A MONTHLY LETTER TO RESEARCHERS

DECOLONIAL
RESEARCH BRIEF

A Bitácora for Theological Research

Vol. 1, No. 2 • August 2026

Whose worlds are being
permitted to have a future?

Oscar García-Johnson, PhD

Editorial: Why a Bitácora?

A bitácora is a navigational record. It does not pretend to contain the sea. It records conditions: currents, storms, hazards, changed routes, and the judgments made while traveling through them. For theological research, it can name a disciplined way of reading in a time when events arrive faster than careful interpretation.

This brief brings two archives into relation. One is the archive of the present: war, displacement, hunger, climate disturbance, economic coercion, and the practices of care through which communities endure. The other is the archive of scholarship: books, articles, methods, arguments, and the questions now taking form. Neither archive is reducible to the other. Research has its own time; it may precede a crisis, accompany it, or struggle to find adequate language years after it. A theological newsletter ought not grade scholars against the news cycle.

The question, then, is not whether a given author has addressed the right headline. It is whether our reading habits enable us to recognize the worlds in which knowledge is being made. At times, the two archives correspond with unexpected force. At other times, they disclose a distance that calls for patience, further study, or a different research question. Both correspondence and silence can instruct us.

The Bitácora is therefore a practice of perception. It asks what our intellectual formation lets us see, what it trains us to pass over, and what kinds of responsibility follow when theological inquiry takes seriously life on the underside of a damaged world. August's materials return us to a difficult but necessary question: Whose worlds are being permitted to have a future?

I. Conditions Recorded

This is a selective record, verified September 1, 2026. It is descriptive rather than exhaustive; the figures and conditions cited here remain subject to revision by the responsible agencies.

Palestine/Gaza: recovery without security

OCHA's August reporting described Gaza's humanitarian situation as critical amid continuing military activity, civilian casualties, and damage to health and education infrastructure. Nearly the whole population was concentrated in less than half of the Strip, under conditions of severe overcrowding. The point is not to compress that situation into one number. It is to name the relation between physical destruction, restricted movement, interrupted care, and a population's ability to inhabit ordinary time: to heal, study, plant, work, mourn, and make plans.

For theological work, Gaza cautions against treating futurity as a neutral good. A future can be promised in diplomatic language while the material conditions for its inhabitation are steadily removed. The relevant question is not only whether peace is named, but whether life-sustaining institutions, places, relationships, and practices are made possible.

Iran, USrael, and the political economy of passage

The regional conflict was also registered in oil markets. The International Energy Agency reported that the breakdown of the mid-June Iran-US ceasefire and renewed disruption around the Strait of Hormuz helped drive sharp price volatility in July and August. Its August outlook linked maritime disruption, reduced Gulf output, tighter product markets, and pressure on fuel-dependent households and supply chains far from the theater of war.

This is not a detour from questions of violence. Energy routes are part of the architecture through which conflict is distributed. They connect military escalation to transport, food prices, public budgets, and household endurance. A decolonial account of security must ask whose mobility is protected, whose fuel remains affordable, and which communities absorb the costs of geopolitical decisions made elsewhere.

Nepal, Colombia, and Venezuela: disaster is never only natural

On August 26, a glacial collapse triggered flash floods along Nepal's Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors, reaching communities in Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, and downstream areas. By September 1, Nepal's disaster authority had confirmed more than 1,000 deaths and nearly 4,000 people still missing, making this the country's deadliest disaster since the 2015 earthquake; UNICEF separately reported more than 17,000 children in urgent need of assistance. The speed of the event and the difficulty of reaching cut-off communities reveal a familiar fact: exposure to hazard becomes catastrophe through uneven infrastructure, information, housing, and access to care.

In northern South America, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Colombia's Chocó department on August 10, killing more than 330 people and displacing hundreds of thousands, with the greatest damage concentrated in Chocó, one of the country's poorest and most conflict-affected regions. Weeks later, heavy rainfall flooded Caracas and other Venezuelan areas still recovering from two major June earthquakes that had killed more than 6,400 people there. These events should not be collapsed into one regional story. Yet together they invite attention to a shared question: how do public capacity, cross-border solidarity, debt, urban form, and prior vulnerability shape what follows a shock? The theological task is not to sacralize disaster, but to read the social arrangements that make recovery so unequally available.

Sudan and Haiti: protracted emergencies and the ethics of abandonment

Sudan entered another month of a war that has made food, movement, and humanitarian access instruments of precarity. WFP reported that almost 19.5 million people faced crisis-level hunger or worse, with 14 areas across Darfur and South Kordofan at risk of famine through September. The same report named mass displacement, market breakdown, and restricted access as interlocking conditions rather than separate problems.

Haiti likewise continued to bear an emergency in which armed violence, displacement, and institutional fragility meet. In an August Security Council briefing, the United Nations cited 1,408 people killed and 656 injured during the second quarter of 2026; a late-August attack in Kenscoff underscored the exposure of families and children. To call either situation 'chronic' risks making it appear ordinary. Protracted crisis is not a natural state of affairs. It is the repetition of preventable abandonment.

Tariffs and contested livelihood

August also brought renewed evidence that trade policy is a field of political contest with intimate effects. Brazil's request for WTO consultations challenged additional US duties, while Canada announced countermeasures after new US tariffs on Canadian goods. These disputes operate at the scale of national policy, but their effects move through farms, ports, small businesses, wages, food costs, and public revenue. Political economy belongs in theological reading because the future is financed, priced, insured, and rationed as well as imagined.

II. Biblical Witness: Scripture, Reception, and the Borders of Interpretation

The Bible does not enter this Bitácora as a final authority placed above the month's record, nor as a storehouse of verses waiting to be attached to contemporary emergencies. It enters as a contested archive: a collection of ancient texts with histories of interpretation that have sometimes sustained imperial projects and, at other times, nourished practices of resistance, survival, and repair. Emerging biblical scholarship helps us ask not only what a text meant in its ancient setting, but who has been authorized to interpret it, translate it, display it, and use it to order the present.

Psalm 120: a borderlands reading

Gregory L. Cuéllar's recent work offers a compelling August interlocutor. Reading Psalm 120 from the southern US borderlands, he resists the detached 'objective gaze' that can make suffering visible without making the interpreter answerable to it. The psalm begins with distress and deceit, names life among hostile neighbors, and longs for peace while dwelling amid those prepared for war. It is not a direct map of Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, or the US-Mexico border. Its ancient setting and its later reception require more care than analogy permits.

Yet Cuéllar's borderland hermeneutic makes one question difficult to avoid: from where do we hear this voice of distress? When a text is read with displaced and racialized communities rather than only about them, its language of hostile dwelling can expose the conditions under which security is distributed unevenly. This is a methodological contribution as much as an exegetical one. The task is neither to claim that the psalm predicts the present nor to make contemporary trauma serve as an illustration for biblical learning. It is to let the encounter disturb habits of reading that separate textual interpretation from the bodies, borders, and institutions through which interpretation takes place.

That distinction matters for the August record. A decolonial biblical hermeneutic will ask how passages about land, migration, peoplehood, empire, and promise have been used to authorize dispossession as well as to contest it. It cannot begin with a presumed innocence of either the text or its interpreters. It must attend to historical difference, the text's internal tensions, contemporary reception, and the ethical relations created by the act of reading.

Emerging biblical scholarship in the month's field

Several current trajectories merit sustained attention. Eric M. Trinka's review of migration and refugee studies in Hebrew Bible interpretation shows how social-scientific work on mobility is changing the questions scholars bring to exile, resettlement, and belonging. Alice T. Reed's study of the First Nations Version New Testament places translation, evangelicalism, ethics, and decoloniality in the same frame. Recent ecological readings from African settings bring Genesis, climate justice, Indigenous knowledge, and Afro-ecofeminism into a relation that refuses both dominion theology and a romanticized appeal to creation.

These voices belong alongside, not beneath, the month's work in theology, migration, and political ecology. They also extend the Bitácora's central discipline. In each case, biblical scholarship becomes most useful when it can identify the social location of its own reading, receive ordinary and Indigenous readers as interpreters rather than raw material, and remain candid about the Bible's entanglement with colonial power. The question is less 'What does the Bible say about the crisis?' than 'What kinds of reading can make a faithful, historically responsible, and non-extractive response possible?'

III. Reading the Month

The August research briefs do not form a single school. They gather Indigenous theology, Asian Christian thought, migration studies, public theology, political ecology, and research method. Read together, they suggest several trajectories.

1. Cosmology, land, and the refusal of extractive abstraction

The special issue of Studies in World Christianity on Indigenous theologies presses beyond the familiar request to add local voices to a stable theological frame. Rathiulung Elias KC describes Indigenous theology as a reorientation at the level of being, relation, and renewal; Jocabed R. Solano Miselis foregrounds memory in Abya Yala as resistance to epistemicide. Their force lies in refusing the separation of doctrine from land, kinship, history, and more-than-human life.

This trajectory meets August's flood and earthquake reports with a more demanding question than stewardship alone can bear. What changes when land is not a setting for theology or a resource for development, but part of the field of relation through which creaturely life is known? Such work also requires care. Theological retrieval must not turn Indigenous knowledge into an ecological supplement for institutions that remain unwilling to cede authority, territory, or interpretive control.

2. Pneumatology from movement, settlement, and vulnerability

Hyeong Kyoon Kim's proposal of a 'Migrational Triune God' and John Alex and Amos Yong's account of Asian Pentecostal theologies both direct attention to the Spirit in mobile, grassroots, and translocal Christian worlds. Their questions are not identical, but both disturb a pneumatology confined to abstract doctrinal description. The Spirit is encountered amid language, movement, belonging, worship, and the work of making a life across difference.

This does not authorize romantic accounts of migration. Forced movement is also loss, legal exposure, family separation, and exhausted labor. A responsible pneumatology must therefore attend to material conditions as carefully as it attends to religious imagination. It must distinguish forms of spiritual language that open space for life from forms that baptize nationalism, conquest, or an economy of disposability.

3. Ecclesiality after the fiction of stable cultures

Hanna Kang's Asian Latinxs, Mestizaje, and Intercultural Theology provides a timely resource for reconsidering how border ecclesiality is named. By recentering Asian Latinx experience in debates about mestizaje, the book makes visible histories that categorical habits have obscured. Its contribution is not the discovery of a new demographic niche. It is the challenge to a theological grammar that too readily treats cultures as coherent blocks which meet only after migration.

The church is often recognizable in translation, hospitality, contested memory, and shared improvisation rather than in territorial stability. That recognition can make room for a constructive ecclesiology of border worlds. It should also make us alert to unequal power within churches: who translates, who is expected to assimilate, whose grief is received as public, and whose ways of knowing remain classified as merely cultural.

4. Public theology from the sites where futures are administered

Günter Thomas's account of public theology as 'twilight theology' offers a useful caution against triumphal expectation. Public theology must be able to name a surplus it cannot produce by its own plans, even as it listens within the professions and institutions where common life is negotiated. Cas Wepener and Ignatius Swart bring homiletics into conversation with the decolonization of development in Africa, shifting attention from abstract religion-and-development claims to the practices through which public meaning is shaped.

Together, these works direct theological attention to the sites where the future is administered: clinics, schools, ports, courts, shelters, energy systems, farms, and municipal budgets. They also make an interpretive demand. The public is not only a stage on which theology speaks. It is a field in which communities are sorted into those who can expect protection and those asked to survive without it.

5. Method after epistemicide: relation, refusal, and the commons

The methodological trajectory is perhaps the most searching. Anupama Ranawana's work on refusal names a limit to the academic desire to extract, translate, and possess. Dana Lloyd's edited volume on Native American religions asks what teaching and learning look like on stolen land. Miriam Tola's feminist political ecology reconsiders the commons through practices of care and resistance. These works do not supply a portable method. They make method answerable to relation, history, place, and accountability.

For doctoral researchers, that is both constraint and invitation. A research design may be technically competent while remaining extractive in the relations it creates. Participation cannot be reduced to access; positionality cannot be reduced to a paragraph; reciprocity cannot be delayed until the acknowledgments. The question is not whether a method displays decolonial language, but whether it changes who can define the problem, interpret the material, and benefit from the work.

A secular counterpoint sharpens this discipline further. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Marxist-Leninist, secular horizon) marked the anniversary of the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana this August with a newsletter on radical traditions. Roberto Fernández Retamar's reading of Shakespeare's Caliban—enslaved by Prospero and taught a language built for obedience, yet turning that language against his master—argues that the tools accumulated by empire do not belong naturally to the coloniser; their reclamation is restitution, not imitation. Jalal Al-e Ahmad's Gharbzadegi reaches a parallel conclusion: dependency is cured not by retreat into an uncontaminated past but by sovereignty over categories a people did not choose. Both are close kin to Cuéllar's borderlands reading of Psalm 120 in Section II, refusing the choice between discarding an imposed inheritance and using it as though untouched by power. The kinship has a limit worth stating plainly: Retamar and Al-e Ahmad write from a tradition in which religious inheritance is, finally, ideology awaiting redirection; this Bitácora treats Scripture and the movement of the Spirit among displaced communities as a non-reducible site of knowledge. René Depestre's caution, from the same newsletter, that cultural affirmation severed from material struggle can harden into essentialism deserves a theological hearing rather than dismissal—it sharpens, rather than contradicts, the warning already given in III.1. An ecology of knowledge that only reads sources congenial to its own commitments is not yet decolonial; it has simply chosen new authorities to leave unexamined.

IV. Where the Conversation Remains Thin

The record above should not be read as a charge against individual scholars. A Bitácora identifies missing instruments as well as helpful bearings. Several absences deserve sustained attention.

First, theologies of land, displacement, and repair need closer engagement with Palestine, without treating Palestinian experience as an illustrative case for theories made elsewhere. Second, research on migration and identity still requires a stronger political-economic account of oil, tariffs, debt, food systems, logistics, and insurance. These are not secondary contexts; they help determine whether families can remain, leave, return, or rebuild.

Third, disability and chronic illness appear too often as aftereffects of war or disaster rather than as sites of theological authority and social analysis. Fourth, humanitarian contraction requires more theological scrutiny. What forms of moral language normalize the withdrawal of support from people whose survival depends on access, funding, and safe passage? Finally, the growth of climate and Indigenous theologies must be accompanied by careful attention to consent, sovereignty, and the danger of appropriating knowledge without yielding institutional power.

V. An Interpretive Proposal

August suggests a tentative proposal. Coloniality does not distribute only territory, labor, race, knowledge, and political voice unevenly. It also distributes the possibility of a future. Some communities inherit institutions designed to protect continuity: secure housing, insurance, documentation, public services, mobility, and credible promises of repair. Others are asked to reconstruct futurity repeatedly under occupation, displacement, debt, environmental disruption, or political abandonment.

This is not an argument for despair or for a generic theology of resilience. Resilience can become an alibi when institutions celebrate communities for enduring what should have been prevented. Re-existence, in a stronger sense, names the practices through which communities preserve life, renew relations, keep memory, organize mutual care, and imagine futures that prevailing arrangements have rendered improbable. It includes prayer and ritual, but also archive-making, food distribution, teaching, legal advocacy, remittance, land defense, and collective mourning.

Theological research can participate in this work when it refuses to treat communities as sources of data alone. It can ask how categories travel; how research names harm; how it receives refusal; and how it makes its own institutional location accountable. Such work will remain provisional. It should be modest about what it can claim. Yet it may help enlarge the field of what becomes perceptible, sayable, and possible.

VI. Questions for Doctoral Research

• What future does this dissertation assume, and whose ability to inhabit that future remains unexamined?
• How does the project connect theology to the political economy of energy, food, debt, borders, or humanitarian access?
• Which communities are treated as objects of pastoral care, and what would change if they were recognized as producers and interpreters of theological knowledge?
• How does the project read Scripture and its history of interpretation—as authority, analogy, or contested archive—and whose reading is treated as normative?
• Does the project's method seize and redirect the intellectual and institutional tools inherited from colonial and ecclesial power, or does it borrow their forms while leaving their direction unchanged?
• What forms of evidence does the project privilege, and what forms of memory, practice, silence, or land-based relation does it render unintelligible?
• How will consent, refusal, co-interpretation, and reciprocity shape the research process beyond a statement of positionality?
• Where do disability, chronic illness, and care work enter the project's account of violence, displacement, and public life?
• What institutional arrangements would have to change for the project’s theological proposal to become materially credible?
• What practices of re-existence are already present, and how can the research avoid turning them into proof of a community's capacity to endure abandonment?

Curated Annotated Bibliography

All entries were checked against publisher, journal, or institutional records on September 1, 2026. Annotations indicate why each item matters for this issue; they are not substitutes for the works themselves.

Essential

Elias KC, Rathiulung. “The Cosmological Challenge of Indigenous Theology: Being, Relations and Renewal.” Studies in World Christianity 32, no. 2 (2026): 130–152. https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2026.0551.

A forceful account of Indigenous theology as a challenge to theological ontology and cosmology, rather than an optional contextual supplement. Essential for reading land, relation, and creatureliness without instrumentalizing them.

Kang, Hanna. Asian Latinxs, Mestizaje, and Intercultural Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2026.

Re-centers Asian Latinx histories within debates on mestizaje and offers a generative resource for border ecclesiology, intercultural theology, and the critique of fixed cultural categories.

Kim, Hyeong Kyoon. “The Migrational Triune God: A Study from Migrant Perspectives.” Religions 17, no. 8 (2026): 896. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17080896.

A contextual Trinitarian proposal that interprets migration as a theological lens. It gives doctoral readers a focused example of doctrine brought into relation with migrant experience.

Solano Miselis, Jocabed R. “Indigenous Memories as Resistance against Epistemicide: Reflections from Experiences with Memoria Indígena in Abya Yala (the Americas).” Studies in World Christianity 32, no. 2 (2026): 167–188. https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2026.0553.

Connects collective memory, sacred relation, and resistance to epistemicide. Especially useful for work on archives, oral knowledge, theology from the land, and the ethical stakes of remembrance.

Biblical Scholarship

Cuéllar, Gregory L. “Decolonizing Western Biblical Studies at the Southern US Borderlands.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Bible, Race, and Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197684221.013.0016.

A major resource for the August issue. Cuéllar reads Psalm 120 through borderlands theory and postcolonial trauma hermeneutics, centering racialized suffering while challenging the disciplinary habits that render it abstract.

Reed, Alice T. “Ethics, Decoloniality, and Evangelicalism in the First Nations Version New Testament.” The Bible Translator 76, no. 3 (2025): 439–458. https://doi.org/10.1177/20516770251391456.

An important entry point into the ethics of translation, Indigenous reception, and the contested relation between evangelicalism and decoloniality.

Trinka, Eric M. “Migration and Refugee Studies as Interpretive Heuristics for the Hebrew Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship with Commentary.” Currents in Biblical Research 24, no. 1 (2025): 6–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476993X251371077.

Maps a developing body of scholarship that uses migration and refugee studies to reread the Hebrew Bible. Particularly useful for doctoral work on exile, mobility, resettlement, and social-scientific method.

Recommended

Alex, John, and Amos Yong. “Asian Pentecostal Theologies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Asian Christian Theologies, edited by Peter C. Phan, 220–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197633793.003.0015.

A concise orientation to the plural, grassroots, and translocal forms of Asian Pentecostal thought. It helps resist accounts of Pentecostalism that assume a single Western center.

Thomas, Günter. “Good Public Theology Is Twilight Theology: A Constructive Deconstruction of Public Theology.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 28, no. 1 (2026): 56–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijst.12780.

A restrained account of public theology’s limits and possibilities. Useful for asking how theology listens within professional and institutional publics without converting promise into easy program.

Wepener, Cas, and Ignatius Swart. “Preaching and the Decolonisation of Development in Africa.” Religion and Development (2026): 1–34. https://doi.org/10.30965/27507955-12340408.

Brings preaching, development, and decolonial practice into close relation. It makes public theology answerable to concrete practices of interpretation and social formation.

Bamidele, Titilayo Lydia, and Seun Bamidele. “Rethinking Religion in Development: Faith, Power, and the Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals.” Religion and Development 4, nos. 2–3 (2026): 191–212. https://doi.org/10.30965/27507955-12340406.

A useful companion for work at the intersection of faith, development, power, and the Sustainable Development Goals; it presses beyond celebratory accounts of religious actors.

Methodological

Lloyd, Dana, ed. Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stolen Land. London: Routledge, 2026. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003564751.

An unusually practical resource for thinking about pedagogy, sovereignty, land, and the category of religion. Its method is especially relevant for teaching and research conducted within settler institutions.

Ranawana, Anupama. “Three Texts, to Restore and to Return: Centring Refusal in Indigenous Thinking.” Studies in World Christianity 32, no. 2 (2026): 153–166. https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2026.0552.

A concise and important meditation on refusal, restoration, and relation. It is a corrective to research habits that treat access, translation, and extraction as unquestioned goods.

Tola, Miriam. Resurgent Commons: Feminist Political Ecologies in the European South. New York: Fordham University Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781531512552.

Brings feminist political ecology and activist practices into dialogue around the commons. Helpful for expanding the brief’s account of care, ecological repair, and collective futurity.

Contemporary Interlocutors

Vijay [Prashad]. “We Dig into the Soil of Our Radical Traditions: The Thirty-Fifth Newsletter.” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 27 August 2026. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/our-radical-traditions/.

Marxist-Leninist, secular horizon. Cited in Section III as a counterpoint to Cuéllar's borderlands hermeneutic, not as an authority. Included here in the interest of an ecology of knowledge that names, rather than conceals, the standpoint of every source it engages—including its own.

Sources for Conditions Recorded

The following records support the factual summaries in Section I. Retrieved and checked September 1, 2026.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Humanitarian Situation Report | 7 August 2026,” Occupied Palestinian Territory. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-7-august-2026.

International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report: August 2026, 12 August 2026. https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-august-2026.

United Nations Population Fund, “Flash Update on the Nepal Floods,” 2026; UNICEF, “Flash Floods in Nepal Leave More Than 17,000 Children in Need of Urgent Humanitarian Assistance,” 2026; Al Jazeera, “Death Toll from Devastating Floods in Nepal Surpasses 1,000,” 1 September 2026. https://www.unfpa.org/resources/flash-update-nepal-floods; https://www.unicef.org/asia-pacific/press-releases/flash-floods-nepal-leave-more-17000-children-need-urgent-humanitarian-assistance; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/1/death-toll-from-devastating-floods-in-china-and-nepal-surpasses-1000.

Pan American Health Organization, Natural Hazards Monitoring, 24 August 2026; Colombia One, “Colombia Earthquake Death Toll Rises to 331 as Damage Mounts Two Weeks After,” 25 August 2026, citing Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD); AccuWeather, “Heavy Rains Hit Vulnerable Communities after Venezuela Earthquakes,” 24 August 2026. https://www.paho.org/en/natural-hazards-monitoring/natural-hazards-monitoring-24-august-2026; https://colombiaone.com/2026/08/25/colombia-earthquake-death-toll/; https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/heavy-rains-hit-vulnerable-communities-after-venezuela-earthquakes/1927034.

World Food Programme, “Risk of Famine in Sudan,” accessed 1 September 2026; United Nations Security Council, “The Question Concerning Haiti,” 2026. https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/sudan-emergency; https://transcripts.un.org/en/sc/10216.

World Trade Organization, “Brazil Initiates Dispute Regarding Additional Duties Imposed by the United States,” 30 July 2026; Government of Canada, “Canada Announces Targeted Countermeasures,” 28 August 2026. https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news26_e/ds646rfc_30jul26_468_e.htm; https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2026/08/canada-announces-targeted-countermeasures-and-substantive-support-for-workers-and-businesses-in-response-to-us-tariffs.html.

Closing Reflection

A Bitácora cannot record every wound or every work of scholarship. Its discipline is more modest and more demanding: to note where we are, what conditions make life difficult or possible, what reading helps us perceive, what remains obscured, and which questions require further navigation.

Doctoral formation is not the accumulation of references. It is an apprenticeship in how, where, and for whom we read. May this practice keep our work rigorous without becoming insulated; accountable without becoming performative; hopeful without becoming evasive. The future of theological knowledge will be shaped not only by what we publish, but by the worlds we learn to recognize and the communities to whom our research becomes answerable.

Oscar García-Johnson
Professor of Theology & Decolonial Studies
Fuller Theological Seminary