Decolonial Love

Abstract

This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.