Emmanuel Buteau
A work of decolonial practical theology, Encountering God in Haiti relies on insights from a diversity of disciplines including ethnology, philosophy, history, art, and, of course, theology. It explores the power of the Haitian everyday to mediate the encounter with God. Here, encounter is presented as the movement of God’s activity in the world through the Spirit. This movement promises to deepen the potential of religious experience, restoring its character as a place of dynamism, possibility, hope, and tangible healing. But encounter goes beyond the religious; sometimes it negates it. The religious may be attached to God, but God is not beholden to it. Encountering God in Haiti puts in question religious dogmatism, including the understandings of God on which it is built. In encounter, history can be redeemed, the everyday transformed, and even calamities such as the 2010 earthquake (Goudougoudou) transfigured into symbolic sites for the emergence of a new theological language, new ideas and ways of being Haitian. 6
