Decolonial Theological Encounters: An Introduction

Progressive social activists and critical scholars are increasingly employing the terms "colonial" and "decolonial" in describing the destructive dynamics of the 500-year-old modern/colonial capitalist world system and the deep and far-reaching character of authentic hopes for another world. Decolonizing initiatives, movements, and theoretical approaches continue to emerge and to include an increasingly rich array of voices from around the world. They present profound epistemological challenges with wide-ranging implications across scholarly disciplines, including theology. In particular, they offer new pathways for rethinking previously taken-for-granted categories and frameworks, which in their dominant expressions were deeply Eurocentric, and are increasingly being questioned. Drawing on many antecedents, significant currents of explicitly "decolonial" thinking have emerged since the mid-1990s, in particular in networks of Latin American and USA Latino/a thinkers. (More recently, drawing on their own centuries-long experiences of resistance and hope, Indigenous activists and scholars increasingly use these terms as well.)

Our tentatively named Canadian Decolonial Theology Project is rooted in collaboration in different combinations and contexts over more than twenty years. We all have long drawn inspiration from liberation theologies, cultural and contextual theologies, and most recently the critical discourses of coloniality/decoloniality. In the last two years, from the perspectives of each person's distinct interests, disciplines, commitments, and life experiences, we have more intensely engaged Latin American decolonial thinking. And together we have discovered that decolonial perspectives confirm earlier key liberationist intuitions and insights, push beyond the limits of existing scholarly and political frameworks, and open new horizons for liberation and hope. In many ways they point to a necessity, as at other historical turning points, for re-imagining theology, its tasks, agents, multiple sources, horizons, and methods.

Each contribution in this collaborative project is a concrete expression of the diversity, complexity, and promise of encounters mixing decolonial thinking and theology. At our Canadian Theological Society panel in Toronto (May 2017), reflected in the edited and revised papers below, we explored various tangents of these multifaceted, irreducibly diverse, complex quests for another knowledge, another hope for the world, and another faith.

Lee Cormie sets this work in the historical context of the broader social movements of the last fifty years. He highlights key features of Latin American decolonial approaches and briefly touches on their implications for rethinking the epistemological status of hope and faith, and for recognizing the renewed significance of religious questions in the midst of the cascading eco-social catastrophes of the twenty-first-century. Néstor Medina discusses the complexity and interconnection of fundamental terms in decolonial thinking. He situates them inside a global frame that uncovers the intellectual/epistemological apparatus upon which modernity/coloniality is built, and he points to the development of the critical category mestizaje (and Latina/o theology in general) as an example of reframing theology along decolonial lines. Becca Whitla shows how decolonial ideas can help uncover the colonizing character of worship, especially in singing, e.g., the "coloniality of music." At the same time, she shows how in other contexts with other singers the same songs can be sources of knowledge and acts of epistemic disobedience. And finally, Michel Andraos, in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, and focusing primarily on the Catholic Canadian context, raises necessary questions for doing theology after the TRC, e.g., for constructing a decolonial theology.

This four-piece presentation that follows exemplifies that, for us as authors, doing theology is rooted in commitments to liberation struggles, practices, and activism. We are deeply aware of the tentative, partial, incomplete character of our work to date. And we look forward to expanding our dialogue with others who nurture hope that "another world is possible" (slogan of the World Social Forum).