Abuelita Faith Quotes

“our fight for an equitable future is intimately connected to our belongingness with one another.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“I always wonder why folks are so quick to think that speaking out against things like sexism, racism, abuse, homophobia, ableism, and such is more divisive than actually being sexist, racist, abusive, homophobic, or ableist. Speaking out against injustice isn’t what divides—instead, acting in ways that are divisive does.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“The promised land is not simply a new country; it is also the gift of a radically new situation.”6 Ordinary people are forced to make extraordinary decisions to leave the oppressive contexts they find themselves in, in search of something better, a new reality.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“our abuelas often live lives in which the well-being of those around them is of utmost importance to them.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“When many of us with varying levels of privilege interact with the Bible’s stories, particularly those of Jesus engaging with marginalized women, we often have to force ourselves into the narrative. I wonder if much of our abuelitas’ theological insight comes from the fact that they can see themselves clearly in the story. They don’t need to stretch to imagine what it would be like to be the Samaritan woman or the persistent widow. Many of our abuelas know those stories intimately not only because they’ve committed to studying them and their lessons but because oftentimes those stories are about them. What they pass on to us is a knowledge about God that many of us spend our lives trying to obtain from books and conferences. Our abuelitas may be “uneducated” by the dominant culture’s standards, but they possess PhDs in prayer and Bible interpretation. They may not be ordained as official priests or pastors, but they’ve been playing those roles behind the scenes forever, noticed and called by God.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, explains that in Indigenous ways of knowing, to know a thing doesn’t mean to know something just intellectually, but to know it intuitively. To really know something, you must know it emotionally and spiritually.23”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“The work of theology is a work of the people, something we do en conjunto, together. In this way, the image of God is not just individual but collective. We need one another because no one person or one group of people can fully bear all that is God’s image. Instead, each culture, people, or group offers a glimpse of a different aspect of the full image of God.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“Perhaps so many young Christians are fleeing from the church because of these dichotomous, “all or nothing” views of faith that disregard life’s complexities—the views of faith that gloss over the messiness of life mirrored by the biblical characters and stories that we hold so dear. As the rest of this book will show, Scripture is a beautiful and nuanced account of the chaos of life and faith.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“I’ve swum in waters that are traumatized, are shaped by exile and displacement, and in many ways, look to the empire, to the United States, as a sort of salvation. But that’s what empire does, doesn’t it? It puts people in vulnerable positions and then convinces them that only the empire can save them from their vulnerability.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“I’ve always found it interesting that to many within the dominant culture, those who leave their country for a chance at a better life are often frowned on, thought of as less than, without honor. It’s curious because I cannot think of anything more honorable than doing whatever you can or have to do in order to provide a better life for your family.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“While the Bible has been weaponized by oppressors, it has also served as a beacon of hope and strength by the oppressed.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“In our fight for liberation, are we seeking to ensure that overlooked and unrecognized peoples act as protagonists of their own stories?”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“Or could there be another Christ? The one whom many of us have been in search of, the one of los humildes, the humble, as De La Torre calls them? My journey began to be shaped by the desire to learn about Jesus from the perspective of los humildes—the colonized, the marginalized, those who didn’t get to write the history and theology books. In many ways, they are the ones intimately acquainted with the Jesus of the Gospels—the bicultural, border-crossing, Brown Jesus, the one born in a stable, rejected in his hometown, tortured, broken, and battered. I knew that in order to understand this Jesus better, I would have to prioritize listening to and centering the voices of los humildes.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength

“The dominating culture had yet to invite me to see myself and my culture within God’s story.”
― Kat Armas, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength