Joining Jesus's Pursuit of Shalom
"Jesus's own ministry, synthetically described throughout the Gospels, provides elements for understanding his programmatic Nazareth manifesto [in Luke 4]: he focuses his ministry on the needy not only from a physical and economic perspective but also from a social and spiritual dimension, according to the will of God. It is evident that his mission includes the restoration of harmony of people with God, with each other, and with creation. It is, in a word, a shalom mission."
—C. René Padilla, Ecuadorian Theologian
About Us
Our Purpose
The Luisa Bosques House of Studies (LBHS) is a Christian community committed to producing & promoting educational resources & experiences that foster shalom.
Our Namesake
The bisabuela of co-founder Nathan Luis Cartagena, Luisa Bosques was a committed Boricua Christian who journeyed with God as a colonial subject within a racist, patriarchal, ecosystem-destroying, capitalist empire. Like many Boricuas, Luisa Bosques was born and raised on Borikén (aka, Borinquen o Puerto Rico) but had to migrate to Nueva York to find employment and support her familia. After over 30 years in NYC, Luisa Bosques returned to Puerto Rico, where she lived with her family and actively participated in her local church, Iglesia Presbiteriana en Moca. As a Boricua evangélica, Luisa Bosques' life in Puerto Rico before and after her NYC migration required navigating her island home as a religious minority. Amidst this challenge and the numerous systems of oppression that she suffered, Luisa Bosques remained dedicated to fostering life, love, and liberation, particularly among poor and marginalized communities.
LBHS seeks to honor Luisa Bosques' life and legacy by promoting her lifelong praxis of pursuing shalom through love of God, self, and all her creaturely neighbors.
Our Methodologies (Part 1)
LBHS is committed to the art of dialogue—to the practice of listening to and speaking with others with love and respect.
We dialogue with Creator, heeding Creator's revealed guidance and Spirit-initiated promptings, and voicing our varied responses to life.
Dialoguing with Creator moves us to dialogue with creation—with all our creaturely relations. We listen to and learn from lands and waterways, flora and fauna, the living and deceased. Heeding what we hear, we reciprocate in species-specific ways.
Our Methodologies (Part 2)
Dialoguing with Creator and creation involves three "Rs"—retrieving, reconstructing, and resourcing.
We retrieve histories, instruction, language, practices, and wisdom from the past. This work empowers our abilities to join, hear, and speak with others.
We reconstruct ourselves, our practices, and our communities in response to what we retrieve. Dialogue demands change. We cannot leave a dialogue unaltered.
Lastly, we resource ourselves and others as we retrieve from the past and reconstruct ourselves, practices, and communities.
Our Methodologies (Part 3)
Our commitments to dialogue and to producing and promoting educational resources that foster shalom requires interdisciplinary research —research that recognizes and synthesizes concepts, findings, methods, and traditions from multiple fields to create resources that mirror creation's complexity and interdependency. Boricua theologian Elizabeth Conde-Frazier voices our philosophy while writing about Christian theological education:
"Presently, theological education is compartmentalized and restricted to disciplines that do not represent the actual complexity of the world and the type of problem solving and analysis needed in our multicultural societies. Today’s ministry considerations are typically uninformed by the expertise of the specialized disciplines of economics, social analysis, and action research. To equip church leaders—by which I mean the full priesthood of all believers—we need to develop both interdisciplinary content and pedagogy."
Our Methodologies (Part 4)
Our commitments to dialogue, promoting and producing educational resources that foster shalom, and interdisciplinary research are tied to another: Empowering local churches to self-theologize.
We work with local congregations and parishes to strengthen their abilities to read Scripture and the world in ways that catalyze liberation, healing, and growth. We pursue this work with a threefold division of liberatory theologizing drawn from Latin American base communities and theologians journeying with them. For more on this division and its interconnections, click here.
Additional Practices
LBHS's pursues its mission and enacts its dialogue-based commitments through seven practices:
1. Curriculum Construction & Distribution
2. Lectures
3. Public Miniseries
4. Reading Groups
5. Restorative Art Projects
6. Workshops
7. Writings
Some of these practices we perform online; others we carry out in local churches; still others we enact through deep communion with local flora, fauna, lands, and waterways.