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The core of this article consists of a critical rethinking of the classical “see-judge-act” methodology of liberation theology. The article contends that this method threatens to install a dualism between a universal, secular experience of oppression and a Christian interpretation of it, thereby creating a hierarchical relation that reduces the complexity of the experience of poverty. The author investigates this issue by focusing on liberation theology's understanding of the “preferential option for the poor” (part 1) and the way in which the see-judge-act methodology affects this understanding (part 2). The article gradually moves on to alternative epistemologies, starting with a discussion of a hermeneutical approach (C. Boff and Schillebeeckx) and the method of “historicization” (Ellacuría), and eventually proposing a new phenomenologically and materially informed methodology for liberation theology that is called “cartography” and is grounded in a “new materialist” metaphysics as articulated by Deleuze, Braidotti, and Barad (part 3). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]