Attached to Paper Session
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Munayer and Munayer (2022) suggested one route to decolonial resources in Palestinian Liberation Theology (PLT) is through using Palestinian Orthodox religion and Palestinian national consciousness as sources for theological reflection. However, to think decoloniality in Palestine while examining the tradition and inspiration by the Palestinian national consciousness does not solve the dominion of the patriarchy. To read into the tradition requires us to re-read it in a manner which disrupts its patriarchal frameworks. To draw from the tradition does not eliminate the problems of misogyny and cultivation of shame culture centered around women’s sexual purity. Rather, the work of re-reading this tradition has a moral responsibility to be indecent. In other words, to disrupt the moral order in which PLT is done, in a manner which admits and addresses the overlapping structures of oppression, and in the words of Marcella Althaus-Reid in Indecent Theology (2000), to “undresses and uncovers sexuality and economy at the same time” (p.19).
The intention of this paper is to follow attempts to decolonise PLT by challenging the patriarchial framework in theology and its dominance in practiced Palestinain Christianity. I do this through an indecent reading of the tradition of Saint Barbara and centering women martydom that is marginalised in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and theological reflection.
Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent Theology. Book, Whole. London: Routledge, 2000. https://go.exlibris.link/5fQdgxrP.
Munayer, John S., and Samuel S. Munayer. ‘Decolonising Palestinian Liberation Theology: New Methods, Sources and Voices’. Studies in World Christianity 28, no. 3 (2022): 287–310. https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2022.0401.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In this paper, I bring together the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid and the annually celebrated story of Saint Barbara in Palestine. In this transformative encounter, I attempt to draw out one possible indecent decolonial option for Palestinian theology, one that is be able to reflect on Palestinian women’s experiences of gender violence sponsored by the state of Israel and by relating the Christian Palestinian tradition. Thus, I argue that the story of Saint Barbara is a story of a Palestinian woman martyr, murdered by her family under the accusation of tainting the family’s honor, carried out hand in hand with the state authorities. Moreover, I challenge the masculine view of martyrdom in Palestinian Liberation Theology as male heroic glorification by indecenting the tradition of Saint Barbara and uncovering female martyrdom as defiant and subversive, hence, confronting the gender and sexual oppression of Israeli society and Palestinian Christianity.