As someone who tends to get stuck in my head, over-analyzing thoughts and arguments to find flaws and make meaning, studying theology was an obvious academic fit. In graduate school, dissecting the arguments of Augustine and Aquinas, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, I found joy in the clean, abstract, objective pursuit of a given truth. I was passionate about using my newfound theological expertise to opine on moral/ethical arguments in the public square. Then, however, a series of encounters with women religious transformed my perspective, and I began to recognize the importance of truth discovered and lived through embodied relationship. Theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz gave me language for this transformation, and her insights have indelibly shaped my approach to theology and faith.
She insisted that theological inquiry take seriously the voices of Latinas, “thinking-with” rather than “thinking-about” them. As a white Catholic woman in an academic role, in a faith and field informed primarily by white men, I resonate with Isasi-Díaz’s theological challenge. She calls me out of my own limited abstraction and into relationship.
Born in Cuba in 1943, Isasi-Díaz came to the United States in 1960 as a political refugee. She joined the Ursuline Sisters and at 24 years old went to Lima, Peru, as a missionary. Her time there helped her cultivate a deeper understanding of how to live out her mother’s most insistent reminder: “Stay in the struggle (la lucha).” Isasi-Díaz said of her time in Peru, “This experience has marked me for life. I often say it was there that the poor taught me the gospel message of justice.” After her return from Peru, she earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of New Rochelle and became a teacher. Later, she chose to leave religious life and pursue a vocation in higher education, earning a master’s of divinity and a doctoral degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Next, she worked at the Theological and Graduate Schools of Drew University, where she cofounded the Hispanic Theological Initiative, whose mission is “cultivating Latinx PhD students for leadership positions in the academy, the church, and the world.”
In her scholarship, Isasi-Díaz developed a new strain of theology that brought together her conviction that la lucha holds moral weight, her commitment to solidarity with the poor and marginalized, and her recognition of the links between sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of oppression. She called her ideas mujerista theology, which she says “has as its goal the liberation/flourishing of Latinas. It uses as its sources the understandings and practices of Latinas, in particular the religious understandings and practices of grassroots Latinas who struggle against oppression in their everyday lives.” Isasi-Díaz calls out the disconnect between white men’s theology done in ivory towers and the lived experience of Latinas, a group U.S. society largely ignores.
Impoverished, racially marginalized women face difficult choices every day: whether to pay $2.25 to take a bus or walk 15 blocks and save the money to buy food; whether to feed themselves or their children. As a result, their mundane daily lives are sites of moral agency and discernment in a way that dominant and privileged classes cannot comprehend. Isasi-Díaz calls this locus of moral/ethical reasoning lo cotidiano—the everyday—and recognizes it as a source of wisdom that’s ignored by dominant society to the detriment of both those who are oppressed and society at large.
As Isasi-Díaz puts it, “The dominant group, the group that has power, considers oppressed people as having no value or significance. Those who are oppressed—Latinas and Latinos, the impoverished, lesbians, gays, transsexuals, and transgender people, among many others—are not taken into consideration in determining what is normative for society.”
For Isasi-Díaz, the established norms of dominant society have ignored the wisdom of entire swaths of people, imposing another form of oppression: that of subjugating knowledge. For example, although Hispanic women “make up the vast majority of those who participate in the work of the churches,” they “do not participate in deciding what work is to be done.” Isasi-Díaz goes on to say, “We do the praying, but our understanding of the God to whom we pray is ignored.” This is one reason, Isasi-Díaz argues, why “the church has to be a church of the impoverished and oppressed, not a church for them.”
But this, she writes, “requires a radical change in church structures, structures that privilege the church’s hierarchies, its ministers, and those theologians recognized by church authorities. To radically affirm the option [for the poor] requires from the church a willingness to consider radically changing how it understands itself and its relationship to the kin-dom of God.”
This language of the kin-dom of God is another important contribution to theological inquiry. Noting that kingdoms are heavily rooted in hierarchy and patriarchy in ways that foster inequality and subservience rather than communal flourishing, Isasi-Díaz claims the metaphor has lost its meaning. She proposes a better alternative: a word that speaks of relationship—kin-dom. When we recognize the ways the language of the kingdom has been coopted by those seeking to impose authoritarian and violent structures of government for the sake of “Christian values,” claiming a new metaphor seems particularly necessary.
Today, Isasi-Díaz reminds me that a relationship with the divine “finds expression in walking picket lines more than in kneeling, in being in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed more than in fasting and mortifying the flesh, in striving to be passionately involved with others more than in being detached, in attempting to be faithful to who I am and what I believe God wants of me more than in following prescriptions for holiness that require me to negate myself.” In this, I find hope.
Good theology, for Isasi-Díaz, manifests as embodied critique of oppression and assertion of personal dignity. “[I]t is an activity both intentional and reflective,” she writes, “it is a communal praxis that feeds on the realization that Christ is among us when we strive to live the gospel message of justice and peace.” Her life expressed her theology.
After the Archdiocese of New York closed Our Lady of Angels Church in East Harlem in 2007, Isasi-Díaz joined a group of fellow parishioners in protest. Eventually, the group began holding Sunday meetings in the church building, where Isasi-Díaz delivered sermons. She was a proponent of women’s ordination, and she became a de facto pastor of Our Lady of Angels.
Through her life and work, Isasi-Díaz invites us to imagine “beyond the controlling rationality of dominant discourses,” acknowledging whatever good is held therein, but always through the lens of its usefulness to the struggles of the oppressed. This is the insight that transformed my relationship with theology. Where I had previously held all critiques up against the dominant theological canon, I came to recognize the necessity of reimagining the canon according to the embodied experience of people who are marginalized and oppressed. If we have excluded voices in the development of doctrine, for example, I do not believe we can claim to have heard the Spirit in fullness.
Isasi-Díaz passed away in 2012 after a battle with cancer, leaving a legacy of compassion, justice, and persistence. Her life bears witness to the Spirit that lifts up the oppressed, reminding us that indeed, the struggle for justice is ongoing—but the struggle itself holds meaning.
This article also appears in the April 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 4, pages 45-46). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Courtesy of Drew University
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