Forthcoming:
Pope Francis in Postcolonial Reality: Complexities, Ambiguities, and Paradoxes
edited by Nicolas Panotto and Jason Craige Harris
Postcolonial frameworks attune us to contradictions, complexities, paradoxes, and ambivalences that mark our social, cultural, economic, and religious formations. They unsettle binary oppositions and either/or logics that erect imaginary regimes of purity or impurity, innocence or guilt, despair or hope, death or resurrection. A robust postcolonial analysis displaces totalizing claims, showing the ways dynamics and possibilities of oppression and liberation co-exist, always simultaneously emergent. Bringing such an analysis to bear on the election of Pope Francis, and by extension contemporary Catholicism and the legacies of Christianity in the Americas, yields a profound portrait of the burdens and promises of religion, of the everyday strivings of Latin Americans, and of the intricacies of the human person.
Chapter Descriptions:
• Preface
• Contradictions, complexities, paradoxes, and ambivalences that characterize Latin American responses to Pope Francis’ election; how it responds to the complexity of the construction of religious identities in Latin America
• Contradictions, complexities, paradoxes, and ambivalences that characterize the legacies of Christianity in the Americas, and its relation to Pope Francis’ election
• Theorizing progressive change in uniquely Roman Catholic ways; between scholastic and postcolonial philosophy
• Pope Francis in light of critical poverty concerns (preferential option for the poor, Jesuit identity, charity, economic justice/structural critique)
• Pope Francis in light of critical sexuality and gender concerns (marriage equality, women’s ordination, and the roles of women and of sexual minorities in the church)
• Pope Francis in light of critical race concerns (Catholicism, racial hierarchies, symbolic constructions of whiteness and blackness in Latin America)
• Pope Francis in light of relationship between liberation theology and postcolonial theology and the future of critical theologies
• Pope Francis in light of religious pluralism/inter-religious engagement
• Pope Francis in light of imperial religion/Christendom, collusions between religion and state/religion and empire; Argentine history
• Pope Francis election in the light of contemporary geopolitical situation. Why a Latin American Pope now?
• Conclusion: Pope Francis in light of the future–hope, resurrection, longing, prophetic role of religion, everyday faith of marginalized Latin Americans, new birth, resurrection
Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine.
Areas of Interest and Research:
African American Religious Studies
Africana Philosophy
African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought
African American Intellectual History
Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought
Philosophies of Liberation
Contemporary Religious Thought
Race, Gender, and American Christianities
Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms
Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas
(Christian) Social Ethics
Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy
Theories of Race, Gender, and Power
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.
