The question then is not so much: “Can providence be liberative?” but rather, “How might liberation be understood as God’s providence?”
Liberation, caught between queer nihilism and eschatological certainty, must seek an third way beyond the binary of hopefulness and hopelessness through the negation of both. It must transpose itself into an apophatic register as the experience of continual failure, an uncertain endless becoming, that might be called simple hope.
What if Liberation itself must be liberated? Or maybe, like the nonperson and the nonbeing, it has always been breathed into by the breath of white violence.
If we are to hope for anything beyond the end of hope, it is in the incommunicable and incommensurable nature that is the moan.
Fifty years after the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation, what, if any, relevance does Christian liberation theology and Gutiérrez’s work have for our present moment? Do we still have a memory of a liberating God? And if not, is there a liberative power in grappling with the absence of this memory?
Pope Francis proclaims: “There was a time, even in our churches, when people spoke of a holy war or a just war. Today we cannot speak in this manner.” Yet, we can and have been invited by Francis and others to speak in the manner of centering nonviolence.
In his point-blank manner, Francis draws our attention that such solutions suffered from “the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, “green”, romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interests.”
Can a medieval monk help us decolonize eco-apocalyptic history?
The call to abolish the family sounds bad – really bad; then again, so does the end of the world. In a moment rife with talk of “environmental apocalypse,” the position of negativity and non-futurity assigned to queer people in Catholic environmentalism becomes a starting point for rethinking the role of “the family” in a genuinely integral and sustainable ecology.
Pope Francis suggests that trans people are destroying the world. Perhaps he might learn something if we did.
There’s an understandable temptation to think that climate disaster is nature’s way of rebelling against the Anthropocene. But this is a dangerous way of thinking we should ward against.