Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism

by Filipe Maia

Overview

The discourse of financialized capitalism tries to create a future predictable enough to manage risk for the wealthy, to shape the future into a profit-making site that constrains and privatizes the sense of what’s possible. Here, people’s hopes and meaning-making energies are policed through the burden of debt. In Trading Futures Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy. Drawing on Marxism, continental philosophy, and Latin American liberation theology, Maia provides a critical portrayal of financialization as a death-dealing mechanism that colonizes the future in its own image. Maia elaborates a Christian eschatology of liberation that offers a subversive mode of imagining future possibilities. He shows how the Christian vocabulary of hope can offer a way to critique the hegemony of financialized capitalism, propelling us in the direction of a just future that financial discourse cannot manage or control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023425
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Introduction. Of Edges and Hedges  1
1. Futures Devoured  23
2. Promissory Notes  40
3. Times That Matter  62
4. The Time That Is Money  86
5. Sighs of the Times  110
6. Fugitive Futures  130
Notes  149
Bibliography  181
Index  197

What People are Saying About This

Catherine Keller

“In this conspiracy of a captivatingly clear theopoiesis with a future held captive by neoliberal capitalism, something unprecedented takes place: the wedging open of the edgy chance of an escape. Filipe Maia’s ‘fugitive futures’ break out through the brilliant space of a hope too honest to consume, to mock, or to silence.”

Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West - Devin Singh

“Here is a liberation theology for the present—or, better, for the future, the not yet. Filipe Maia brings a longstanding and indispensable tradition of liberationist critique to bear on the contemporary realities of finance capitalism, opening crucial spaces of alterative hope against foreclosed horizons.”

Editorial Reviews

"In short scope and lucid prose, Felipe Maia’s Trading Futures makes a provocative argument about such fundamental topics as justice, capitalism, theology, and time. . . . Trading Futures effectively shows that agents of financial capitalism and theologians of liberation can differ profoundly in their orientations toward the future."

Perspectives On Politics - Matthew Scherer