A cross-continental conversation about sin and shame with Marcia Blasi and Marit Trelstad

This is a cross-continental conversation about contextual understandings of sin and shame in the context of women in Latin America and Africa, and students in the United States. Marcia Blasi brings the experience of working with women throughout the world in her role in the Lutheran World Federation, and both authors work in Lutheran and feminist theologies. In particular, this interview highlights how individualized understandings of sin, often focused on morality and behavior, serve to shame women and reinforce notions of inferiority in patriarchal systems. In these systems, women are never doing enough for others and pride in one's self is not allowed. At the same time, social understandings of sin as systematic injustice serve to fight against these ideas of sin and the concomitant production of shame because they contextualize a person's actions within a broader culture and its expectations. The authors here seek to understand what real grace means and feels like for female-identifying people and how confession of sin would be altered if seen through the lens of women globally.     

Bridging the personal and the political: practices for a liberation psychology

In the Irish context, legacies of colonialism, the Northern Ireland conflict situation, and the strength of community and women's liberation movements all provide rich resources for understanding the processes involved in both oppression and liberation. This paper draws on the theoretical and research literature and on Irish experiences to develop an understanding of some of the processes and practices that aid in liberation. The research is grounded in diverse writings on oppression and liberation, which include writings on colonialism (E. Duran &B. Duran, 1995; F. Fanon, 1967; V. Kenny, 1985, L. Maracle, 1996), feminist psychology (J. B. Miller, 1986; S. Wilkinson, 1996), liberation psychology (H. A. Bulhan, 1985; L. Comas-Díaz, M. B. Lykes, & R. D. Alarcon, 1998; I. Martín-Baró, 1994; Starhawk, 1987), and psychological aspects of racism (b. hooks, 1993; A. Mama, 1995; R. J. Watts, D. M. Griffith, & J. Abdul-Adil, 1999), homophobia (A. R. D'Augelli & C. J. Patterson, 1995), poverty (K. O'Neill, 1992), and other dimensions of oppression.     

Sexual freedoms

Women—still—experience different forms of sexism in their daily lives. After the sixteenth‐century Protestant proclamation of the blessings of motherhood and women's bodies, and the women's sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, women's real freedoms and rights with their bodies, including sexual relations and procreation, are still being negotiated. Violence against women's bodies, including sex trafficking, relates to both the lack of appropriate education and fundamentally distorted views of humanity. Considering Luther's teaching on women as imago Dei, and attending theologically to the issues pertaining to misogyny—such as reforming the traditionally male‐centered God‐language and challenging the culture's implicit permission for ongoing violence against women—are some of the concrete steps that can be taken. Given the revelations with the #MeToo movement, the ELCA's 2018 draft on the Social Statement on Gender and Justice is timely.     

Praying with the World at Heart

Praying with the world at heart is to learn to pray where people hurt, with those who suffer, with the poor. To pray is to shape the world, to expand ourselves, to hear God's voice and the voice of somebody else. In this article we want to learn how to do theology through prayer, thus, engaging the lex credendi through the lex orandi.     

Community without memory? In search of an ecclesiology of liberation in the company of people with dementia

The increasing prevalence of dementia among members of the Christian Churches prompts a re-evaluation of Christian ecclesiology. This is particularly true for the ecclesiology born of the theologies of liberation, because of the emphasis it places upon conscious participation in the historical life of the community. The present article draws on stories of people with dementia as recorded by themselves and those close to them; by reflection upon these stories, it seeks to re-think the character of the Church in the face of this challenge, and so to offer a richer interpretation of its identity as a community of liberation.     

A Paradoxical Theology of Biology

Abstract

This article examines a sermon in which Desmond Tutu advocates for gay rights in light of his activism against apartheid in South Africa. In doing so it uncovers a paradoxical theology of biology that enables him to advocate universal notions of justice simultaneously with love for particular persons and bodies. This advocacy, however, is susceptible to the critiques of queer theorists and theologians who worry that liberationist frameworks unwittingly reinscribe injustices against a variety of queer persons. The article concludes by raising new questions to be asked about Desmond Tutu’s theology, and liberation theologies in general, about the potential of liberationist and prophetic frameworks for achieving social justice. It also raises questions for queer theology about the possibility and political efficacy of queering the act of preaching.     

ACTIONS AS THE TIES THAT BIND Love, Praxis, and Community in the Thought of Gustavo Gutiérrez

Gustavo Gutiérrez develops an account of human action or praxis that I—borrowing the language of Charles Taylor—label expressivist. Human action must be understood as expressing an underlying potential or impulse that only becomes real through expression in action. Gutiérrez's expressivism is fundamental to his view of the relationship between faith and love, his notion of three dimensions of liberation/salvation, and his understanding of the fundamental option as a yes or no in response to grace. Moreover, it supports a valuable approach to community as defined more by shared actions than a shared tradition or narrative. The final section briefly indicates two limitations to Gutiérrez's vision—especially with regard to the conception of community—and suggests the direction that a constructive appropriation of his thought might take.     

The (HI)Stories We Live by: Power/Knowledge and Family Therapy in Africa

There is a need to Africanise family therapy so as to serve the interest of local communities. Western approaches to family therapy have been accused of being irrelevant to African contexts. They are seen as forming part of a dominant scientific knowledge which invalidates local folk and cultural psychologies and thereby continuing a historical tradition of oppressive colonial power relations. This paper aims at archaeologising and evaluating such criticism by situating family therapy within different fields of knowledge that have emerged historically and are currently co-existing in Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of dominant family therapy approaches in African contexts are explored by focussing on power relations between different knowledges in Africa. It is argued that many global narratives of family therapy offer congenial companionship to many local African narratives, but that family therapists should pay more attention to local spiritual and political narratives so as to attain more legitimacy and validation by local communities.     

Book Reviews

Dalton, Dennis, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action
Goodman, David G. and Miyazawa, Masanori, Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype
Rejai, Mostafa and Phillips, Kay, World Military Leaders: A Collective and Comparative Analysis