Trading Futures

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Written By Open Plaza

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

 
 

Financialized capitalism is “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production,” according to Greta R. Krippner.

In this episode of OP Talks, liberation theologians Dr. Jung Mo Sung and Dr. Filipe Maia discuss his recent book Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022). Dr. Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy.

 
 
 

“Here is a liberation theology for the present—or, better, for the future, the not yet. Filipe Maia brings a longstanding and indispensable tradition of liberationist critique to bear on the contemporary realities of finance capitalism, opening crucial spaces of alterative hope against foreclosed horizons.”

— Devin Singh
Author of Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West

 
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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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Jung Mo Sung

Jung Mo Sung is a Roman Catholic lay theologian trained in theology, ethics, and education. Born in South Korea and has been living in Brazil since 1966, he teaches in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Methodist University of São Paulo, Brazil. He works within the paradigm of liberation theology and is considered a "next generation" theologian-practitioner. His research focuses on the relationship between theology and economics, especially the theological aspects of capitalist economics and the economic aspects of Christian theology. He has written many books on theological critique of political economy, including the following titles in English: Desire, Market and Religion (SCM Press, 2007); Beyond the Spirit of Empire (SCM Press, 2009), co-authored with Néstor Miguez and Joerg Rieger; and The Subject, Capitalism and Religion: Horizons of Hope in Complex Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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