Online June Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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This is a closed workshop.

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Three experts will present on the perils and possibilities of trauma-healing occurring through an ecclesial context: Kevin Considine, Stephanie Edwards, and Carina Yépez.  The presenters examine distinct understandings of how theological discourse, ethics, the arts, and spirituality undergird the precarious relationship between trauma-recognition, trauma-healing, and creating small ecclesial communities of justice, healing, and belovedness.  Considine will speak from his text and life praxis articulated in Analogy of the Wound (Lexington 2025), Edwards will speak from her text and life praxis articulated in Enfleshed Counter-Memory (Orbis 2024), and Yépez will speak from her text and life praxis articulated through the series Mujeres currently being installed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Callid Keefe-Perry will offer a response and facilitate conversation among the presenters and the audience. The point is to better understand various manifestations of trauma and the challenges and opportunities for ecclesial communities to become spaces for healing.

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.