From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology

In connecting postcolonial, liberationist, feminist, and queer thought, Marcella Althaus-Reid pushes the boundaries of each of these disciplines, uncovering the overlapping systems of oppression, especially of poverty and patriarchy. Her rigorous and challenging analyses include continual engagement with human experience beyond, before, and within any interpretation of text or context.Part One, "Troubling Theology: Liberation Theology Meets Sexuality," attends especially to the voices of poor Latin American women and in doing so questions the patriarchal assumptions of traditional liberation theology. The bodies of women and concrete experience of menstruation are keys to undoing the "universals" of traditional theology and recovering a dialogical christology always in process with the caminata, or walk, of the poorest women.In Part Two, "Indecenting Theology: Undressing Sexual Ideology in Theology," Althaus-Reid uncovers uncritical theological methodologies that are dualistic, hierarchical, exclusive, and androcentric. She calls for new ways of knowing, "epistomologies from the poor" which are characterized by struggle that constantly unseats any theology that is becoming ideology, including heteronormative christology.Part Three, "Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Liberation," suggests that theology is a consumer good and in particular that Latin American Liberation Theology has been reappropriated and marketed for an educated North American theological community.Finally, Part Four, "Indecent, Radical, Queer: The Future of Feminist Theology of Liberation?" incorporates queer theory, which can help theology transgress all boundaries and question all assumptions about God. She again uses experiences of the poor in Latin America, most provocatively in the final chapter in which she reads the life and death of Jesus through a story about a murdered transvestite. Here Althaus-Reid locates Jesus with the most marginalized exploding all sense of christological normalcy in gender or sexuality.I commend this book, as a challenge to pastors, academics, and lay people and as an encouragement to the queer, the poor, and those otherwise marginalized. For those unfamiliar with theology and critical theory, it may be difficult to read and understand but it is well worth the time as it helps us all see the world in new and transgressive ways.

AMAZING BOOK!

good!