I spent many years as a professional journalist, experience that hardened me to the brokenness / fallenness of the world, and to the almost unfathomable, Dante-esque capacity human beings have to hate, oppress, fuck with, and destroy one another. As someone who practiced journalism in theological perspective — as a witness to society, culture, and history, with all its joys and all its unspeakable evils — I practice theology with an eye constantly on the world. I hope for the good, but too often am disappointed. I teach with as much love as I can because my students need to be steeled for justice-work and fraternity in a broken and violent world — which means I have to try and encourage in them the awakening of a spiritual praxis that will steel their young souls without anger or bitterness, so they can quest with hope after the good. Aside from that, my first book is close to being submitted. Title: ‘Los Engaños de las Razas’ / ‘Illusions of the Races’: Capital, Christendom, and the Ideological Roots of Racism in Latin@América, (Waco, Baylor University Press, forthcoming). The book is a theoretical and historical examination of how Christendom laid the foundation of racism in the history of the Américas. I have led students on an immersion to El Salvador, and am planning a second trip this Spring, in connection with a course on Teología de la Liberación (in Spanish) to advanced students from the Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Theology /Religious Studies programs. I am standing down this November after five years as chairman of the steering committee of the Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). I serve as a board member, at-large, of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). At USF I have chaired our school’s minor program in Chican@ / Latin@ Studies, as well as the Catholic Studies and Social Thought minor program.