Mission Yearbook: Final Sprunt Lecture looks at Bible and present tricksters

“What happens when the God of liberation simply does not liberate?” asked Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre during the fourth and final installment of the 115th Sprunt Lectures recently held at Union Presbyterian Seminary. 

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De La Torre’s lectures began with a screening and discussion of the film, “Trails of Hope and Terror” that he helped make with his wife and son. The film documents the horrible conditions that Latinx immigrants face while crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. De La Torre is professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

His second lecture followed up on the topics of the film with an introduction to the immigration crisis and the third, titled “A Rejection of Eurocentric Thought,” deconstructed the philosophical underpinnings of that crisis.

His final lecture focused on an ethical response in the midst of such a crisis and within a view of history as one of chaos, not one of order and progress. De La Torre acknowledged the vulgarity of his title: “Ethics Para Joder,” while also espousing its real-world applications and its biblical foundation through the stories of tricksters who overturn the systems that oppress them and others.

“Why the vulgarity? Well, what’s really vulgar is how Latinos are forced to live in this country,” he said. “That’s what should be offensive, not the word that I’m using, and that’s where we need to put the focus.”

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The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre delivered this year's Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.

“Struggle with me as I struggle with God, to try to see the face of God in the midst of really horrible things that are going on all around us,” invited De La Torre, explaining how for 10 years he read the Bible cover to cover annually and found that sometimes God was not present and sometimes, God even sent evil spirits. His real-life encounters echoed this absence of hope and presence of evil as he taught theology students through contextual learning trips.

De La Torre says he began to struggle when he took a group of students to Cuernavaca, Mexico. When his group encountered a row of dirt huts along an abandoned train station, one student reflected on the horrible conditions of the people living there but detected a glimmer of hope in a little girl’s eyes. Growing up as he did in a tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where his bathroom was a tin can, De La Torre had a more sober understanding of the girl’s future trajectory through a life of poverty than the student did. He wished to reject the tendency to idealize exceptional stories like his own escape from poverty’s downward pull. He described his response to the student’s need to see a hopeful future for a child as an “epistemological meltdown,” which led to his rejecting hope.

The mental reaction he had to his student’s statement of faith was the thought that the young girl in their gaze “was born into poverty, and she will die in poverty, as will her children and her children's children.” He felt for his student and other Christians who project an easy hope, that “the only reason you see hope in her eyes is so that you don't have to do anything about it. You could just trust God to take care of it.”

“What we are doing,” he explained in the articulation of hope, “is we are justifying and visualizing and ignoring all the others who don’t make it, who remain oppressed, who die in hopelessness.”

In Spanish, the word for hope is “Esperanza,” which comes from the root word meaning “to wait.” De La Torre focuses not on the outcome we wait for, but on the process.

“The ethics that I’m trying to do is, what do I do while I am waiting, as opposed to what may come after the waiting?” he said.

“You see, it doesn’t matter if God keeps God’s promises or not; that’s not what defines my faith. My faith is not transactional,” he said: “I will pray even when God doesn’t keep God’s promises, and I will pray to hold God accountable to what God is supposed to do.”

Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency, PC(USA) (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Jake Souder, Program Assistant, Educational Resources, Interim Unified Agency  
Roger Spalding, Prospect Research Analyst, Stewardship & Funds Development, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray:

Loving God, lower our gaze so that we might see you face to face. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: ‘Trails of Hope and Terror’ film sparks lively discussion at Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary

The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre has written dozens of books, but it took making a film alongside his son and his wife to reach the crowds he’s yet to reach through his books.

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The Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre

De La Torre, professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, recently delivering the 115th Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Before his first talk, De La Torre screened the award-winning 2017 film “Trails of Hope and Terror.” Watch the trailer here. His initial Sprunt Lecture is here.

“Nobody reads my books except other scholars. You’ve got to be a bit of a theological nerd,” De La Torre told those gathered in Lake Chapel at Union Presbyterian Seminary and online. “More people saw the film in the first week than the people who have read all my books put together.”

“How do we as scholars find new ways to communicate the work we’re doing? Making this film was part of that venture,” he said, urging the gathered scholars and others to “think of creative ways to get this information out to a wider audience that desperately needs it. Making complex issues accessible is the job of the true scholar.”

Filmmakers interviewed immigrants seeking to cross the border between Mexico and the United States as well as people who oppose such attempts. Among those interviewed are a pair of Presbyterian pastors: the Rev. John Fife, the emeritus pastor at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, Moderator of the 204th General Assembly (1992) and a co-founder of Sanctuary movement and organizer of No More Deaths; and Fife’s successor at Southside, the Rev. Alison J. Harrington.

After the screening, De La Torre highlighted some of the scenes the film depicts, including a Border Patrol agent kicking over jugs of water placed in the desert to aid migrants. In another scene, an agent dumps the water on the ground, then challenges the filmmakers by asking them, with cameras rolling, if they’d left the water. “If we said yes, they’d arrest us for littering,” De La Torre said.

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At one point, U.S. authorities did detain De La Torre’s team. They’d found a bale of marijuana nearby and threatened team members with arrest on charges of drug trafficking. “I went to their leader and said, ‘I am a professor at a seminary and these students will be pastors one day,’” he said. “I think you may want to check with your supervisor before you charge us with drug trafficking.”

Meanwhile, it was time for a worship service, and De La Torre and his students invited the authorities to join them. Instead, they held the team for a few more hours until word came from headquarters in Washington to let them go — but not before De La Torre’s identification had been run through a law enforcement database.

Perhaps not coincidentally, De La Torre has seen his tax returns audited every year since.

“I told John Fife that, and he said, ‘Welcome to the club,’” De La Torre said.

“Sometimes I just break down” while viewing his own film, he said, “and it’s kind of embarrassing. It still breaks my heart, especially after I got to know these people.”

During a question-and-answer session following his talk, De La Torre said filmmakers have recouped most of the money invested in the film, and plan to make the film accessible to the public.

“For some people, it’s better to embrace ignorance than it is even to watch a film,” he said. “I have had people watch the film and then threaten me because it rocked their self-identity. I believe my job as a scholar is to provide the means by which to raise consciousness.”

De La Torre is teaming with the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb to edit a book scheduled for publication in September. “Tear Down These Walls: Decolonial Approaches to Barriers and Liberation” will have a look at “walls around the world,” De La Torre said. “We want the labor — we just don’t want the bodies attached to that labor.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Adam Slutzky,  Director, Project Delivery, Strategic Planning & Execution, Board of Pensions
Ashley Smalley-Ray, VP, Director of Compliance, Presbyterian Foundation 

Let us pray:

Loving God, you created us for life together. Help us create life-giving patterns of community. In the name of Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life in all its fullness. Amen.