In 2006, Dana L. Robert asked: “What would the study of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America look like if scholars put women at the center of their research?” This panel responds by centering the female body as a site of memory and the creation of just futures. Painting the Unspoken highlights the importance of visual sources in understanding Christian women in East Asia as active creators who shaped visual power for the church's vitality. Re-membering the Body examines how contemporary Rwandan women-led religious spaces employ testimony to help women navigate the “Holy Saturday” of unresolved grief while working towards new futures. Tamar's Cry for Justice interrogates the corrosive masculinity that underlies spousal abuse in Timor, offering a Timorese homiletic for preaching the “texts of terror” to confront gender-based violence. Institutional Memory and Historiographical Limits argues for recognizing Catholic women healers and prophetic figures by expanding historiographical boundaries.
Within the framework of trauma-informed theology and ministry practices, the act of sharing testimony can be a part of the trauma-healing process. In the context of the Kigali-based ministry, Women Foundation Ministries (WFM), Christian women in contemporary Rwanda are using the liturgical act of giving testimony to re-member the past, forge new identities, articulate their understandings of God, and imagine new futures. Working with Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology and narrative biographical interviews conducted in Rwanda in 2019, this study centers on the lived religion of lay women. Through a case study of WFM, this paper observes that such a grassroots, women-led religious space — even in the wake of layers of individual and collective trauma — employs testimony as a valuable spiritual tool to help women navigate the “Holy Saturday” of unresolved grief, while also working in community toward new futures.
Building on Dana Robert’s call to center women in World Christianity studies, this paper argues that our understanding of their historical role remains incomplete without a visual turn. By examining Chinese Christian posters and Japanese kamishibai, this paper highlights how women addressed their gender identity and actively reshaped theological imagination as well as achieved conversions through the production of visual materials. The case of Charlotte Tippet in China reveals the importance of gendered intimacy with rural Chinese women in creating "visual archives" of their spiritual and social struggles and converting them. The example of Imai Yone in Japan represents women's agency of localizing theology, transforming the street performance of kamishibai into a religious pedagogical tool for Japanese children. Ultimately, these cases highlight the significance of visual sources in understanding Christian women in East Asia as active creators who profoundly formulated visual power for the church's vitality, absent from texts.
Twenty years ago, historian Dana Robert noted women’s majority status in Christian congregations worldwide, in contrast with a leadership imbalance strongly privileging man. The Gereja Masehi Injili di Timor (Christian Evangelical Church in Timor) is an exception to this rule, in that sixty-nine percent of its pastors are women, and its church attendance and lay leadership are predominantly women. However, this uncommon circumstance has not curbed domestic violence and misogyny. This paper honors these women’s faith by critically interrogating the corrosive notions of masculinity that underlie widespread spousal abuse in Timor and offering preaching that exposes injustice by exercising imagination. It describes the dynamics of abuse in the church and presents a Timorese homiletic for preaching the biblical “texts of terror” to confront gender-based violence. Drawing on postcolonial and trauma theories, I present an approach that will help women to imagine and construct futures free of violence and discrimination.
Under the influence of Dana Robert and others, World Christianity has found creative research methods for unearthing voices of women in Christianity. For Catholic women, the focus has often led to renewed attention to canonized saints and women’s institutions. Yet especially in Latin America, many women lead at the fringes rather than through the mainstream portions of the tradition. These include uncanonized folk saints and other leaders who, though deeply influential in their day, did not meet canonization standards and did not enter or found institutions. To this end, this presentation examines newsprint and oral histories to highlight female Catholic healers and prophetic figures in northern Mexico and the US-Mexican Borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ultimately, the presentation argues that in order to recognize many Catholic women (both in and outside Latin America), historiography boundaries must expand beyond institutional resources.