Introducing Teología Sin Vergüenza: Queer. Feminist. Latinx. Decolonial Theology
Introducing a new show from Axis Mundi Media.
Teología Sin Vergüenza: Navigating Faith, Activism, and Identity. Teología Sin Vergüenza is a digital platform originally in Spanish, created in response to the far-right's dominance over religious media. The platform serves as a space for people at the intersections of queer or trans feminist theology, faith, and activism to engage in conversations about taboo topics like divorce, sex, gender identity, and abortion. It aims to bridge divides between academic, religious, and activist silos, involving diverse voices from various Christian denominations and beyond. The first English season seeks to make these critical conversations accessible to the Latin American diaspora in the U.S., focusing on real-life experiences and decolonizing faith by separating political agendas from genuine religious traditions.
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We are living in a moment where Latinx people in the United States are being racially profiled.
Where people in unmarked cars wearing masks are kidnapping fathers and mothers, neighbors, colleagues, friends, abuelas, and others.
We're also living in a time when queer people are targeted and attacked, especially those in the trans community.
At Access Mundi Media, we want to bring you the stories at the center of our world to educate in order to activate.
That's why today we're introducing Teologia Sinfraguenza, the English version of a podcast that's been broadcast across Latin America for seven seasons.
This is the first time it will appear in English.
It's a show focused on queer feminist, Latinx people of faith who are living their lives without shame and exploring the colonial aspects of Christianity in order to open up a space for conversation, for healing, and for building resistance against the spiritual violence of ice, of white Christian supremacy and the institutions and structures that hurt so many.
I want to introduce you to the host, and that's Reverend Alba Onofrio, also known as Reverend Sachs.
Rev Alba is going to explain where TSV came from and what it aims to do.
The first episode drops October 13th.
We hope you'll tune in to this one-of-a-kind show now available in English.
Teología Sin Vergüenza roughly translates as shameless theology in English.
And it's a digital media platform and space that originally was done in Spanish.
It was a direct response to the total monopoly that the far right has on all religious programming at that time, both social media, TV, and radio, on anything having to do with religion.
We created it as a space for folks who live at the intersections of queer or trans feminist theology, people of faith, and activists to come together to have real conversations with theologically trained folks about real life issues that are happening to us today,
whether it's divorce, sex and pleasure, gender identity, abortion, this was a place where all of those taboo topics could be talked about with real people in real time who have knowledge of the Bible, theology, Christian tradition, and are ordained clergy for some folks.
TSV started out of a very specific conversation when I was meeting with feminists in Costa Rica.
But I want to tell you the story because it's a repetition of a similar story that I could tell for many, many countries across the globe when I'm having these conversations.
I was visiting a seminary in Costa Rica and after our daily conversations I got invited out to dinner with a group of young Costa Rican feminists.
And the similar thing happens over and over again where we sit through a really intense but wonderful conversation that starts with, okay, but tell me about the rip.
And then it goes on from there to ask about Paul, the submission of women, the Bible, and Christian theology in general.
Underneath that conversation where I answer about appropriate translations, the weaponization of the text for the purposes of patriarchy, where I talk about how politics and religion actually totally go together, and that the Bible is actually a very political book that has a lot of opinions about how we should behave in a political world.
It always ends at the same place.
I didn't know that I could be both feminist or queer and a Christian.
This thing that you're saying, are you the only one who believes it or are there others like you?
And then the hurt is always revealed of folks who have felt like they had to choose between the life-saving work of human rights or their religion.
And that's the moment of truth for me because it says, and they always hear the same thing, where can I go first?
for more?
How can I learn more about this way of thinking about God, this way of reading the Bible, this kind of analysis?
And the truth is, particularly when we're not speaking in English, there is very little that's super accessible for people just to be able to tap into for free to learn more about this.
And of course, that's intentional because that's the way religion of power works.
So the elogia sinvergüenza started in direct response to that question.
How do we create more accessible content for human rights defenders, for LGBTQI people, for feminists, and for others who have a faith, but it doesn't quite square with the world around them and what they're seeing and what they need from God, the Bible, and theology in this moment.
So from there, we took it to, I know some friends who have their theological training and who are queer and/or feminist.
What if we just recorded conversations?
And then those people invited other people, and it organically grew now across every Spanish-speaking country in Latin America and across many states in the US, many episodes of beautiful conversations, and now for the first time in English.
English by Ben Thede.
you you you you So what makes it special?
Well, one of the main things we're doing is bridging the divide between silos of work like the academy or the church or activism.
Another place that makes us really unique is that we talk to folks across the spectrum, from folks who are Pentecostal, evangelical, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, you name it, we've got it.
Folks who currently identify within a Christian denomination, and folks who are spiritual and religious outside of the institution.
We try to talk about things that other places don't allow you to speak up about.
We try to heal some of the wounds of the global north and all of the toxic theology that we've been exporting through colonizing religion for centuries.
We work from a horizontal place in community.
It's a space where we welcome conversation and difference, knowing that we will find a place of common ground, that when we learn from each other and each other's strategies and how each other lives, that we can find places to move forward together.
We already take it for granted that the people that we're talking to deserve to be heard and listened to.
We have theological education, we have different places within this fight for liberation, whether it's from being a professor in an institution to being an activist on the ground or an artif or a pastor.
All of us come together into this space, and each week we focus on one individual person, their lived experience as somebody from Latin America or in the diaspora, and we talk about what is alive and well for them in their work, in their hearts, in their spirits.
We don't come in to it with a preconceived notion of what we need to talk about, what we need to get done.
We focus on what's alive, what corresponds with what's happening in the world, and not in a way that folks have to defend their existence, but rather combines education, theologically trained people with whatever is going on in their particular world, whether it's in a foreign country, whether it's in the US, we're having this conversation, and this is the first season that we're doing it in English.
And that's because we recognize that there are a lot of folks who are part of the Latin American diaspora who don't have access to Spanish either as their first language or because their families have spoken other languages.
We're trying to show with our actions what is happening in the world in real time when we stop paying attention to borders as barriers, when we stop thinking that somebody who thinks differently than us or believes differently than us, or Has a more complex story to tell is somehow less worthy than those who feel like they have it all figured out and have a monotone narrative to tell.
We're also intentionally biased.
We're trying to back up the work of human rights and the struggles for liberation all across the globe through this work.
So we know that we're coming to it with a particular lens and a particular experience as queer and trans people, as activists, as folks who have spent a lot of time and energy doing deep reflection about the critical issues of our time and have things to say about how we might approach those.
We feel like through this interview style that's very conversational, like coffee at the dining room table in the afternoon when someone comes to visit, that we have this way of understanding the whole person, maybe not every detail of their story, but at least we're coming to this point of seeing what they are expired by, what keeps them up at night, what are the things that they're working on to make this world a better place.
This is a way that we're trying to move through time together and bridge the gaps and the silos that we've been created to live into over and over and over again.
We are rooted in experience and in practice and in praxis, and we theorize about the real world and what's happening on a day-to-day basis.
The point is we're trying to get at decolonial faith.
We're trying to understand what it means to separate the political agenda of weaponized religion from actual faith that is true to our traditions, whether it is recovering Christianity, whether it is mixing it with other forms of spirituality, or whether it's setting it aside and having an intelligent conversation about what happened and how we got to this place.
There are experts in certain fields, but we are all the experts of our own lives.
So this space that for the first time ever is in English, we hope expands the field of theological education on a real kind of conversational basis that helps folks understand that there is so much brilliance coming out of Latin America and the global South, and that many of us who have Latin American roots are still here in the US in diaspora, and we have a lot to contribute to the conversation.
