The discourse of financialized capitalism tries to create a future predictable enough to manage risk for the wealthy, to shape the future into a profit-making site that constrains and privatizes the sense of what’s possible. Here, people’s hopes and meaning-making energies are policed through the burden of debt. In Trading Futures Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy. Drawing on Marxism, continental philosophy, and Latin American liberation theology, Maia provides a critical portrayal of financialization as a death-dealing mechanism that colonizes the future in its own image. Maia elaborates a Christian eschatology of liberation that offers a subversive mode of imagining future possibilities. He shows how the Christian vocabulary of hope can offer a way to critique the hegemony of financialized capitalism, propelling us in the direction of a just future that financial discourse cannot manage or control.

Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University.

-- Matthew Scherer Perspectives On Politics

Preface  ix
Introduction. Of Edges and Hedges  1
1. Futures Devoured  23
2. Promissory Notes  40
3. Times That Matter  62
4. The Time That Is Money  86
5. Sighs of the Times  110
6. Fugitive Futures  130
Notes  149
Bibliography  181
Index  197