. Seeing the tomb stone had been rolled away, she was dispirited and distraught. While the other disciples searched the tomb for the body, scripture tells us she wept (John 20:11).

But then she heard the voice: “Mary!” Amid the silence, deep in the graveyard, itself a symbol of death, she heard and felt Jesus’s presence. His voice dawned after silence. Like Mary, I believe that Jesus still speaks, and that Christian symbols can facilitate an encounter with Jesus’s liberating presence and voice. But as our conversation with Segundo and Sobrino, the protestors of feminicide and the enslaved who sang spirituals reveal, hearing this voice requires we remember the Christian traditions at the margins of the suffering world. Perhaps then we shall discover that God has not been taken away, that instead God’s voice resounds – however quietly – in our world today.

Episode Copyright 2022 - World Outspoken. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.worldoutspoken.com for more information.


Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

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About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.


Footnotes

[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. These podcast episodes draw on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis.

[2] Pineda-Madrid, 12.

[3] Ibid., 13.

[4] Ibid., 29.

[5] Ibid., 58.

[6] Ibid., 102.

[7] Ibid., 101.

[8] Ibid., 146.

[9] https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/world/juarez/2022/09/03/memorial-honors-victims-of-femicide-in-jurez/65470252007/

[10] Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 26.

[11] Ibid., 28.

[12] Ibid., 29.

[13] A correction: in the podcast I said God on the run as a child escaping “Pharoah.” I meant to say Herod, though the New Testament writers do suggest parallels between Jesus and Moses, Herod and Pharoah. 

[14] Morna Hooker, “’Who Can this Be?’ The Christology of Mark’s Gospel,” in: Contours of Christology in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 79-99, 85.

[15] Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, 208.

[16] Vincent Lloyd, Black Dignity, 13. Vincent Lloyd draws on the language of “primal scene” from Saidiya Hartman. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 1.

Miniseries E3 - Symbolic Devastation and the Method of Liberating Theologies

I.

What resources are there within Christianity to reattune us to the liberating meaning of Christian symbols? How might we be honest about the brutal legacy of Christianity’s complicity with oppression? And how do we do this while affirming the liberating center at the heart of the stories of Israel’s God, the same God the New Testament writers identify in the life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?

These podcast episodes on symbolic devastation are rooted in my own confrontation with the violent legacy of Christianity and how individuals and communities who identify themselves as Christian invoke the symbols of the biblical texts to justify their actions of indifference and violence.[1]

My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. Last episode I began in the early moments of the colonial era. But today, we turn back to the twentieth century and to a specific movement in theology and church history: Latin American liberation theology.

It is 1968. As church members in Chicagoland planned and began organizing the Pentecostal church in the Chicago suburbs, 130 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church from across Latin America met in Medellín, Columbia, to discuss the ramifications that the Gospel had to Latin America's economic situation.[2] It was a powerful meeting. The bishops condemned structural poverty, colonialism, and neocolonialism on theological grounds, decrying these realities as injustices contrary to the will of God.[3] But beyond this important ecclesial injunction, Medellín helped to inaugurate and give birth to Latin American liberation theology. As the Sociologist Christian Smith writes, "What Medellín introduced, liberation theology cultivated, elaborated, and systematized.”[4]

Today, many know of Latin American liberation theology because of its calls for the “preferential option for the poor.”[5] In evangelical and fundamentalist circles, many accuse the movement of being reductively political. For example, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief for Christianity Today, called the theology of white nationalism "a liberation theology for white people." His point was to condemn white nationalism as politically reductive. But in making his point, he condemned liberation theology too. For Moore, liberation theology and white nationalism are two sides of the same coin. Moore’s naive reading prevents many from looking toward the rich insights at the heart of Latin American liberation theology.

For our purposes I want to focus on two theologians from this movement: Juan Luis Segundo, a theologian from Uruguay, and Jon Sobrino, a theologian writing from El Salvador. Both theologians are responding to contexts where much of the theology that is developing is indifferent to oppressed peoples. They are trying to do theology in a context of religious corruption. It is their critical and material approach to theology that will be helpful as we try to interpret Christian symbols in a way that is honest about history yet hopeful about the possibility that we can, in a spirit of humility, apprehend their liberating meaning.

II.

Juan Luis Segundo understood that theology could be either oppressive or liberating in its use of religious symbols. It is for that reason that Segundo felt the urge to develop a theology that was at once critical of itself without rejecting entirely the sources, like the Bible and tradition, from which it tried to speak of God. His book Liberation of Theology, based on a set of lectures from a short time he spent at Harvard University, is his attempt at this critical yet constructive theology.

Segundo holds that a liberating theology is one that takes seriously experience and its capacity to trouble long-cemented habits of interpreting the biblical symbols. The trouble of interpretation begins in experience – our everyday lives marked by history, culture, and society but also class, gender, race, and sexuality. Because experience is unstable and ever-changing, new experiences can arise that render previous interpretations of biblical symbols insufficient. This can be described as the “crises" of interpretation.[6]

As we said in the last episode, one cause of this interpretative crises is the result of unjust historical conditions which arise alongside and are given justification by Christian symbols. Marx and Fanon are onto this when they accuse religion of being bourgeois and colonial. When we experience the cross as a symbolic component of an unjust social order, our frame of meaning is upended. Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Cortez, the Klu Klux Klan, White Christian Nationalism, Megachurch Capitalism and indifference, all of which I talked about last episode, only seem to prove their point.

But this is where Segundo goes beyond both Marx and Fanon. For Segundo, the experience of religious corruption does not spell out the total death of religion, instead it provokes the need for what he calls “ideological suspicion,” so that we might be able to diagnose how religious language, symbols, and stories are being used. It is not religious symbols in themselves that are corrupted, it is the ideological uses of them that are corrupted, that is, how they are used to justify and sanction the societies in which we live.[7]

Now why does this matter to symbolic devastation? Symbolic devastation names the silence of Christian symbols that results from the inability to apprehend the Good News to which they point. From the vantage point of symbolic devastation, the symbols appear to do existential and material harm, and part of the terrifying nature of the devastation is that you can internalize this harm as the only way to look at these symbols. When one way of interpreting a Christian symbol becomes established through history, venerated in the form of an unbreakable tradition, it becomes easy to assume that the symbol can mean nothing other than its dubious ideological use. There is no other way to interpret. Feeling the danger, we abandon the harmful symbol altogether.

You may see now that, in some sense, I have already begun naming the ideological problem at the heart of my own and many others’ devastation of Christian symbols like the cross. Christianity has a long history in which its central leaders and institutions have used the ambiguous language and meaning of Christian religious symbols for the accumulation of power, fame, greed, and control. We need suspicion – of ourselves, of our communities, and of power – if only to be very honest about the nature of religion itself: its a powerfully evocative force that, when its symbols are invoked, can muster cosmic and theological meaning to build worlds that depend on death, destruction, and violence.

But Segundo does not end with suspicion. Instead, suspicion exposes our idolatry, our capacity to fashion religious language to justify our violent fantasies. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” can serve as a theological clearing; it clears the ground for us to return to the symbol and ask if it can speak again, making a distinction between a symbol and its unjust use.

What is the new starting point? For Segundo, a liberating theology depends on our capacity to enter a relationship with these symbols with the trust that they can, after separating them from ideological chaff, speak anew.[8] The way forward is to interpret symbols from the vantage point of critical suspicion and the openness to trust that the God to whom these symbols points wants genuine liberation and freedom. This is what Segundo calls the inevitable “political option” to theology.[9] Theology is political because God’s revelation through scripture, history, culture, and experience, is a revelation that stakes a moral and ethical imperative that is social in its character. It is God’s concrete commitment to situations of both individual and collective injustice that allows us to distinguish between liberating and violent invocations of Christian symbols.

III.

Like Segundo, Jon Sobrino’s theology has a critical starting point. But he is concerned with the social context of El Salvador, where poor farmers were being exploited by elite Christian landowners and many members in the church refused to speak out against these injustices. Those who did were assassinated. Óscar Romero, the archbishop, had been assassinated in 1980. And in 1989, while Sobrino was away in Thailand, Jesuit Colleagues of his were killed by members of the Salvadoran military. Sobrino was targeted as well, but narrowly escaped death as a matter of happen stance.[10]

Sobrino wrote an essay in 1998 titled Theology in the Suffering World: Theology as Intellectus Amoris, the Latin translating to “the understanding of love.” It is an important essay because Sobrino lays down what he takes to be an effective way to do theology in rather succinct terms.

Sobrino argues that theology must be done from the messiness of the material world: a world of suffering, poverty, exploitation, racism, sexism, and violence. Theology, Sobrino tells us, must root itself in this place, and it must begin there, in the concreteness of life that is a life of struggle. Sobrino is like Segundo in this regard: there is no “neutral” starting point to theology. Theology must “take responsibility,” says Sobrino. So in the most holistic sense of the term, theology is political — even while remaining spiritual and existential.[11]

But for Sobrino, it is not simply a matter of doing theology in the suffering world. Rather, he thinks that the suffering world is the place of God’s revelation. As he writes, “God has revealed God’s self not only for but through the sufferings of God’s peoples.”[12] Liberation theologians often speak of the preferential option for the poor, that in order for theology to be truly Good News, it must center those who are poor, those whom society makes outcasts, marginalized, forgotten, decentered, and wounded. Perhaps most provocatively, the implication is that the God of Jesus is not going to be found in those institutions and places that damage and wound those whom God loves; even the most central institutions and symbols of Christian faith can be absent of God, because they can sustain and ignore the injustice they create.

There is good scriptural ground for this way of thinking: Moses speaks of the God who came down from Sinai to free oppressed Israel; the prophets, like Amos, speak of a God who could care less about temple sacrifice when the poor are ignored; and Jesus of Nazareth is born of Mary, a woman of insignificant standing, from a small town outside of Jerusalem, who trusts in the God who cares for orphans and widows. Even Jesus tells us that we know him in and through the “least of these,” suggesting that God’s Divine Presence will not stay bounded within the temple walls. Revelation itself becomes the inditement of the powerful in a violent social order.

At the heart of Sobrino’s theology is a commitment to love and hope. Hence, he describes theology as intellectus amoris and intellectus spei, that is, theology as an understanding of love and understanding of hope.[13] We might think of these as ethical and temporal dispositions, activities that shape how we approach interpretation. Love is a commitment to the flourishing of another. Hope is an orientation of trust toward the present in light of a future secured by God’s identification with and victory in the suffering world.

Finally, Sobrino calls theology mystagogy, a way of walking into the deep mystery of God.[14] Here Sobrino reminds us that there is a distance between our speech about God and God in Godself. The paradox of faithfulness is its willingness to accept its own fragility, to be open to the inexhaustible depths of God’s character. What follows is that no interpretation can fully comprehend Divine Mystery. We tread the path to understand who God is with humility, knowing that even the most sedimented of traditions – like the traditions of colonial Christianity and their lingering ways of understanding God – fall short of beholding God. Perhaps this is why in the Old Testament traditions there is a sense of reverence to God’s name. It is not to be spoken. Its meaning is “I will be who I will be.”[15] God is always ahead of human fantasy and language, always its divine subversion, and this is especially so for those who have power. To assert finality in any interpretation is to capture God, it is to participate in that very spirit which captures peoples and land, and to bring them under the reign of human mastery, the logic at the heart of colonialism.

Now what does this mean for symbolic devastation? Much like Segundo, Sobrino offers a critical starting point to Christian symbols. In the suffering world, a world created and sustained by the religious system of Christianity, one cannot proceed except by engaging in an internal critique of Christianity, the goal of which is to gain clarity into the religious causes, not only the material causes, to the unjust worlds we build. To recover the symbol’s meaning, we must give up the innocence of Christianity in the colonial world. This is what I mean when I say there is no going back after symbolic devastation. The way forward is through the honest accounting of Christianity’s own ethical compromise. 

But a symbol’s meaning is not entirely lost. Instead, the critical starting point begins in a commitment to seek out God’s revelation in the poor. The basis for this is in Jesus’s own teachings and life. His commitment to the poor, sick, marginalized, and outcast reminds us that God is found in those who enact God’s preferential love. It is on the basis of this commitment that love and hope become dispositions for a truly liberating theology. We must look for love in any interpretation of the Christian symbols, and we must have anticipatory trust – in other words, hope – that they can speak again, even as they are used as tools to justify colonial dominance, white nationalist superiority, and middle-class indifference.

Finally, Sobrino’s invitation for us to treat theology as a form of mystagogy reminds us that language will inevitably fall short before God. Mystagogy puts a stop to all interpretation and therefore to those interpretations that make use of Christian symbols as a form of religious justification of domination. By recognizing the limited nature of all attempts at inquiring into God, we become free to dismiss colonial interpretations of the symbol as just that – interpretations that cannot exhaust the symbol’s meaning since it is a symbol that points to the inexhaustibly Divine.

IV.

But what does this look like concretely? What might it look like to interpret the cross beyond the colonial history that devastates it as a symbol? We wrestle with these questions in the final episode. I believe that when we interpret the cross within the materiality of Jesus’s own life and look to how marginalized peoples have made use of the symbol, we will discover a tradition of Christianity that points to the truly liberating dimensions of the Gospel. The silence of the cross as it gets used by oppressive ideologies need not lead us to reject Christianity as a whole, instead, it is an invitation into the scandal of Divine mystery of a God who takes His Place not with Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, the Klan, among Christian Nationalists, or even in those suburban megachurches. If the God of liberation is to be found, he is to be found where he has chosen to take up residency – in Jesus, yes – but also among those whom Jesus identifies with throughout history and in the present, today. 

We explore what this entails next episode.

Blessings until next time.

Episode Copyright 2022 - World Outspoken. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.worldoutspoken.com for more information.


Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.


Footnotes

[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2. These podcast episodes draws on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis. 

[2] Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Russel Moore, “Christian Nationalism Cannot Save the World,” for Christianity Today, September 2022. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/september-web-only/christian-nationalism-cannot-save-world-politics-elections.html.

[6] Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology, 9. A correction: In the audio version of the podcast, I say that Segundo uses the language of “crises of interpretation.” This is not the case. He actually describes the need for interpretation as arising out of experience that instigates “profound and enriching questions and suspicions about our real situation.” The language of crises emphasizes the existential upheaval one can feel when these profound and enriching questions arise from these experiences.

[7] Ibid.,. 19, 39.

[8] Ibid., 31-33.

[9] Ibid., 69.

[10] Jon Sobrino, Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross, (Orbis Books, 1994), 173. See also Anderson, Gary L., and Kathryn G. Herr. "Sobrino, Jon (1938–)." In Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, edited by Anderson, Gary L., and Kathryn G. Herr, 1296-1296. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2007. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412956215.n800. Robert Anthony Lassalle-Klein, Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America (Orbis Books, 2014), xvii-xxi.

[11] Sobrino, Principle of Mercy, 38.

[12] Ibid., 12.

[13] Ibid., 41.

[14] Ibid., 43.

[15] Terrence Fretheim, Exodus, in Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 63. I follow Terrance Fretheim’s argument here that places emphasis on the promise and divine future embedded in the name. Hence: “I will be what I will be” over “I am who I am.”

Miniseries E2 - Tracing the Legacy of the Cross

I.

What do we do when the frame of meaning that orients world is disrupted, and we discover a violent underside lurking behind what were once meaningful symbols?  

My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. I am a follower of Jesus, somebody who believes that Jesus’s teachings, way of life, crucifixion, and resurrection reveal the presence of God in our world. But I also know what it is like to struggle existentially with losing sight of the Good News to which the Christian symbols point. This terrifying loss of apprehension is, as a I described in the last episode, a “symbolic devastation,” a devastation that results from the role Christian symbols have in injustices like colonialism, white supremacy, US nationalism, and the harm these injustices have caused in both the past and the present.[1]

Symbolic devastation is an experience we undergo when the potentially liberating meaning of Christian symbols is lost, and the symbol becomes a religious means to justify domination. The very symbol itself seems to give religious sanction to this injustice. And this raises questions: How do symbols get devastated in the first place? What does it feel like to experience the death of the meaning of the symbols we cherish? And how might we re-encounter the liberating meaning of these symbols after their silence?

In this episode, I want to consider these questions from the viewpoint of one symbol: the cross. We wear the cross on our necks, we gesture the cross while we pray, and crosses are often set atop roofs or burrowed into the ground to mark a building as a church. Beyond that, the cross is an important symbol of Jesus’s crucifixion, it is the means by which the Roman empire tortured and murdered somebody they believed to be a rouser of rebellion. Once a symbol of Roman domination, it had been subverted and remade to signify the Christian conviction that oppression, torture, and murder cannot overcome the love and life of God. Despite the gritty hope of this primary meaning, it is also a symbol that has been weaponized for purposes of domination. Because of this, it is a symbol that often invokes the devastation I’m attempting to describe.

We need to begin in 1492, in the first moments of the so-called discovery of the New World, when European explorers and colonizers arrived on the shores of the Caribbean, only to extend their stays in the mainland of the Americas. It is there that we can begin to see with concrete details of why symbolic devastation occurs.

II.

Columbus was undeterred by the great swell of ocean that separated Europe from the unknown, with its titan size, calamitous waves, and unending bluegrey horizon. A passionate and courageous sailor, no doubt, he took his crew and embarked upon these trepid and punishing waters with every goal in mind to find a route — the route — to Asia.[2] But Columbus did not find Asia. Instead, he charted a path to a world yet unknown to Europe. He landed upon the shores of what we now call the Americas. His captain, Gonzalo de Fernandez de Oviedo, described Columbus as “the prime mover of a great enterprise.”[3] And de Oviedo is certainly correct. Columbus launched the beginning of a European movement across the Atlantic, one that would transform Europe and the Americas alike — drawing them together in an inextricable link of migration, mission, and exploitation. Missionaries, settlers, and conquistadors followed Columbus, equally undisturbed by the risk of ocean voyage, and crashed upon unfamiliar lands, with every intent of making it their own.

Columbus carried the cross with him. This is depicted in an illustration that accompanied a letter Columbus wrote to the king describing his journey to this world yet unknown to Europeans. In the illustration, the ship that sails toward the Americas bares the symbol of the cross.[4] 

On his third journey, Columbus planted a cross wherever he visited, proclaiming and, in another sense, enacting Spanish expansion. “I have a tall cross erected on each cape, and I proclaim your Highnesses’ greatness to all the people informing them that you are lords of Spain,” writes Columbus in a letter detailing his third journey across the Atlantic.[5] In the letter he explains with utmost excitement that he has shared the Gospel with the Indigenous peoples. On the one hand, we cannot dismiss the heartfelt seriousness with which Columbus engages his evangelism. He couldn’t do otherwise as an explorer whose self-understanding is thoroughly Christian. But the faith he shares is tainted, obscured by the interests of greed and empire. Earlier in the letter he writes with eagerness about seeing the indigenous people wearing pearls and gold on their necks. “I was delighted by this sight,” Columbus tells us, “and tried hard to discover where they found these pearls.”[6] Evangelism, for Columbus, is tied to plunder. The symbols of the faith join imperial greed and desire for resources. In A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Luis N. Rivera Pagan says that in the colonial era, “hidden behind the evangelizing cross, faintly veiled, was the conquering sword.”[7] Rivera-Pagan is certainly right in his analysis.

Of course, Columbus is not the only explorer who made use of the symbol. The explorer Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca proclaimed land possession by building a church and erecting a large cross, growing the Spanish empire by drawing regions of Central America into it.[8] And the infamous Hernán Cortés named one of his settlements “City of the True Cross.”[9] When the Spanish wanted to survey South America to get a sense of their newly growing imperial hinterland, maps were illustrated with settlements depicted by simple line drawings of churches with a cross stationed on their roof.[10] Walter Mingolo, known decolonial scholar, points out that indigenous map makers would often paint these church buildings around the edges of the map, an implicit way of signifying the Spanish empire’s ever-expanding reach to grab and take possession of their homeland.[11]

The 16th century intellectual Guamán Poma de Ayala, himself the child of the colonial era, being of both indigenous and Spanish heritage, painted a series of panels depicting this moment in history. One painting feature a map with churches on it, the main feature marking the illustrated buildings being a cross.[12] At first glance, and outside of context, the image appears theologically neutral. It is merely a map. But the neutrality ends the moment one situates those images within the story of ecclesial abuse, which is thoroughly narrated by Guamán Poma in The First New Chronicle and Good Government, his theological history of Inca society before and after the conquests. There, he has an extended treatment on the abuses of the priest. Here is Guamán Poma’s own words on clerical exploitation: “The padres and priests oversee the making of cloth … to sell, claiming that the cloth is for their prelates. They tell their managers to order the poor Indians to make the cloth, employing them without paying them anything at all, throughout the kingdom.”[13]

Like the Spanish, French and English settlers planted crosses as they encroached upon Indigenous lands. This happened on the coasts of Maryland and as far North as Gaspe Bay, in what is now modern-day Quebec. Historian Susan Juster found a testimony from settler colonists that the cross had become so wedded to land possession that indigenous leaders would make a sign of the cross with their hand while pointing to the landscapes they called home.[14] The point? They had learned that for European settlers, the cross was not merely about God, but God and the dispossession of their homeland.

We can search through history and find these moments when the cross becomes deeply woven into a history of violence.

The 19th century saw the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. And today, the flaming cross is their hallmark symbol, provoking an ideology of white supremacy in an ever-increasing multiethnic United States. The flaming cross not only represents the Klan’s desire for a White dominated future, but also draws to mind their nostalgic view of the past, in which the accountability that White people have is only to themselves. Beyond the Klan, the cross has become tethered to a larger White Christian nationalist movement. It has been appropriated to signify the dream of an exclusionary United States undergirded by a Divine power supporting white rule and superiority. Today, it can be difficult to see the cross as anything but the symbolic projection of a White nationalist consciousness.

In Chicagoland, where I grew up, it is easy to think that the colonial history of the cross has nothing to do with the church where I was raised, separated as they are by five centuries. But that fails to account for history’s living consequences. The church itself sits upon the land home to the Council of Three Fires. But to invoke the home of the first peoples, however, is also to invoke an absence, for even if this land is their home, the church has not in any materially significant way recognized it as such. The land of the Council of Three Fires is marked by a violent history of the cross. A white cross is burroughed into the ground and a magnificent church building takes up a cluster of land that could fill a few blocks of a Chicagoland subdivision. So even where there is a seeming indifference, the cross appears to signify the consequences of colonialism by its sheer placement into the earth — it invokes those other colonial cross planters: Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Cortez, and others. We do not have the suburbs, sprawling megachurches, property ownership, and middleclass consumerism without conquest – a conquest marked by the cross.

The symbol of the cross has a history. And part of that history is its use by colonial missionaries and conquistadors who believed in a divine pronouncement that the lands of North and South America belong to them. Burroughed into the soil of the Americas, the cross stood in for power and control, as it became linked to and a signifier for imperial gain. If, for the gospels, the cross represents Jesus’s life and its tragic end by Rome, that meaning has transfigured. In the US, the cross serves less as a reminder of Jesus’s fellowship with the poor into an excruciating death, and more as a reminder of the desire for power and control. I cannot understate the implications that follow from the journey of the cross as it made its way to the New World and how its many interpretations evolved over time.

III.

This history exposes the roots behind symbolic devastation. The cross’s tie to colonialism devastates the cross’s meaning and our ability to apprehend it. As I mentioned last episode, symbols like the cross are potent with liberating meaning for the world, entry ways into discovering the revelation of a God whose love reaches out and embraces all of creaturely life. But access to such meaning is often lost because the symbols which narrate this story are tied so closely to injustice. The “well of meaning,” to use philosopher Paul Ricouer’s language, is plugged by the history of violent misuse, redirecting the symbol’s signification to ideologies of imperial power.

To experience symbolic devastation is to face an abyss that turns a symbol meant to invoke Good News into a sign of death. It is to encounter the distance between a lifegiving interpretation and an unintegrated, desperate, and traumatized past and present to which the symbol points. Symbolic devastation is characterized by closure, haunting indifference, and unmet longing. Resonance disappears in the encounter of an imperial appropriation of what was an anti-imperial symbol. 

We end this episode on a sober note. It is important that we move slowly through a history that cuts through language and fills us with grief. Devastation arises from the history of the violent uses of the cross — violence found in Columbus, Cortez, Spanish, French, and British colonialism, the Klu Klux Klan, and the suburban indifference found among many middle-class Christians who worship the God of the cross while forgetting that they do so on the land of the council of three fires.

So questions are raised: how might we recover the meaning of the cross? How might the symbol bear witness to the Good News taught and lived by Jesus of Nazareth, empowered as he was by the God spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures?

We turn to these questions next.

Blessings until next time.

Episode Copyright 2022 - World Outspoken. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.worldoutspoken.com for more information.


Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.


Footnotes

[1] Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2. These podcast episodes draws on research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis. 

[2] J.M. Cohen, “Introduction,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Penguin UK, 2004), 12.

[3] Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, “General and Natural History of the Indies by Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, ed. J.M. Cohen (Penguin UK, 2004), 27.

[4] Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 8.

[5] Christopher Columbus, “Narrative of the Third Voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Indies, in which He Discovered the Mainland, Dispatched the Sovereigns from the Island of Hispaniola,” in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 251.

[6] Ibid., 213.

[7] Rivera, A Violent Evangelism, 9.

[8] Franciso Morales Padrón in “Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Adelantado y Gobernado del Río de la Plata,” in Naufragios y comentarios (1552), by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico, D.F.L Editorial Porrúa), quoted in A Violent Evangelism, 14.

[9] Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), 207.

[10] See Howard F. Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586,” Hispanic American Historical Review 44, no. 3 (August 1, 1964): 341–74, https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-44.3.341, 341.

[11] Walter Mignolo,The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 2003), 306–7, 309.

[12] Mingolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 310.

[13] Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, abridged, ed. and trans. by David Frye (Hacket Publishing Company, Inc., 2006), 208.

[14] Susan Juster, “Planting the ‘Great Cross’: The Life, and Death, of Crosses in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2017): 241.

Miniseries E1 - Losing the Liberating Meaning of Christian Symbols

I.

Five years have passed since I left the church that raised me. It was not all bad memories, though the most meaningful moments weren’t the regular services either.[1]

While I was in high school, every Thursday evening, a group of friends met me at an old church building to read and study the Bible together. It was a dingey building, ignored by most everyone else in the church, the once-used building that the church had outgrown decades ago, having since become a megachurch. But it was a special place to me. It was where the biblical texts came to life. There I felt the freedom to read, question, and be questioned by these texts. And despite the smallness of the room, I felt immersed in the biblical worlds. The priestly creation hymn of Genesis; John’s confession that God is enfleshed in a person from the countryside of Palestine — these stories brought me face to face with the reality unleashed by God.

In that forgotten room I learned that the biblical texts are filled with symbols that point to the love of God. Jesus is the symbol of God’s unique presence in the world. Of course, Jesus is both a symbol and more than a symbol. But he is symbolic insofar as his life points to a transcendent love that preceedes the beginning of all things, a love that brings all creaturely life into existence, and a love who so adores creation that it would take up flesh and bone, become human, and preach a message of freedom to those ensnared in a world a violence and hate. This is a love unconquerable by death.

Symbols invite interpretation of the world. Their graphic imagery gives meaningful shape to everyday life. They etch themselves into consciousness so thoroughly that when we encounter a symbol a whole set of meanings is invoked. Our world, put simply, is experienced as symbolic.

But the meaning of symbols can be redirected, their truly liberating significance lost. The church I grew up in was a megachurch founded during the late 1960s during a time of tremendous social turmoil. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a few years after the church was founded. And in Colombia, Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church met in Medellín to discuss what relationship the gospel had to the economic oppression of the poor, a conversation that would be fundamental to the development of a movement known as liberation theology. But I don’t remember these movements within Christianity being significant to the theology of the church. What I remember is a theology that invoked symbols like God’s salvation, the Holy Spirit, and the cross all the while being indifferent to much of the injustice around us. I remember fellow congregants expressing unabashed support for Donald Trump; and I remember mostly indifference toward police violence against black life. The reality of God’s salvation, it appeared to me, made no claim on the racism and racist violence in which I was raised.

Stretching two stories tall, my church placed a cross at the front of their building and cast light on it at night so that you could see it from the road. The cross marked the building as a church. But it also signified more than that. To me, the cross signified an American Christianity indifferent to the injustice, an indifference gave way to callousness and allowed nationalist sentiment to flourish.

II.

Today what many see when they encounter Christian symbols, especially of Jesus and the cross, is an indifferent and unjust Christianity. Due to a history of injustice and misuse, the symbols of Christian faith have been ruined for so many. The result of that ruin is what can be described as a symbolic devastation. In the experience of symbolic devastation, we can lose sight of a symbol’s liberating meaning and the symbol itself becomes silent. There is a temptation to abandon the symbol altogether.

The reason for symbolic devastation of Christian symbols arises from the fact that these symbols have a long-cemented history of misuse. In the Americas, Christian symbols have been called upon to justify all manner of wrongdoings: from conquest and indigenous genocide in the colonial era, to White nationalism in the early American era and today, and to the suburban megachurches who aspire after wealth and middleclass stability while ignoring the violent history of the past which made possible our present moment. At this point, the misuse of Christian symbols carried across this history has become a genuine, even if mutilated, tradition, a foul collective habit of appropriating the stories of Israel and Jesus to advance land conquest, capitalist greed, and cultural destruction. Normalized and internalized, the interpretive practice of abusing Christian symbols is the reason for devastation that so many of us experience.

One consequence of symbolic devastation has been more public conversation around the need to “deconstruct” the Christian faith. Christian leaders and intellectuals have both lauded and critiqued the usefulness of deconstruction. Ultimately, however, I see the call for theological deconstruction as an outcome of symbolic devastation. The question is not whether one should deconstruct the symbols of Christian faith, but how to recover an encounter with the liberating meaning of Christian symbols after symbolic devastation has left us with nothing but silence.

To put it another way, deconstruction is an option; symbolic devastation is not. We do not choose to be devastated, rather we undergo it. Deconstruction is the necessary step afterward, where we try to understand why and how symbols are used to give religious credence to the unjust world we continue to build.

So far, I have described what appears to be a rather linear process: symbols at first are not devastated and then become devastated. But perhaps it is better to think of the process as occurring differently depending on our relationship to the symbol.

For some, the devastation is all one knows. The symbol does nothing but signify and justify the violence in which we all live, move, and have our being. This is the case for intellectuals such as Franz Fanon who claims that the church represents nothing more but “the ways of the colonizer.” We could read Karl Marx in this way, who believes that religion is nothing other than an ideological justification behind the unequal social order that the bourgeoisie have built. Illuminating as these two figures are, they are resigned to religion’s liberating possibilities.

Others stagger back and forth, carrying within them a dimming hope that struggles against what appears to be a history of the symbol’s signification of violence. Here we are not resigned, but we understand those who have resigned. The struggle is navigating the murkiness of a symbol that simultaneously points toward love and toward violence. Stagger one way, we can recover the symbol; stagger another way, and the liberating meaning of the symbol is lost.

In this sense, it is helpful to imagine the experience of symbolic devastation as a death of meaning. One grieves a loss. The symbol becomes a linguistic corpse. It is silent. And terrifying though this experience is, for those for whom the symbol died, there is also no going back. Devastation stretches outward from the symbol and takes hold of the person. They wonder if the symbol will ever be meaningful to them again. If it is to mean something, the previous interpretation is no longer sufficient.

III.

The experience of symbolic devastation finds expression in Mary who, as the Gospel of John tells us, approached Jesus’s tomb at dawn just a few days after his crucifixion. Jesus was her beloved teacher; and more than that, he represented the arrival of God’s reign in her world. To see the crucifixion of Jesus, then, was to witness the literal and actual death of the enfleshed symbol of God’s love. Having witnessed the brutality of the Roman empire, as it exerted its full power to expose the fragile humanity of Jesus, Mary saw her hopes and dreams come to an end. Who for her was a symbol of new life, she now believed to be a silent corpse. I imagine her weeping in the dark just before daybreak.

Many of us find ourselves in similar kinds of graveyards. What were once powerfully evocative symbols are now silent; they lie before us like corpses. They no longer speak. We tremble and weep before the possibility that there might never be a return to the fullness, a return to the reservoir of meaning that these symbols point to and that we base our lives upon.[2] Can these symbols mean something new? Can they speak to us again?

I believe they can.

My name is Colton Bernasol, a friend and essay contributor for World Outspoken. I am a follower of Jesus, somebody who believes that Jesus’s teachings, way of life, crucifixion, and resurrection reveal the presence of God in our world. And I have experienced symbolic devastation, losing the liberating meaning of Christian symbols as they have been used to justify the injustice in the world. Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring the theme of symbolic devastation. How do symbols get devastated in the first place? What does it feel like to experience the death of the meaning of the symbols we cherish and that frame our world? And how might we re-encounter the liberating meaning of these symbols after their silence?

To answer these questions, we will need to journey with two theologians who wrote and reflected in contexts that are both similar to and different from my own.[3] But before doing that, we need to go back to 1492, in the first moments when European explorers and colonizers arrived on the shores of the Caribbean and made their ways to the Americas. For it is there that we consider one symbol in particular – the cross – so that we might trace the origins of the devastation we experience today.  

Why does Symbolic devastation occur? How might we name its causes? And what does it look like to interpret Christian symbols “otherwise,” so that their liberating meaning might be rediscovered and encountered? Join me every two weeks as we work through these questions together. Find these episodes on the Mestizo Podcast feed or read the transcripts on the World Outspoken website. Though the silence of symbolic devastation is real, we can trust in the story of Mary, who, facing the silence, heard her teacher’s voice after death. Let us move forward knowing that the God of justice – Israel’s God, the one revealed in Jesus – is the God who speaks even after devastation.

Blessings until next time.

Episode Copyright 2022 - World Outspoken. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.worldoutspoken.com for more information.


Episode Credits:

Writer and Host: Colton Bernasol

Music by Lucas Manning

Producer: Lucas Manning

Executive Producer: Emanuel Padilla

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About Colton Bernasol

Colton Bernasol is an editor and writer from Plainfield, Illinois, a Southwest suburb in the Chicagoland area. He graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in Philosophy and Biblical/Theological Studies and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary with an MA in Theology and Ethics. He writes at the intersection of religion, society, and culture. Currently, he lives in Chicagoland with his wife Anna. Sign up for his newsletter, Provisional.


Footnotes

[1] These podcast episodes draw on and adapt research and writing I’ve done for my master’s thesis. See Colton R. Bernasol, "Theology After Symbolic Devastation: Method in the Liberation Theologies of Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, and M. Shawn Copeland." Order No. 29162635, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2022. http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theology-after-symbolic-devastation-method/docview/2675665905/se-2.

[2] This metaphor comes from philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

[3]A correction: in the podcast I mistakenly said that I would look at three theologians. While I do that in my thesis, in this podcast series, I will only be looking at two.

S3E11 - Mailbag Episode

On this final episode of the season, your hosts answer your questions about the Mestizo church, themes of the season, and tell you what is coming next for the Mestizo Podcast.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Complete the Survey: Use this link to complete the survey and help us learn how we can better serve you.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

S3E10 - Regreso a Casa (Returning Home)

We sit down with Jeremy and Angelica Barahona to discuss their church plant efforts back home in West Palm Beach, Florida. We talk about why they returned home, chose to plant a new church, and the challenges they’ve faced in planting.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

The Light: Learn more about The Light Church by visiting their website.

About Angelica and Jeremy Barahona

Angelica was born and raised in Venezuela. She is married to Jeremy and is the mother of Junia! When she was 15 years old, she and her family came to faith in Christ during a visit to Orlando, FL at a Latino church. She was then discipled and served at Centro Evangelistico Peniel (CEP) in Valencia, Venezuela. She holds a B.A. in International Relations from La Universidad Central de Venezuela and did community development for 5 years. In 2015, she and her family moved to the United States due to the harsh realities in her home country. This led her to get a dual M.A. in Leadership/Intercultural Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and was on staff at Oak Brook Community Church. Before planting The Light WPB, she was the Asylum Program Manager for World Relief Chicago.

Jeremy is the son of immigrant parents from El Salvador and Ecuador. He grew up in SoFlo and came to faith in Christ at a faithful Spanish-speaking church at 13 years old. He is married to Angelica and is Papi to Junia. He has a B.A. in Theology from Moody Bible Institute and an M.A. in Intercultural Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Prior to planting The Light WPB, he helped develop Pursue Scholars and was on staff at The Brook.

S3E9 - BONUS Why and How We Listen

On this bonus episode of the Mestizo Podcast, Emanuel sits down with last years Scholars in Residence to discuss their work for the year. They share about who they were listening to and how they were listening to serve.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

Learn more about the SIR: Here is the link to the Scholar in Residence Program.

S3E8 - Bonds Between Us

After writing Rediscipling the White Church, Pastor David W. Swanson has gone on to be an important voice in Christian racial solidarity movements. On this episode, we sit down to talk to him about his vision for rediscipleship, why he prefers brother/sister language over “ally,” and what it means to have fellowship with rediscipled white congregations.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

Reading: Here is the link to the article by Pastor Swanson.

About Pastor Swanson

David is the founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side of Chicago. He also serves as the CEO of New Community Outreach, a non-profit organization working to reduce causes of trauma and raise opportunities for equity.

David’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Discipleship, is available now. Read more from David at his website, dwswanson.com.

S3E7 - Re-membering Puerto Ricans

We sit down with Dra. Teresa Deglado to talk about the personal dynamics of the diaspora, the family motivations that drove Delgado’s research, and how to recover the links between Island and Barrio. Dra. Delgado tells us why literature was so important to her decolonial theology, and we get into a little Puerto Rican history. Elizabeth and I also share some of our family stories to understand the Puerto Rican colonial condition.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About Dra. Delgado

Teresa Delgado is Dean of St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John's University. Her more recent publications include Augustine and Social Justice, co-edited with John Doody and Kim Paffenroth (2015), and contributions to Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms (2014), Reinterpreting Virtues and Values in the U.S. Public Sphere (2013), and More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church, Volume 1 (2013). Delgado serves on the Board of Directors for WESPAC Foundation (Westchester Peace Action Coalition) and lives in Mount Vernon, NY with her husband and their four children.

S3E6 - California Love

On this episode, we sit down with Dra. Alexia Salvatierra to discuss community development between Californios and recent immigrants, asking questions about how she manages to develop mutuality between the immigrant and citizen.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About Dra. Salvatierra

Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is the Academic Dean of the Centro Latino and the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary. She has over 40 years of experience in ministries of community transformation, in the US and internationally. She is the co-author of Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities. Her favorite title is Madrina, given to her by the rising leaders whom she mentors.

S3E5 - Mother Wants What's Best

On this bonus episode, we sit down with Jasmine Rodriguez and Micah Bournes to discuss the themes of their songs “Kiss” and “Water.” We talk about the generational resistance to black beauty and respectability politics that shaped family patterns.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

New Music: Listen to Micah Bournes music and poetry here. Listen to more of Jasmine’s music here.

About the artists

Micah Bournes is a musician and poet from Long Beach, California. His work is full of vulnerable narratives touching on themes of culture, justice, and faith. For over a decade he has toured the world performing and teaching creative writing workshops.

Jasmine is a Dominican singer songwriter born in NYC, raised in Michigan and now based out of LA. She was inspired to do music to tell her story through vulnerability, to create spaces for healing and to inspire others to face their fears. 

S3E4 - Teólogas make good Madres

Dra. Nancy Bedford’s daughter once asked, “How can I be a good mother if I’m not a theologian?” On this episode, we sit down with Dra. Bedford and discuss motherhood and vocation and how she raised hijas nepantleras.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

New Music: Listen to Audax the Damsel’s original “Beads” and more here.

About Dra. Bedford

Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Dr. theol. (Tübingen, 1994), was born in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina in 1962. She has been Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston) since 2003. Previously (1995-2002) she taught theology at Instituto Universitario ISEDET and Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista (both in Buenos Aires). She has written, co-written, or edited ten books and written over 90 book chapters and journal articles, which have appeared in five languages.

Among her books are Who Was Jesus and What Does It Mean to Follow Him? (Herald Press, 2021), Galatians, A Theological Commentary (WJK, 2016) and Teología feminista a tres voces (with Virginia Azcuy and Mercedes García Bachmann; Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2016). The second, revised edition of Nuestra Fe. Introducción a la teología cristiana (with Guillermo Hansen) will appear in Fortress Press in Spring of 2023.

S3E3 - Loving DJ

On this episode, we sit down with Dra. Liz Rios and Rev. Hiram Rios to discuss the dynamics of raising their special needs child, DJ. We discuss parenting and ministry, the role of humor and joy in a culture of erasure, and a theology of disability.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About the Rios Family

Liz Rios has been in ministry for over 32 years serving in various capacities in almost every area of the church including Executive Pastor and Co-Lead Pastor alongside her husband Rev. Hiram Rios. Hiram and Liz officially started in ministry in 1990. They pastored together in a local Florida church and eventually went on to plant their own until they stopped pastoring in 2016. Since then, Rev. Hiram has semi-retired to focus on his family, especially as primary caregiver to his special needs son and as a community minister via the Passion Center, where he hosts a monthly comedy show to bring laughter and joy to their South Florida community. Dr. Liz works as a Talent Acquisition Manager for Urban Strategies and as an adjunct professor and also serves as a Consulting Editor for Outreach Magazine, on the board of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. In addition, she is a senior consultant for Freedom Road, LLC which coaches, consults, trains and designs experiences to help groups in multiple sectors do justice in just ways. Dr. Rios also serves on the Send Institute's Missiologists Council. Her work and experiences led her to start her own network Passion2Plant to encourage and support Black/Brown church planters committed to planting justice-oriented churches in urban communities right from the start. Hiram and Liz have two children, Samuel Eliu who recently graduated from Southeastern University and works part-time at Passion2Plant as Operations Assistant and Daniel Jeremiah (DJ) their "silent prophet" and special angel who has a number of ailments including epilepsy, cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus due to medical negligence. They met in church as teens and have been together for 34 years, 32 of them happily married.

S3E2 - Choosing Us and Mutual Flourishing

On this episode, we are joined by Pastor Gail Song Bantum and Dr. Brian Bantum to discuss their new book Choosing Us: Marriage and Mutual Flourishing in a world of Difference. We ask them about death and love, confession and change, and how to read the stars.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: Whether you want a t-shirt, hoodie, baby onesie, journal, mug, or sticker, tenemos un poquito de todo. My favorite is the recently released "Product of Abuela's Prayers" crewneck, celebrating the theology we inherit from nuestras Abuelitas. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

About the Bantums

Gail Song Bantum is lead pastor at Quest Church and has created four mentoring groups nationally for women of color leaders. A nationally known speaker on topics of justice, leadership, and mentoring, she has spoken at Why Christian?, Evolving Faith, Christian Community Development Association, and the Proctor Children's Defense Fund Conference, among others.

Brian Bantum (PhD, Duke University) writes and speaks on the intersections of identity, race, and gender. He is the Neal F. and Ila A. Fisher Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a contributing editor for the Christian Century, and the author of The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World and Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Christian Hybridity.

S3E1 - Dinámicas Entre Nosotros

On this episode, we welcome you back to the show, introduce the theme for the new season, “the dynamics between us,” and forecast some of what’s coming in the season.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Merch: You can now support the show and represent la Iglesia Mestiza. Check out our New merch store by visiting our store.

Courses: Want to take courses that prepare you to face the challenges of doing ministry in the hyphen? Visit learn.worldoutspoken.com today and enroll in one of our newest courses.

Special Offer: Don’t forget that as a listener of The Mestizo Podcast, you can get 30% off + free US shipping when you shop at InterVarsity Press and use the promo code: MESTIZO.

S2E14 - BONUS Introducing La Ventanita Podcast

What would it look like if a church was planted with the expressed purpose of reaching bi-cultural, 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos? What would some of the initial challenges be? How would a pastoral team tackle them?

On this bonus episode, we introduce you to World Outspoken’s newest podcast, La Ventanita. Pull up a seat with Jeremy Barahona and Joshua Suh to hear about the process of church planting on the south end of West Palm Beach… as it’s happening. La Ventanita Podcast gives you a behind the scenes look as Jeremy and his team launch The Light WPB, a church deeply committed to the neighborhood.

Expect talk about everything from the Bible, hip-hop, and Latinidad. The episode you are about to hear gets into the honest struggle of church plant fundraising. For more episodes like this one, subscribe to La Ventanita on your favorite podcast app. And don’t forget the Mestizo Podcast returns this March 2022 with lo Bueno como siempre.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Purchase Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity

Don’t forget that as a listener of The Mestizo Podcast, you can get 30% off + free US shipping when you use the promo code: MESTIZO. Don’t wait. Get a great deal on a great book, today.

S2E13 - BONUS Interview w/ Cardec Drums

On this episode, we switch things up, sitting down with 2x Dove Award Winner, Tu Premios Música Urbana winner, and co-owner of No Apologies Music, Jacob Cardec, known as Cardec Drums.  We sit down with Cardec to discuss his vision of bridging the English speaking hip hop world con la musica Cristiana Urbana. He shares his earliest experiences with the church, how he manages the tension of being between world, and the future of No Apologies Music.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Follow Cardec Drums on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cardecdrums/

Follow No Apologies Music: https://www.instagram.com/noapologiesmusic/

Purchase Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity

Don’t forget that as a listener of The Mestizo Podcast, you can get 30% off + free US shipping when you use the promo code: MESTIZO. Don’t wait. Get a great deal on a great book, today.

You can also register here to join Dr. Robert Chao Romero on THURSDAY, FEB 3 (2PM ET / 1 PM CT / 11 AM PT) for a webinar titled Developing Christian Leaders with Seminary Now.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

S2E12 - BONUS Mixed Take Crossover

Today we introduce you to one of World Outspoken’s other amazing podcasts, Mixed Take. On this podcast Robert Rivera and Donielle Alicea discuss how the mixing of cultures and heritages in the US - influence film, television, and other forms of media and entertainment.

On this episode, Doni and Robert interview actor and singer Jennifer Hudson and director Liesl Tommy on their film RESPECT. Doni and Robert also have interviews with actor, singer, and fellow Boricua, Robin De Jesus, actor Jimmy Gonzalez, and other episodes dealing with the ways the media landscape is changing.

Check out Mixed Take on your favorite podcast app for more episodes like the one you’re about to hear. Oh and…

If you haven’t heard of the book Brown Church, you’ll want to get yourself a copy today. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant mother, explores the history and theology the “Brown Church.”

Romero considers how for five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to religious, socioeconomic, and political status quo, and takes readers through this history of activism and faith in the Latina/o church. Brown Church appeals to the vision for redemption, which includes not only heavenly promises but also the transformation of our lives and the world.

Get your copy today at ivpress.com. And as a listener of The Mestizo Podcast, you can get 30% off + free US shipping when you use the promo code: MESTIZO. Don’t wait. Get a great deal on a great book, today.


Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

S2E11 - BONUS Atando Cabos

On this bonus episode, we hear from our sister and madrina, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier about her newest book, Atando Cabos: Latinx Contributions to Theological Education. We discuss the loose ends she explores, the importance of respect, and what we can all learn about how education is changing from the margins.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Learn more about the The 2021 Justo and Catherine Gonzalez Lecture Series here.

Purchase Atando Cabos en Español here.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

S2E10 - Mixed Mailbag

Season 2 Ep 10.png

A special season ending episode of el Mestizo Podcast, the show for the mixed people of the mixed church. On this episode, your hosts answer your questions about the Mestizo church, themes of the season, and tell you what is coming next for the Mestizo Podcast.

Support the Mestizo Podcast by giving today.

Have a question you want answered on the podcast? Leave us a message at 312-725-2995. Leave us a 30 second voicemail with your name, city, y pregunta and we’ll discuss it on the last episode of the season. You can also submit a question using the form on this page.

Curious about Emanuel’s rapper days? Listen to Legacia today.