Overview

What can theology offer in the context of neoliberalism, globalization, growing inequality, and an ever more ecologically precarious planet that disproportionately affects the poor? This book, by one of the country's best-known Latino theologians, explores possibilities for liberation from the forces that would impose certain forms of knowledge on our social world to manipulate our experience of identity, power, and justice. Beautifully written in a refreshingly direct and accessible prose, Maduro's book is nevertheless built upon subtly articulated critiques and insights. But to write a conventional academic tractatus would have run counter to Maduro's project, which is built on his argument that ignorance is masked in the language of expertise, while true knowledge is dismissed because it is sometimes articulated in pedestrian language by those who produce it through the praxis of solidarity and struggle for social justice. With a generosity and receptivity to his readers reminiscent of letters between old friends, and with the pointed but questioning wisdom of a teller of parables, Maduro has woven together a twenty-first-century reply to Marx's ""Theses on Feuerbach."" Neither conventional monograph nor memoir, neither a theological nor a political tract, but with elements of all of these, Maps for a Fiesta arrives as Maduro's philosophical and theological testament-one that celebrates the knowledge-work and justice-making of the poor. What Maduro offers here is a profound meditation on the relationship between knowledge and justice that could be read as a manifesto against the putatively unknowable world that capitalist chaos has made, in favor of a world that is known by the measure of its collective justice. His fiesta grants us the joy that nourishes us in our struggles, just as knowledge gives us the tools to build a more just society. What Maduro offers is nothing less than an epistemology of liberation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Otto Maduro ,  Eduardo Mendieta
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
Imprint:   Fordham University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.272kg
ISBN:  

9780823263059

ISBN 10:   0823263053
Pages:   200
Publication Date:   01 April 2015
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"FOREWORD TO THE 1ST ENGLISH EDITION INTRODUCTION FIESTA, SORROW AND KNOWLEDGE A CURSORY AUTOBIOGRAPHY TO BEGIN WITH WITH LIBERATION THEOLOGIES HOW DID I GET INTERESTED IN THIS KNOWLEDGE THING? AND WHOEVER COULD BE BOTHERED BY THIS STUFF? A SHORTAGE OF SUITABLE READING MATERIALS WHAT, AFTER ALL, DO WE MEAN HERE BY ""KNOWLEDGE""? SOME KEY CLARIFICATIONS 1 - DOES EXPERIENCE SHAPE OUR KNOWLEDGE? SOME DIMENSIONS OF THIS QUESTION DT Life's Formative Experiences DT Life's Joys and Difficulties DT Loving Acceptance DT Social Norms DT What is ""Known and Accepted"" DT Certainties DT Power DT Frustrations DT Contradictions and Inconsistencies A BASIC SYNTHESIS OF THE DISCUSSION 2 - CALMLY REFLECTING ON OUR KNOWLEDGE SOME DIMENSIONS OF THIS QUESTION DT Why Make Life More Complicated than it Already Is? DT Why Reflect Deeply on Our Reality? DT Examining the Place from Which We Know DT Studying the History of What We Want to Know DT Contrasting the Familiar with the Different DT Walking A Mile in Somebody Else's Shoes DT Carefully Reviewing Our Convictions and Positions A BASIC SYNTHESIS OF THE DISCUSSION 3 - OPPRESSION, LIBERATION, AND KNOWLEDGE SOME DIMENSIONS OF THIS QUESTION DT Static Visions and Power Dynamics DT Need and Limits of Theories of Oppression DT Who is Responsible for Our Burdens? DT Isn't Knowledge for Intellectuals Only? DT Practical Context and Theoretical Knowledge DT Expanding Our Criteria for Discerning Truth A BASIC SYNTHESIS OF THE DISCUSSION 4 - HOW DO WE EXPRESS AND SHARE KNOWLEDGE SOME DIMENSIONS OF THIS QUESTION DT Language as an Instrument for World-Construction DT Domination and Language Control DT Communicating in Silence DT For a Creative Re-appropriation of Language DT Marginalization, Liberation, and Language DT Common-Folk Language: Elitist versus Populist Assessments DT Beyond the Written Word A BASIC SYNTHESIS OF THE DISCUSSION 5 - RETHINKING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF KNOWLEDGE SOME DIMENSIONS OF THIS QUESTION DT Modern Sciences: Usefulness or Idolatry? DT Reason, Emotions, and Knowledge DT Knowledge as Imaginative Reconstruction of Relationships DT Knowledge of What (Still) Isn't DT Knowing as Pre-judging, Re-cognizing and Co-knowing DT Knowledge as Misrecognition and Exaggeration DT Knowledge as Continuous Transformation DT Another Way of Looking at the Question of Truth and Error DT Knowledge and Reality: Unity and Distinction A BASIC SYNTHESIS AND A REDEFINITION CONCLUSIONS FROM PAST CERTAINTIES TO A TENTATIVE QUEST FOR THE FUTURE SHARED QUEST(ION)S, RATHER THAN PREFABRICATED ANSWERS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY"

Reviews

"""In a word, Maps for a Fiesta is perennial and relevant."" -- -Andrew Weigert University of Notre Dame"

In a word, Maps for a Fiesta is perennial and relevant. -- -Andrew Weigert * University of Notre Dame *

In a word, 'Maps for a Fiesta' is perennial and relevant. -Andrew Weigert, University of Notre Dame

How do we know what we know or what we think we know? This is a question that has been pondered by philosophers and social theorists throughout many centuries. In Maps for a Fiesta, the late Otto Maduro, a renowned philosopher and sociologist of religion, offers a carefully argued and erudite book in which he delves into this important question within a Latin American and U.S. Latino/a context. * Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology * In a word, Maps for a Fiesta is perennial and relevant.----Andrew Weigert, University of Notre Dame

Author Information

Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He recently edited and introduced Maps for a Fiesta: A Latina/o Perspective on Knowledge and the Global Crisis (FUP, 2015).

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