The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy

by Nichole M. Flores

Overview

Focusing on Latine theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought, Nichole M. Flores builds a framework for interpreting religious symbols in our contemporary democratic life and shows how we can create a community where members stand in solidarity with those from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647120900
Publisher:	Georgetown University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2021
Series:	Moral Traditions series
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nichole M. Flores is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several scholarly articles and is a contributing writer for America magazine. She was the recipient of the 2015 Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award for the best academic essay in Catholic theology from the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. A Political Theology of Guadalupe and Juan Diego

2. John Rawls’s Liberal Imagination

3. Martha Nussbaum’s Liberal Aesthetics

4. Lifting Up the Lowly

5. The Aesthetic Dimension of Solidarity

Bibliography

About the Author

What People are Saying About This

Rubén Rosario Rodríguez

Cornel West points out that Christianity is ultimately a narrative about good triumphing over evil. John Milbank asserts that Christianity’s appeal lies in the inherent beauty of this salvific story. Nichole Flores, grounded in the rich heritage of Guadalupan devotion and Catholic social teaching, makes the bold claim that talk of truth and beauty cannot be separated from ethics and social justice. Her activist Latinx perspective shakes up and transforms the staid public discourse on the role of religious and cultural particularity in democratic processes.

Olga Segura

Nichole M. Flores expertly weaves in storytelling and theology to examine the usage of Marian symbols, from the Chicano movement to immigration organizers today. The Aesthetics of Solidarity is a must-read for everyone looking to deepen their understanding of Latinx theology and proves why Flores is one of the most important theological voices in the Catholic Church today.

Rubén Rosario Rodríguez

Cornel West points out that Christianity is ultimately a narrative about good triumphing over evil. John Milbank asserts that Christianity’s appeal lies in the inherent beauty of this salvific story. Nichole Flores, grounded in the rich heritage of Guadalupan devotion and Catholic social teaching, makes the bold claim that talk of truth and beauty cannot be separated from ethics and social justice. Her activist Latinx perspective shakes up and transforms the staid public discourse on the role of religious and cultural particularity in democratic processes.

Luke Bretherton

At a moment when society is fraying and politics is polarized Flores provides a rich, ethical conception of democratic solidarity and its centrality to a politics of the common good in a pluralistic context. Arguing against key liberal philosophers, Flores’s theologically and aesthetically sophisticated political theology of solidarity creatively draws on a set of resources rooted in Latine responses to oppression, including movements for social justice, political campaigns, theatre, popular religious celebrations of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and experiences of lo cotidiano. In doing so the book models the best of what teologia en conjunto means both in practice and in scholarship.

Editorial Reviews

Flores’s study offers significant insights for understanding the importance of marginalized groups, their struggles for justice, and their religious expressions within the political landscape of a pluralistic society.

Commonweal

Flores makes an important contribution here. As people become more saturated in visual imagery designed to shape imagination and catalyze emotion—about whose lives matter, about who can and cannot belong in coalitions of change, about threats to national identities—paying attention to the ways Latine communities continue to participate in the Guadalupan narrative as a resource for civic engagement can invite them into the galvanizing aesthetic dimension of solidarity.

Journal of Catholic Social Thought

A keen-minded, scholarly analysis enhanced with a bibliography and an index, Our Lady of Guadalupe is highly recommended especially for college and university Religion/Spirituality collections.

Midwest Book Review

Flores has provided a valuable book. Her juxtaposition of political liberalism, Catholic social thought, theological aesthetics, and Guadalupan-inspired aesthetic and political expression reframes the conversation about a twenty-first-century democracy in important ways.

Journal of Law and Religion

The Aesthetics of Solidarity represents a major contribution to the ongoing development of U.S. Latinx theology. Flores has produced a first-rate scholarly monograph in which she carefully develops, and clearly articulates, the intellectual features of an aesthetics of solidarity—a rich notion that will, no doubt, influence theological conversation in the future, not only among Latinx scholars but in the broader theological community.

Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology

The Aesthetics of Solidarity, by Nichole M. Flores, is an important work on US Latinx theological aesthetics, adding to a series of recent books seeking to bring out the political and activist dimensions of aesthetic practice.Flores tells the stories of several social movements, actions, and artistic productions touching Latinx communities, wiring them into a theory of democratic solidarity and action that takes the particular experiences of marginalized minority communities to heart. Along the way, Flores levels incisive critiques of liberal social-justice ethics, using a wide range of Latinx theological voices to expand the accounting of difference, particularity, and locality that liberal thought often leaves behind.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion