Palestinian Lutheran Theologies: Justice, Peace, and the Academy

This roundtable session brings together experts and leaders in the history, context, and practice of Palestinian Lutheran Theologies. We will consider histories of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), empire, occupation, settler colonialism, justice, gender, sumud (steadfastness) for justice in Palestine and Israel, liberation, and peace. We'll ask into Lutheran themes in current Palestinian Christian theologies, engage questions of solidarity, and, finally, ask what role the academy should play at this moment in history. As theologian Willie James Jennings writes in his "Foreward" to Munther Isaac's Christ in the Rubble, "the wider Christian world has too often failed to be alive to God and see Palestinian suffering on the map and has failed to walk alongside our Palestinian Christian kin as they traverse this impossible terrain" (Eerdmans, 2025). This session turns our attention and action to that walk and that terrain.