Michael Iafrate vox victimarum, vox dei

About

Welcome to the website of Michael J. Iafrate.

I am currently a doctoral student in theology at the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto, Ontario. My master's degree in theology is from Wheeling Jesuit University. I spent some time as a campus minister at Wheeling Jesuit University and West Virginia University. I currently serve on the board of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia and as a copy editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Networks. A basic C.V. can be found here.

My theological interests include Roman Catholic, ecumenical, and alternative ecclesiologies; contextual, liberationist, and post/decolonial theologies; religion and social movements; theology and (popular) culture; and Appalachian studies. I am currently exploring the applicability of postcolonial and decolonial thinking for theological reflection on the interconnectedness of human oppression and ecological devastation in Appalachian region of the United States and am preparing a dissertation proposal along these lines.

I maintain a personal blog at CatholicAnarchy.org and contribute to the Rock and Theology project blog (sponsored by Liturgical Press). I was one of the founding members of Vox Nova which David Gibson named one of the ten best Catholic blogs and which was listed as a notable religion blog by The Immanent Frame.

I am also a singer-songwriter who has been performing for about 15 years in various bands such as The Minus Tide, COBRA, and M Iafrate & The Priesthood. An extensive (but probably not complete) discography is here.

My wife Emily and I welcomed our daughter into the world in October 2008 and the three of us share our home with a puppy named Paisley.

Some of my theological influences include:
(in alphabetical order)
Gregory Baum, Michael Baxter, Tom Beaudoin, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Leonardo Boff, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Walter Brueggemann, Michael Budde, William Cavanaugh, James Cone, M. Shawn Copeland, Lee Cormie, Dorothy Day, Enrique Dussel, Ignacio Ellacuría, Neil Elliott, Jacques Ellul, Gustavo Gutierrez, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Horsley, Bryan Massingale, Eugene McCarraher, Johann Baptist Metz, Ched Myers, Margaret O'Gara, Karl Rahner, Joerg Rieger, Oscar Romero, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jon Sobrino, Dorothee Soelle, Mark Lewis Taylor, John Howard Yoder.

LICENSE

The text contained on this website (blog posts and essays) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Under this license, you are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes so long as you attribute the work to Michael J. Iafrate and so long as you do not alter, transform, or build upon the text. View details of the license here.