Entanglement and Liberation

The theme for our 2022 social justice folio, “Entanglement and Liberation”, was born out of a recurring question that has emerged numerous times over recent years. As this summer’s print edition of the EcoTheo Review showcased, our awareness of “Entanglements” has been heightened over the course of the pandemic in countless ways. So many of us have faced, with amplified awareness, the repercussions of our shared breath, our interconnected supply chains, and our complicated collective histories. But how has the acknowledgement of so much interlaced complexity altered, if at all, traditional notions of “liberation” that have rooted so many social justice movements? Does understanding our inextricable reliance on other people and larger ecosystems change how we view concepts of “freedom from” or “freedom for”? 

The contributors to this folio are exploring such inquiries across a diverse range of issues and experiences. Nonfiction essays by Meredith Barges and Danielle Isbell both examine, in beautifully unique ways, our modern relationships with bodies of water and how the contamination of them threatens not only our environmental health, but our social and spiritual condition too. Visual art by Carol Bouyoucos and Les James elicits poignant experiences of the ties between spiritual liberation and the embroiled human condition. Terry Dawson and his son Liam Wilson share a powerful joint offering of poetry and visual art that embodies the flowing layers of ecological, spiritual, and social entanglement. We are re-sharing Elizabeth Upshur’s mighty words on the notion of haunting and womanist thought in her review of Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat. And finally, both the riveting poetry of Stephanie Vander Lugt and our interview with Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley offer hope that, in Lugt’s words, “there are other ways of being gesturing elsewhere.” Woodley teaches such ways at the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice. His work as a farmer, scholar, and wisdom keeper is rooted in a decolonized spirituality that demonstrates how both freedom and justice can exist in our entangled, reciprocal relationships with all living things. 

We at EcoTheo are thrilled and honored to share this collection. We hope that the creative goodness included in this folio may guide us all towards renewed connections that are grace-filled and life-giving.