Dear Friends,
Every Monday I post a theological pamphlet about some theme/issue/topic related to life and God. A pamphlet is a piece of paper, from one to 4 pages, that can be folded, holding short position on something with just enough information to spur some action. My pamphlets will be expressed through a folding/unfolding of short videos. Revolutions disseminate through the distribution of pamphlets, hoping to catch people’s attentions to something that only a group, together, can make happen. It is a performative way of doing theology, or in the words of Tom Driver, it is “the showing of a doing.”
The hope here is that these doings, these pamphlets, in forms of actions, movements, words, books, art, performances, images, dreams, hopes and imagination, will gain some social ripple effects that might help us think/act/change somethings in our individual/common life.
This project is inspired by Prophet Gentleness, Profeta Gentileza, a man who decided to give up everything in life to write a long pamphlet to the world bellow a car bridge in Rio De Janeiro, to distribute flowers, share love and give strong words demanding that we love one another.
Like Prophet Gentileza, as a Christian social-eeconomic-cultural-religious actor, I have responsibilities with our ways of living. So my eye, ear, mouth, hands and body will try to be with, or near to the poor. Perhaps, only perhaps, we will find common breathings of the Spirit in our midst, so we can share a common, even if radically different, enthusiasm/en-theos-ism (being possessed by God) in our lives!
Come join me! Watch the videos! Do something where you are!
Blessings,
Cláudio
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This interview was recorded in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in December 2013 with workers of the Landless Movement. The Landless Movement is the world largest social movement with more than 500.000 members and is connected with the Via Campesina. The movement proposes a new possible world, fight for agrarian reform and fights against agribusiness. They propose just distribution of the land, family farming, communitarian work, bio-diversity and food without any chemical use. In this video, you will see how poor people, even homeless, can gain a home, a community, just work and a mission in life! For more info see: http://www.mstbrazil.org/
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Read more about Cláudio Carvalhaes here.
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.
Read more about Cláudio Carvalhaes here.
