From the Guest Thematic Editor: True Interdisciplinarity

It has been a pleasure to serve as guest thematic editor of Diálogo 16. The timing was just right. Latino Studies and Latino/a Theology have not always walked on the same path. This collaboration brings together two dynamic centers of scholarly productivity at DePaul: the Center for Latino Research, and the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, both in the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences. Both entities are committed to interdisciplinary research that fosters greater solidarity and understanding between North America and Latin America as well as to the themes of immigration and transnationalism. But the truly novel part of the collaboration was to engage Latino/a reality in the U.S. from dual perspectives. I sincerely hope the exchange, in these Diálogo pages, can contribute to broader methodological discussions of how these two disciplines complement each other.

This issue brings together a fascinating collection of insights into Latino/a aesthetics and the history of the Mexican presence in Chicago. We invited contributions that explore the current state of Latino/a Catholicism in the U.S., and current and historical struggles to achieve transformations in Latino/a Catholicism. I myself was particularly interested in ways in which Latino/a Catholicism integrates a vision of beauty and justice and thus articulates a new and compelling view of nature, culture, art, and social change. We offer a glimpse of the history and contemporary lived experience of Latino/a Religious Communities in Chicago by focusing on the diary of a Mexican woman from the time of early migration, and an article that studies The Resurrection Project in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

The collaboration was fruitful beyond my expectations. It is easy to talk about broad and noble ideals like “interdisciplinarity,” but we actually produced an interdisciplinary issue. Now that is exciting!

We chose the theme of: “Cosmic Liturgy: Latino/a Catholicism Today.” The term “cosmic liturgy” comes from a distant but interesting source. A highly regarded Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, first used it in 1941 to summarize the achievement of a groundbreaking thinker from the seventh century (Maximus the Confessor) whose synthetic understanding of life and liturgy brought together a vast expanse of the wisdom of Asia and the Christian East into a single vision.¹ Under the same thematic title, a second issue of Diálogo 16 will describe the work of Alejandro García-Rivera, a Cuban American theologian (and former nuclear physicist) who died on December 13, 2010 and was indebted in some ways to von Balthasar and especially to his search for a new vision of cosmic synthesis in the world today.

In context of this journal, however, the meaning of cosmic liturgy has a very broad, multivalent meaning. For Latinas and Latinos the study of faith and culture always lies at the crossroads. Alex García-Rivera talked about the Latino/a theology as a fusion of the indigenous cosmovision with the Christian view of the world as the garden of God. Alex highlighted the woundedness of the artist that comes from standing in solidarity with the marginalized. All of the symbols in religion and rituals of daily life reflect these multiple sources of identity and meaning as well as the struggle to articulate their integration in a novel way.

Volume 16, Number 2 will focus on the theological aesthetics of Latino/a Catholicism. This thematic focus grows out of a conference held in the Fall of 2011 at DePaul University entitled, “Cosmic Liturgy: The Vision of Alejandro García-Rivera.” We gathered then to celebrate Alex’s legacy and mourn his passing. Alex died young, and his departure was both sad and sudden. The collection of short essays in that issue, revised from presentations given at that conference, will be a fitting memorial to the still undiscovered legacy of this remarkable man, and will be joined by complementary articles from scholars in Latin American and Latino Studies.

These two issues are just the beginning; evidence of diálogo in process of discovering a new path, un camino. In his last publication before he died, Alex García...