http://wabashcenter.typepad.com/stories_from_the_front_of/2016/01/where-we-begin.html
I write as I teach, from a Latino/a perspective. And I write, as I teach, with an accent, carrying within me voices that liberate me and voices that persist in colonizing my mind, my body and my soul.
It was at the Independent Presbyterian Seminary of São Paulo, Brazil that I started to think critically. My teachers introduced me to a life I never thought existed! I learned about God’s love for all, and about how that love was opposed to the ways in which Brazilian society was structured. There I learned about liberation theology and the gospel possibility for the liberation of the poor. Being poor myself, that resonated vividly in my bones!
With Paulo Freire, Moacir Gadotti, Marilena Chauí and others, I learned that education could be either an apparatus for government control or an action, a social praxis against hegemonic power, against the ideology[1] of those who use the power to benefit themselves, a social praxis that could construct a new society. Fundamentally, education was for liberation! When I remember my theological education, I have a clear sense of what James Baldwin wrote at the end of The Fire Next Time: “Every time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and chains fell off. The impossible is the least one can demand…. We must engage in the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”
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Read the rest in the blog post.