Cláudio Carvalhaes

Carvalhaes invites readers into a spiritual practice of resistance and renewal for our climate-challenged world. At its heart lies a simple yet profound ritual of three gestures—rising, bowing, and prostrating—performed within one’s own bioregion as a way to reconnect body, spirit, and land. These embodied actions ground us in our places, teaching us to attend to the skies and trees above, to honor human and nonhuman neighbors around us, and to remember the histories beneath our feet. Carvalhaes situates this practice within a sweeping analysis of our global crises. He shows how ecological destruction, political violence, economic injustice, and social fragmentation all stem from a deeper spiritual crisis: our captivity to the spirit of capitalism. By tracing the colonial roots of our broken relationship with the earth and naming the ongoing struggles between destructive global forces and local lifegiving spirits, he exposes the urgent need for new forms of ritual and spirituality. Drawing on theology, philosophy, indigenous wisdom, and ecology, the book develops key concepts such as bioregion, relationality, and “molecular revolutions”—small acts that can spark wide transformation. Alongside theory, Carvalhaes provides practical tools: reflective exercises, a bioregional quiz, and ritual guidance that make the work accessible for both classrooms and communities. Weaving scholarship and practice, critique and hope, Carvalhaes redefines what it means to live faithfully in our time. With poetic vision and prophetic urgency, he calls us to decolonize ourselves, reorient our desires, and embody gestures that generate new forms of communal life. This book offers students, professors, clergy, and general readers alike a path toward reconnection with the earth—and with one another—through ritualized practices of care, resistance, and hope.

Carvalhaes invites readers into a spiritual practice of resistance and renewal for our climate-challenged world. At its heart lies a simple yet profound ritual of three gestures—rising, bowing, and prostrating—performed within one’s own bioregion as a way to reconnect body, spirit, and land. These embodied actions ground us in our places, teaching us to attend to the skies and trees above, to honor human and nonhuman neighbors around us, and to remember the histories beneath our feet. Carvalhaes situates this practice within a sweeping analysis of our global crises. He shows how ecological destruction, political violence, economic injustice, and social fragmentation all stem from a deeper spiritual crisis: our captivity to the spirit of capitalism. By tracing the colonial roots of our broken relationship with the earth and naming the ongoing struggles between destructive global forces and local lifegiving spirits, he exposes the urgent need for new forms of ritual and spirituality. Drawing on theology, philosophy, indigenous wisdom, and ecology, the book develops key concepts such as bioregion, relationality, and “molecular revolutions”—small acts that can spark wide transformation. Alongside theory, Carvalhaes provides practical tools: reflective exercises, a bioregional quiz, and ritual guidance that make the work accessible for both classrooms and communities. Weaving scholarship and practice, critique and hope, Carvalhaes redefines what it means to live faithfully in our time. With poetic vision and prophetic urgency, he calls us to decolonize ourselves, reorient our desires, and embody gestures that generate new forms of communal life. This book offers students, professors, clergy, and general readers alike a path toward reconnection with the earth—and with one another—through ritualized practices of care, resistance, and hope.

A collaborative book project centering the liberative theopoetics practiced by a new generation of scholars of color What is theopoetics? Once a field dominated by white liberals in the ivory tower, this embodied form of theology has flourished in the work of a new generation of scholars of color. In this groundbreaking book edited by Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein and Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, a diverse team of theologians shows how theopoetics can be practiced "in color." Featuring unconventional and artistic forms of religious reflection, this collection demonstrates how theology can become accessible when it reflects the embodied experiences of marginalized people and communities. These creative contributions defy the limitations of the white, Eurocentric academy, including such works as: - an explanation on the use of experimental theater to express theological theses - a guide to spiritual disciplines for metaphorical cyborgs seeking liberation - a meditation on the theological import of Filipino potlucks - a literary reflection on the meaning of religion to Black boys and men Diverse in scope and radical in perspective, this bold volume reclaims the liberative potential of theopoetics. Scholars and students of theology and the arts will discover inspiring new methodologies and fresh ideas in these pages. Contributors: Brian Bantum, Yara Gonz lez-Justiniano, James Howard Hill Jr., Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, Yohana Agra Junker, Peace Pyunghwa Lee, Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, Patrick B. Reyes, Joyce del Rosario, Tiffany U. Trent, Tamisha A. Tyler, Lis Valle-Ruiz

Embark on a Global Journey through the Season of Advent Advent is celebrated differently throughout the world. Some cultures barely observe the waiting and focus on the Christmas celebration. Others feel deeply the contrast between present circumstances and God's promise of a better future, making for a season of fasting and prayer. All of them focus on Christ as the Light of the world. Light from Afar is a daily Advent devotional that illuminates the season through the unforgettable stories and reflections of four writers from around the world. Authors Nadiyka Gerbish (Ukraine), Joel Bengbeng (Philippines), Cl udio Carvalhaes (Brazil), and Sidwell Mokgothu (South Africa) share cultural and religious traditions of the Advent season in their daily reflections. Each day's meditation includes a scripture reading, a prayer, an opportunity for reflection, and a link to a song from the author's home country. The light of the star of Bethlehem has spread around the world. The people who have heard the good news have stories to tell and traditions to share. By joining with Christians from different cultures and countries in prayer, we can experience the hope, love, joy, and peace of Advent, leading ultimately to Immanuel-God with us-on Christmas day.

Paperback with full-color interior artwork by Marc H. Ellis. Cl udio's every literary, liturgical, artistic expression is an exquisitely magical reflection of God's truly radical love. Cl udio always embodies this most selfless and yet lifegiving form of love in the most vibrant, imaginative, gentle, surprising and inspirational of ways. Here in his latest book, he blesses his readers abundantly with his theological brilliance, his compassionate heart for all in God's creation, his unending cry for justice for all . . . Dr. Jenny Te Paa Daniel Te Mareikura & Interim Director National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa, New Zealand "Every landscape is a multi-scape." Cl udio Carvalhaes has given us yet another gift in this collection of performance-lectures turned essays. With deep care, Carvalhaes weaves together literary and historical sources to better attune readers to inventories and aspirations of the multivalent present. Join in this conversation, this dance, this song. Robert O. Smith (Chickasaw Citizen) University of North Texas Professor Cl udio Carvalhaes is a household name both in Brazil and the US and one of this century's most consequential religious scholars. An artist-sentient-thinker, Carvalhaes thinks/speaks with his entire body, in a grounded manner.... Raimundo C sar Barreto, Jr. Associate Professor of World Christianity Princeton Theological Seminary

It is time for an eco-liturgical liberation theology One that hears the cries of the people and the earth and orients thinking and practices from their pain and suffering. In this book, Cl udio Carvalhaes writes from where it hurts in multiple registers and crossings. Featuring a Foreword by Ivone Gebara and full-color art by children.

With a foreword by Ivone Gebara. "Ritual at World's End maps Cl udio's conversion to an ecological approach to liturgy. It also manifests his ever-confident eschewal of the usual authorities in liturgical theology. Instead, he is looking to liberation theologians, and listening to the poor. So, these are the field notes of a man on a journey-to the land, to his past, with his children, for the overlooked-as he wrestles with his questions, privilege, and responsibilities. Passion and urgency, truth-telling and testimony, combine with great force in Cl udio's thinking, and this remarkable book will be well-read, gather companions, and muster more justice in the life of believers. Read it for it's challenge, gift, provocation, blessing, agenda-setting, summons..." Stephen Burns Professor of Liturgical and Practical Theology Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity Melbourne, Australia

This book develops an understanding of prayer from a liberation-theological perspective. "Praying with" offers a distinctive way of praying that can help orient our prayers around the "where" we pray and "with whom" we pray as the locus of the body's and heart's theological praxis. The book helps create language to pray with people and in situations we are not used to praying with; it insists on praying amidst racism, poverty, violence, and suffering; it calls us to pray at night and at the end of the world when we are overcome by fear, hurt, climate disaster, or economic impoverishment; it ventures into interfaith prayer settings; and it claims a sense of "self" that is not discrete, encapsulated in its own thinking or feeling-rather, it understands the notion of the self as entangled with the whole earth and each sentient and nonsentient being. Thus, to "pray with" in this book is to take the location of one's prayer more seriously and, individually and collectively, to gain an awareness of our grounding and positionality, therefore creating a theological structure that assumes both the listening of our own heart and the voices of everything around us.

This book offers a wealth of resources from forgotten places to help us create a new vocabulary for worship and prayer. It is a collection of prayers, songs, rituals, rites of healing, Eucharistic and baptismal prayers, meditations, and art from four continents: Asia-Pacific Islands, Africa, Americas, and Europe. Liturgies from Below is the culmination of a project organized by the Council for World Mission (CWM) during 2018-2019. Approximately 100 people from four continents worked with CWM, collaborating to create indigenous prayers and liturgies expressing their own contexts, for sharing with their communities and the rest of the world. The project was called "Re-Imagining Worship as Acts of Defiance and Alternatives in the Context of Empire." The author and others spent weeks living in each of four communities for several weeks/months, getting to know the people, and then facilitating the people's own creation of prayers and liturgies. The author, other scholars, pastors, artists, activists, and students all came from radically different ethnicities, races, sexualities, churches, and Christian theologies. The people in each location were poor, living in very challenging communities, living in oppressive and seemingly hopeless situations. After some time, they wrote prayers and stories of their experience trying to live the Christian faith in utterly abandoned places. What we have here is an immensely rich and varied collection of liturgical sources from various communities dealing with issues of violence, immigration, drugs, land grabbing, war, misogyny, militarization, and climate change.

This book connects the living realms of the church, the self, the neighbor and the world. It envisions our daily local and global life from liturgical spaces, places where Christians worship God. Through these relations, we can connect worship with economy, preaching with raising a village, baptism with forms of citizenship, ecology and the market, Easter with immigration, liturgical knees with colonization, spirituality with minority voices, all uttering prayers that name racism, poverty and a liberation theology of glory. In these pages Claudio Carvalhaes issues a call to the churches to move from captive and colonized spaces into where the Spirit lives: among the poor, the needy, the forgotten. With a variety of relations between the Christian faith and our cultural ways of living, Carvalhaes offers new liturgical and theological imaginings to be engaged with the most vulnerable in our societies and the earth. A creative liturgical theology of liberation that makes sense of God between the world and the table/altar, between the pulpit and local communities, the worship space and our multiple lived experiences. For liturgy is an endless song of liberation. This book is a call to life ""This book is a rare gift, a liturgical encounter, that celebrates God's presence among the poor and marginalized of this world. I strongly recommend it."" --James H. Cone, Professor, Union Theological Seminary ""As a historian, some writers about Christian liturgy have always alienated me with a-historical behavioral dogmatism--a Platonism of 'the proper.' My brother Claudio Carvalhaes refreshingly starts elsewhere, with an Aristotelian 'life comes first.' These richly contextualized essays liberate liturgy and show how liturgy can liberate."" --Jon Pahl, Professor, United Lutheran Seminary ""Liturgy is, as Carvalhaes has lived, led and taught it across the Americas, a street theatre of resistance. By critically interfacing the circulatory powers of the local (social, economic, ecological) with traditional memories, the divine economy becomes performatively enfleshed in the local. Every worshipper in this way assumes the work of an organic intellectual "" --Sharon Betcher, Senior Fellow, Whidbey Institute, Whidbey Island, Washington ""Carvalhaes refreshing collection of essays liberates us from centuries of distorted liturgy. Wise and indispensable insight is given on centering and empowering a people to focus--via a contextualized worship--on what is important: their fellow congregants. The reader is challenged to embrace our diversity, the means of finding God's liberative presence at the margins of society."" --Miguel A. De La Torre, Professor, Iliff School of Theology ""Christian worship is often imagined and practiced as two-dimensional: the individual and/or the congregation in relation to God. For Carvalhaes there is a third dimension: the neighbor in need. Authentic worship, he argues, is service to, with, and for the poor. If this is a challenge, it is also a promise of liberation and vitality."" --Tom F. Driver, The Paul J. Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary Claudio Carvalhaes is Associate Professor of Worship at Union Theology Seminary in New York City. He is the author of Eucharist and Globalization. Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (2013), editor of Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy (2015), and editor of several issues of the journal CrossCurrents.