Synopsis (Prologue)
Philosophy and theology have increasingly turned to the problem of the rising numbers of people who live in extremely severe and abasing conditions of oppression, people who are surplus to global economic and political orders which the oppressed define as "neoliberal" and "neocolonial." This work, Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance, is part of that turning, through conversations with those who were and have been living under oppressive conditions, especially in Central America and Mexico, and through conversations with phenomenology, feminist theology, feminist jurisprudence, ethics, and liberation theology.
There is an assertion that divine grace, and the autochthonous organization of the "lifeworld" which phenomenologists discuss, act in concert to seek to enable and empower the flourishing of all things, including humans, who have the reflective capacity to understand, conceptualize, imagine, produce and judge.
The actions of grace and the autochthonous are in a sense the same as they move to privilege places and spaces where flourishing is impeded, to help mediate opportunities for flourishing.
What frequently occurs when people living under oppressive conditions seek to become aware of, or change their circumstances is a backlash by those who control political and economic conditions. This backlash results in resistance. Grace, thus, is the gift of resistance, political and economic, and for the author, nonviolent.There is also an assertion that there is emerging within creation a more intimate and deeper understanding of the connections within which humans thrive together and with the planet, a fragile emergence.
To characterize this emergence the author has employed the neologisms "transintuitivity," "transsubjectivity" and "transreflexivity," each described phenomenologically and theologically. Also asserted is a theology in which the divine is described as emptying itself entirely into creation, empowering through grace and its own risk, through flourishing, through enhancing connections, including those that are considered intuitive, subject-to-subject, and reflexive. These connections, especially present in such sites of resistance as Christian base communities throughout Latin America, can be seen in the daily lives of people who theologize about their circumstances as they seek to discover equitable means of survival within a global economy that has left them surplus.
-- Wes Rehberg
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