Hadje C Sadje

BIOGRAPHY

Hadje Cresencio Sadje is an associate member of the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies, University of London, UK. Mr. Sadje obtained his MA in Crosscultural Theology at the Protestant Theological University, The Netherlands, and MA in Ecumenical Studies (specializing in Sociology of Religion) at the University of Bonn. He is a visiting Ph.D. research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria, a student ambassador at the Paris Institute of Critical Thinking, and a visiting lecturer at the Divinity School Silliman University Philippines.

Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg Germany. In the world of practice, his notable works are in association with the Christian Peacemaker Team Greece, Caritas Brussels, World Student Christian Movement-Europe (WSCM-Europe), EAPPI-World Council of Churches (WCC), PeaceBuilders Community Philippines, and Pananaw Pinoy. While in academe, he researches and teaches at the Barcelona Applied Social Sciences Spain and the Foundation Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Mr. Sadje’s research interests include decoloniality, global politics and world religions, sociology of religion, and political/public theologies.

ABSTRACT

Hadje C. Sadje & Ma. Glovedi Joy L. Bigornia, “The Great Reset: (Re)imaging, (Re)liberating, and (Re)embracing Theologies of Liberation in the Age of Hyper-Uncertainty” 

In 2010, Slavoj Žižek published a book titled, Living in the End Times (2010), which offers a provocative view of how we have arrived at a given historical situation, particularly the global capitalist economic system. After twelve years, the insights of Žižek are still very much relevant as a lens to analyze the global system vis-à-vis the issues and crises experienced at present.

Žižek contends, “a return to the critique of political economy” that cuts across social reality, more importantly, shed light on a topic under constant discussion of the ongoing global crises due to poverty and hunger, unfair distribution of wealth and resources, the COVID pandemic, climate change, among others — underscore the need for liberation (2010a, 181-243; Žižek, The Return of the Political Economy, 2010b, 60-82). Although political economy analysis shows the intersection of politics and economy and the consequences of ignoring it, Žižek suggests that contemporary social scientists must incorporate other important social issues such as class struggle, superpower politics, and guilt-assuaging tricks of commercialized charity (2010a; 2010b).

In the world today, we find a wide range of Christian theological responses to the ongoing global crises, for instance, theologies of liberation offer various critical analyses and critiques that confront policymakers’ competence, worldview, and the adequacy of their economic-political models. For some reason, theologies of liberation have changed in the past fifty-five years. According to Josef Estermann, it became a highly academic enterprise or an abstract theological discourse (Estermann, 2017: 20-21). Some, like non-organic European academic theologians, viewed theologies of liberation as antiquated or see it as another way of doing contextual theology that is reduced into process-oriented theological thinking (Estermann, 2017).

In this context, this paper is divided into three parts. The first part shows how progressive thinking domains, like theologies of liberation, become a highly academic enterprise or an abstract theological discourse. The second part of the paper addresses the extent to which theologies of liberation are still relevant today for reformulating theological reflection, especially from the non-Western perspective. The last part offers some decolonial reflections in response to (re)imaging, (re)liberating, and (re)embracing theologies of liberation in the age of hyper-uncertainty.