In the Presence of Absence

podcastOPTalks
Written By Open Plaza

Jacob Leal talks with Dr. Filipe Maia about activating the imagination with hope in the face of a colonized future and about his latest book, Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism

Rubber Plant, Ficus elastica, a species of Fig Trees. Parque Ecológico, Campinas, Brazil, 2012. Photo: rafaelsoares

 
 

In this episode of OP Talks, Jacob Leal talks with his mentor Dr. Filipe Maia, Assistant Professor of Theology at the Boston University School of Theology, about his book, Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022), and pivots to the power of the imagination, ancestors and the interruption of linearity. Dr. Maia argues that a language of active hope, or “future-talk,” is critical as a mode of critique, particularly with the financial market’s need to control future outcomes and its sacrificial nature, especially for the oppressed. The scholars’ conversation recognizes the importance of liberation theologist Ruben Alves and the Brazilian/Portuguese concept of saudade, which captures the essence of absence and deep longing for return. Leal, a third-year PhD student at Boston University, illustrates these points by describing his research about the dreams of the ancestors and about the Mesoamerican ballgame Ullamaliztli, which is having a resurgence in present-day Mexico.

As a testament to his willfulness and longing to summon a different future, Dr. Maia states: “My motion in the direction of hope is fragile, mournful, and tentative, but is also quite stubborn. The hope I embrace persists. It keeps coming back, haunting me forward...I remain within the language of hope, not to simply profess that I have hope.”

 

"In short scope and lucid prose, Felipe Maia’s Trading Futures makes a provocative argument about such fundamental topics as justice, capitalism, theology, and time…Trading Futures effectively shows that agents of financial capitalism and theologians of liberation can differ profoundly in their orientations toward the future."

Matthew Scherer,
Perspectives On Politics

OP Talks

Trading Futures

Dr. Jung Mo Sung talks to Dr. Filipe Maia about his recent book, a theological critique of financialized capitalism

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Jacob Leal

Jacob Leal, a PhD candidate in Constructive Theology at Boston University, is a Texas-born Mexican-American whose research is influenced by ancestral veneration of what remains in the afterlife of colonial trauma, in both Mexican culture and Mexican people. Leal holds an MTS from Duke University Divinity School and a BA from Vanguard University of Southern California. Rooted in precolonial Indigenous cultures and how Indigenous ancestors haunt structures of coloniality, his interest in Mexican ancestral understandings seeks to offer important contributions to Constructive Theology. Leal’s research employs liberation theologies, decolonial theory, and trauma studies to explore the continuing presence of our ancestors. As such, the influence of his abuela‘s stories of visitations from deceased loved ones is a force toward his precolonial understanding of time, space, and death. Leal hopes to expose negative Western labels of ancestral visitations, which deem interactions with the dead taboo. His passion for theological research and training simultaneously realizes the importance of creating inclusive academic spaces and opportunities for Latines and marginalized voices, like his abuela, to tell their stories.

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Filipe Maia

Dr. Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at the Boston University School of Theology. His research and teaching focus on liberation theologies and philosophies, theology and economics, and the Christian eschatological imagination. Dr. Maia's scholarship pays special attention to how imaginaries about the future shape politics, economics, cultural patterns, and religious practices. Employing sources in Marxist and continental philosophies, his current book Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022) offers an analysis of the debate in critical theory, addressing the “financialization” of capitalism to show how future-talk is ubiquitous to financial discourse and how contemporary finance engenders a particular mode of temporality. In this context, he suggests that the language of hope, as approached by Latinx liberation theologians, is a subversive social force that can continuously question and resist the hopes and expectations conjured by hegemonic economic discourses. Dr. Maia holds BTh and BPh degrees from Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, and a ThD from Harvard Divinity School.

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