Emerging Community Pantries in the Philippines during the Pandemic: Hunger, Healing, and Hope

This research is a critical approach to the emergence of community pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic as at-once contestatory and transformative narratives, foregrounding the Filipino poor’s experience of hunger, suffering, and marginality, while also highlighting their collective hope for a better world. I began by exploring the emergence of the community pantry in the Philippines, which was prompted by the government’s inadequate response to the plight of the hungry poor due to prolonged mandatory lockdown in the National Capital Region. I then turned to Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of hunger as the basis for the ethical giving displayed in the community pantries, which is a symbolic arena where leadership is questioned and the marginalized voices of the hungry poor are both mainstreamed and articulated. I brought ethical giving into relation with the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam as the platform for the possibility of healing wounded relations. I constructed a particular weave between the community pantry and the Filipinos’ shared experiences of hunger that touches on the ethical that can create liberating spaces for collective hope. In conclusion, I argue that this study is valuable for confronting unexamined assumptions of the relationship between hunger, healing, and hope for critical pedagogy and critical spirituality, which can have significant philosophical and theological implications.

“Inexpressible horror”: The Devil and Baptist Life Writing in Cromwellian Ireland

The Baptist movement in Cromwellian Ireland displayed a number of distinctive features. Adherents of the movement regularly claimed to have heightened spiritual experiences, which in a number of cases included firsthand encounters with the devil. This article observes the political contexts in which these claims were made while analyzing attempts by Baptist leaders to promote a more critical spirituality and counter illegitimate claims to supernatural experience. It argues that these unusual experiences, reflective more of their geographical than their denominational context, were rhetorically enabled, and Baptist leaders would struggle to both sustain and contain claims to spiritual experience.