Come to part or all!
Canadian Theological Society
Virtual Conference
May 24-26, 2022
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Tuesday, May 24
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| 10:00 – 10:05 am ET |
Welcome (Jane Barter)
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| 10:05 – 10:55 am |
Panel 1:
“Reconciliation: Journey, Setbacks, and Promises”
Presenters: Gordon Rixon, Graham P. McDonough
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| 11:00 – 11:50 am |
Panel 2:
“For a Humble Church: Catholicism, Repentance,
and Building Cultures of Peace”
Presenters: Zoe Bernatsky, Christopher Hrynkow, Doris Kieser, Nick Olkovich
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| 12:00 – 12:20 |
Break
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| 12:20 – 1:10 pm |
Panel 3:
“Toward a New Christian Theology of Martyrdom, Repentance, and Place”
Presenters: Jeremy M. Bergen, Preston D. S. Parsons, Ryan Turnbull
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| 1:20 – 2:10 pm |
Panel 4:
“Faith, Hope, and Love as Embodied Disciplines and Practices
within Liberatory Anti-Violence Movements”
Presenters: Johonna McCants-Turner, James W. McCarty, Hannah Bowman
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| 2:20 – 3:10 pm |
Special Session:
Presenter: Joseph Naytowhow
“ahkamiyimowin: Perseverance under Great Odds”
Organized by CTS Dignity, Equity, and Justice Committee
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| 3:20 – 4:00 pm |
Cocktail Hour / World Café
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Wednesday, May 25
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| 10:00 – 10:50 am ET |
Panel 5:
“Beyond Saints and Superheroes: How Can Canadian Churches
Support Parents Raising Children with Disabilities?”
Presenters: Laura MacGregor, Allen Jorgenson, Kayko Driedger Hesslein,
Roz Vincent Haven
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| 11:00 – 11:50 am |
Jay Newman Lecture
“Afropessimism and the Dogged Strength of Blackness:
An Assessment of the Ground for a Theology of Hope”
Frederick Ware
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| 12:00 – 12:50 pm |
Networking Lunch
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| 1:00 – 1:50 pm |
Panel 6:
“Beyond Ecological Colonization and Crisis: For a New Theology of Creation”
Presenters: Carl Friesen, Michael Stoeber, Jean-Pierre Fortin
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| 2:00 – 2:50 pm |
Special Session:
Presenter: Jeanette Rodriguez (Seattle University)
“Cultural Memory, Resistance, and a Return to ‘Original Instruction’”
Organized by CTS Dignity, Equity, and Justice Committee
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| 3:00 – 5:00 pm |
AGM
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Thursday, May 26
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| 9:30 – 10:50 am ET |
Special Session:
Papal Apology Roundtable
Panelists: Msgr. Donald Bolen, Rev. Daryold Winkler,
Jeremy Bergen, Christine Jamieson
Chairs: Jane Barter and Doris Kieser
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| 11:00 – 11:50 am |
Panel 7:
“Christian Faith and Theology of Liberation, Healing, and Hope”
Presenters: Andrew K. Gabriel, Don Schweitzer, Zane Chu,
Patrick Nolin
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| 12:00 – 12:20 pm |
Break
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| 12:20 – 1:10 pm |
Panel 8:
“Intersectional Feminist Imagination”
Presenters: Michelle Voss Roberts, Sheryl Johnson, HyeRan Kim-Cragg,
Carmen Lansdowne
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| 1:20 – 2:10 pm |
Presidential Address
“‘God Keep Our Land?’ Unsettling Canadian Theology”
Jane Barter
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| 2:10 – 2:20 pm |
Closing Remarks
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Abstracts
Panel 1:
Gordon Rixon, Regis College
A Slain Lamb Standing: Journeying in Reconciliation
My roundtable presentation advances my reflection on the development of church doctrine on indigenous rights and the preparation of a revised edition of Michael Stogre, S.J., That the World May Believe: The Development of Papal Social Thought on Aboriginal Rights (1992). In a recent paper, I explored three areas of learning arising for church communities as people of faith identify and address systematic issues of colonialism, racism, and abuse. I examined each of these areas as a response to a question. Why are communities slow to recognize and respond to the humanity and suffering of those who have been harmed? Why are communities reluctant to acknowledge and address the woundedness of perpetrators, who are themselves often victims of complex, intergenerational trauma? What changes need to emerge in religious leadership to support a culture of healing, restorative justice, and preventative care in our communities? My presentation focuses on the third question and addresses the need to complement the teaching office of Bishops with a leadership role in facilitating recovery from trauma. Recent statements by some Bishops deflecting responsibility for the imbroglio of religion, colonialism, and sexual violence flags the need to develop competence in additional forms of discourse. In Trauma and Recovery (2015), Judith Herman outlines that recovering from trauma is a survivor-focused journey that overcomes the loss of identity and agency by re-establishing basic social safety, narration and memorialization of violation, and social activism. In “‘The Trinity is our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement” (1998), Miroslav Volf proposes an approach to interrelating religious vision and engagement in social issues. Drawing on these two authors, I identify how leadership could become more adept at engaging multiple forms of discourse and, thereby, again repudiate what Stogre identifies as a tendency in church doctrine and practice to subordinate justice to the advancement of Christian mission.
Graham P. McDonough, University of Victoria
How Supersessionism Obstructs the Catholic Church’s Approach to Reconciliation
I hypothesize that supersessionism – a belief that Christianity replaces and fulfils Judaism – sets a template within Christianity that obstructs today’s Catholic Church efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous persons and groups. I begin with a broad, but robust generalization that reconciliation should entail apologies for both past actions and the modes of thought that enabled them. Catholic Church apologies for the actions of residential schooling also must apologize for Catholic Church disrespect of the religious freedom of Indigenous persons, and disrespect of Indigenous spiritualties – beliefs, practices, and lifeways. I will argue that while the Canadian Catholic Bishops’ (CCCB) 2016 “Response to Call to Action 48 (On Adopting and Implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)” properly recognizes colonizers’ violations of Indigenous persons’ religious freedom, it insufficiently recognizes colonizers’ beliefs that Indigenous spiritualities are less than Catholic Christianity. While the Church’s respect for the rights of Indigenous persons to practice their spirituality is one thing, its respect for the content of that spirituality itself is another, and I will show that the CCCB’s talk of respect for religious rights is made to do the work of respect for the content of spiritual practices. These insufficiencies echo a wider phenomenon in the Church that enables colonial structures of thought to persist in this new guise, including how contemporary Catholic school curricula mirror it in their presentations of Judaism and Indigenous spiritualities. Hence, I maintain that as supersessionism remains within Catholic school experiences it also impedes teaching for reconciliation.
Panel 2:
For a Humble Church: Catholicism, Repentance and Building Cultures of Peace
Inspired by the recovery of unmarked graves on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools in Canada, this panel of four Catholic theologians will explore the themes of social sin and repentance as they apply to the Canadian Catholic Church. Acknowledging our positions of privilege as Catholic settlers situated in western Canada, the panelists will critique ecclesiologies that promote cultures of exclusion and explore ways of fostering cultures of encounter and peace. The latter will include a focus on moments, signs, gestures, and movements toward a collective, Catholic response to the abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church.
Sr. Zoe Bernatsky (Newman Theological College) uses Ignatian spirituality to shift focus from fear, pride, and self-protection to open-hearted encounter within the Catholic church, critical for kenotic repentance, conversion, and healing from harms suffered by indigenous peoples at residential schools.
Nick Olkovich (St. Mark’s College) explores ecclesiological dimensions of social sin and grace, with a particular focus on the evils of clericalism and triumphalism, in dialogue with Pope Francis’ call for a synodal church committed to constructing an inclusive common good.
Doris Kieser (St. Joseph’s College) engages Bernard Lonergan on conversion alongside the Vatican II notion of a pilgrim church, to consider gestures of repentance and steps toward reconciling for abuses perpetrated by the church and traumas suffered by indigenous peoples in Canada.
Christopher Hrynkow (St. Thomas More College) works from a Peace Studies perspective, integrating theological concepts related to corporate responsibility and responsibility, to identify structural barriers to Catholic participation in transformative cultures of encounter, dialogue, and peace.
Panel 3:
Jeremy M. Bergen, Conrad Grebel University College
Christian Martyrdom, Cultural Trauma, and Conspiracies of Silence
Problem: The ways in which churches and Christian theology frame the suffering of particular victims as “martyrs” may have implications for how churches and Christian theology respond to other victims of violence.
Contribution: I will connect contemporary theologies of martyrdom with the lens of cultural trauma.
The interpretation and narration of particular deaths as martyrdom is a framework within which some victims of violence are recognized and lauded by the Christian community and their witness held up as inspiring and instructive. In this brief presentation, I consider some implications of understanding the discourse of martyrdom as a response to “cultural trauma,” a concept developed by Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman. The language of martyrdom provides meaning to suffering but does so at the risk of silencing some voices and perspectives, including the martyrs who can no longer speak for themselves. The paper is part of a larger project assessing the claim that Christian martyrdom, in the words of Pope Francis, is an “ecumenism of blood” which advances the unity of the church. An important and defensible thesis, critical examination of this claim also reveals troubling costs, including cultural conspiracies of silence in the name of a coherent martyr narrative. The collective repression of the memory of Jesus as a victim of sexualized violence epitomizes this danger. How churches and Christian theology frame the suffering of particular victims as “martyrs” has implications for how churches and Christian theology respond to other victims of violence.
Preston D. S. Parsons, Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener
Bonhoeffer and the Problem of Vicarious Repentance
As bishops calls the church to repentance for the sins of the unrepentant, Bonhoeffer’s theology of vicarious repentance offers theological grounding to these calls. Amid the revelations of the church’s contribution to indigenous trauma, Anglican bishops have called for the church to repent. Many actors, however, are dead; others are unrepentant; others see repentance for the sins of others as an incoherent proposal. These calls for repentance, alongside the unwillingness or inability for some to repent, leads to the problem of repentance for the sins of others, and the need for a coherent theological articulation of this mode of repentance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the church as a community in which we act for others. Bonhoeffer writes of the forgiveness of sins, intercessory prayer, and sacrificial work as ways that one can act vicariously. What is less clear is the way repentance fits into Bonhoeffer’s schema. Yet when he does write on repentance, he writes about it much as he does on other forms of vicarious action. This leads to the possibility that repentance may serve a vicarious function Bonhoeffer’s thought. This possibility offers two opportunities. The first is to investigate how repentance functions for Bonhoeffer in Bonhoeffer’s theology as a whole, and thus to fill a lacuna in Bonhoeffer research. The second is to employ the fruits of this research in support of the bishops’ call for the church to repent for the sins of the unrepentant.
Ryan Turnbull, University of Birmingham
Haunted and Held: Indigenous Place-Making and Settler Unknowing
The 1930s saw a massive drought in the heartland of the Canadian prairies. In response, the federal government created the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administrative and gave it broad powers to intervene in the Canadian prairie landscape to mitigate the worst effects of the drought. One mitigation strategy involved the creation of a series of community pastures that would better protect the eroding top-soil in drought conditions than the cultivation practices of the time. However, in some instances, the land identified for expropriation into pasture land was the home of an Indigenous people group known as the Métis. In one such site, Ste. Madeleine, Manitoba, the entire community was displaced, largely without compensation, and saw their homes burnt and dogs shot, all to ‘protect’ the ‘marginal’ land and provide reliable pasture to the settler community. My presentation provides an overview of ethnographic and archival research I have conducted on this site as a way of exploring the conflicts in Indigenous and Settler place-making and identity formation. From this case study I argue that Christian theologies of place have to grapple seriously with practices of settler unknowing. Following both Eve Tuck and recent work by Settler-Canadian theologians seeking to engage decolonization, I interrogate the descriptions of Ste. Madeleine through the lens of hauntology of this site in order to demonstrate how the Indigenous-haunted psyche of settler colonialism reproduces violent erasures and how this ‘haunting’ must be accounted for if Christian theologies of place are to move beyond their colonial structures.
Panel 4:
Faith, Hope and Love as Embodied Disciplines and Practices within Liberatory Anti-Violence Movements
Drawing primarily from Black feminist, womanist, Latina, and Mujerista theologies, we examine contemporary social movements created by women of colour in the U.S. and Canada that are enacting strategies to challenge intimate violence and the violence of prisons and policing. We argue that these cultural and political spaces offer a prophetic witness to faith, hope and love as embodied disciplines and practices in the face of violence. U.S. organizer Mariame Kaba’s oft-repeated phrase “hope is a discipline” is an influential mantra for these movements. Yet another is Canadian cultural worker Kai Cheng Thom’s urging, “I hope we choose love,” rather than punishment in the aftermath of violence. Liberatory anti-violence movements forged from the interstices of vulnerabilities to interpersonal, systemic and carceral violence situate their practices of resistance as exercises in hope and faith, imagining ways of practicing justice and accountability that do not yet exist. Likewise, organizers understand their efforts as a disciplined embrace of “love as the practice of freedom,” to quote recently departed writer bell hooks. Addressing the moral and ethical foundations, and theological implications of liberatory anti-violence movements, we posit that learning from their embodied practices of faith, hope and love can serve as a rich resource for doing theology and formulating Christian social ethics.
Panelists:
Johonna McCants-Turner, Conrad Grebel University College
James W. McCarty, University of Washington Tacoma
Hannah Bowman, Mount Saint Mary’s University
Panel 5:
Beyond Saints and Superheroes: How Can Canadian Churches Support Parents Raising Children with Disabilities?
The proposed panel reviews the results of a qualitative study funded by the Louisville Institute exploring the experiences of parents raising children with disabilities in Canadian churches. Briefly, the results indicate that parents encounter numerous physical, social, theological, and attitudinal barriers to church participation. Parents report that poor understanding of disabilities and caregiving among church communities can manifest in judgmental attitudes, ableist theology, and social exclusion that render church “unsafe” for their child and family. Parents desire churches that; 1) extend practical support, 2) offer meaningful inclusion, 3) demonstrate a willingness to learn about disability, and 4) provide unconditional friendship and the lived experience of true belonging. The results of this study are relevant for faith communities considering ways to welcome people with disabilities into their communities, but also for churches hoping to embrace radical welcome more broadly. This panel will present findings, offer a theological framework of embodiedness as an entry for dis-abling church, and provide an opportunity for conference attendees to collectively explore the theological and practical implications of the parents’ stories and discuss strategies to make their own faith communities safe and welcoming for all.
Panelists:
Laura MacGregor, Martin Luther University College, Wilfrid Laurier University
Allen Jorgenson, Martin Luther University College, Wilfrid Laurier University
Kayko Driedger Hesslein, Lutheran Theological Seminary Saskatoon
Vincent Haven, United Church of Canada (retired)
Jay Newman Lecture:
Frederick Ware, Howard University
Afropessimism and the Dogged Strength of Blackness: An Assessment of the Ground for a Theology of Hope
This presentation assesses the plausibility of three expressions of optimism over against Afropessimism. These expressions are framed eschatologically (W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Messianism), Christologically (M. Shawn Copeland’s resurrection hope), and philosophically (Victor Anderson’s relational concept of race and view of the emergence of faith and beloved community from the process of creative exchange). Afropessimism is variously defined as an intellectual movement, school of thought, and framework of social and political analysis that asserts Black people are integral to human society, American society in particular, but are ironically excluded from it and targeted for gratuitous violence. Afropessimists argue that Blackness and other categorizations of minorities are a condemnation to “ontological death,” the status of nonperson, a “thing,” without human identity or subjectivity. With Black life described as such, this presentation ponders the questions. Is there an alternative to anti-blackness and racial violence? Is there no solution (end) to racism? Do these expressions of hope, or any other forms of optimism so conceived, adequately inspire social action to address past and present injustices and work toward a sustainable and equitable future?
Panel 6:
Carl Friesen, University of Notre Dame
Hope in the Kenotic Pattern of Creation: Theological Naturalism and Ecological Crisis
The unprecedented challenges created by our ecological crises has prompted theologians to emphasize that Christian hope is not in nature itself, but in an eschatological future where suffering and death are ultimately overcome. Some environmentalists, by contrast, contend that such eschatological hope is morally problematic for it leads to naïve, unscientific prescriptions for human-nature relationships. Insofar as hope is reasonable at all, they suggest that it is rests on the human capacity to successfully respond to crisis. Both accounts of hope tend to overlook the regenerative rhythm of natural processes in se and thus struggle for direct moral relevance. This paper argues for a Christian hope grounded in natural processes as manifestations of divine wisdom. A naturalistically grounded hope is intensely practical for it recognizes the kenotic rhythm of God’s creation—its impetus to bring new life out of death—as pattern for the moral life. Christian descriptions of hope almost exclusively focus on God’s redeeming activity in Jesus Christ, now and in the eschaton. While an eschatologically grounded hope has some practical relevance in addressing environmental degradation, it also distorts our understanding of how to respond to nature in the present by extrapolating moral norms from an imagined future rather than attempting to respond to nature as it is. What is needed instead, I argue, is an account of hope grounded in the life-sustaining processes of nature itself. If we view nature as indication of God’s wisdom, we have a template of sorts for how to structure our lives.
Michael Stoeber, Regis College
Sacred Groves or Profitable Commodities? Exploring Dispositions toward our Environment in Interreligious Dialogue
This paper will explore human orientations that have contributed to current environmental issues and propose positive creative responses. It will illustrate the problems in relation to Indigenous peoples and coloniality contexts, highlighting both distorted and reverential approaches to trees through consideration of a concrete historical case—the radical depletion and degradation of the White Pine forest ecosystem of Ontario and other areas of eastern North America, from the 17th -19th c. The paper: (i) compares this Canadian/USA context to current conditions in the Amazon Rainforest of South America; (ii) analyzes core traditional distorted human attitudes that contribute to such environmental destruction and socio-cultural repression, whereby trees are solely objectified, hyper-commodified, and radically exploited; and (iii) points to supportive and personally transforming attitudes towards trees—especially through Jewish-philosophical and Indigenous models—which highlight their intrinsic value and our potential relationship with them, in respectful, appreciative, non-intentional, unmediated, and deeply spiritual ways. The main dialogue partners will be Martin Buber, Nick Black Elk, Pope Francis, Lynn White, Jr, Edith Stein, and Andrew Vietze.
Jean-Pierre Fortin, University of St. Michael’s College
White Messiah, Colonizing Ecology: Dune as Dystopic Representation of the Future
The release of the movie Dune (Part I) by French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve invites a critical reconsideration of Frank Herbert’s vision for the future of humankind. Pertaining to “cautionary science fiction,” Dune embodies Herbert’s attempt to warn his readers about the consequences of giving in to the western (post)modern neoliberal ideal. The search for messiahs (such as Paul Atreides) in and to whom the hope and mission of saving humankind can be invested and entrusted may lead society to relinquish freedom and agency for the safety and comfort of clearly defined stable order. Excessive faith and trust placed in human science and technology generate deterministic understandings of nature and history, themselves providing means to control, disrupt or annihilate natural ecosystems and evolution. In such a world, the temptation is great for members of privileged castes to use religion as a tool to manipulate populations deemed “primitive,” for the sake of imperial conquest (cf. the Corrino, Harkonnen and Atreides houses) or to produce the ultimate version of the human being (cf. the Bene Gesserit order). Dramatizing the deleterious effects of enforced theocracy, imperial domination, colonization and patriarchy, Dune compels its readers to nurture understandings of religion and the supernatural transcending superstition, notions of the human and education overcoming unilateral rational control of the body, in favour of embracing the inherent indeterminacy of natural and human evolution and history. Dune thereby provides contemporary theologians with constructive resources to produce faithful and liberating articulations and embodiments of God and the human.
Special Session:
Papal Apology Roundtable
This roundtable is intended to offer personal and pastoral reflections on the papal apology by Indigenous and non-Indigenous panelists. After viewing the Apology, several invited guests will speak to its meaning in their lives and their hope for Pope Francis’ visit to Canada. We will then open the conversation to all those gathered.
Panelists:
Msgr. Donald Bolen, Archbishop of Regina
Rev. Daryold Winkler, St. Basil’s Parish, Ottawa
Jeremy M. Bergen, Conrad Grebel University College
Christine Jamieson, Concordia University
Chairs:
Jane Barter, University of Winnipeg
Doris Kieser, St. Joseph’s College
Panel 7:
Andrew K. Gabriel, Horizon College & Seminary
Hope for the Future: On the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada’s Renewed Statement of Faith
The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC) is Canada’s largest evangelical denomination. In May of 2022 its General Conference will vote on a “refreshed” statement of faith, and the denomination’s leadership expects it to receive broad affirmation. This is the first major rewrite of the statement since 1980. This presentation will give a brief overview of the history of the PAOC’s “Statement of Essential Truths,” report on the results of the vote, and survey key changes in the statement. The presentation will demonstrate that while the statement continues to express conservative evangelical theology, 1) its changes allow for a greater diversity of theological views within the denomination, while at the same time 2) giving more emphasis to Pentecostal theological sensitivities as the statement draws on the best of historical and contemporary Pentecostal theology, and 3) its changes include attempts to addresses some current cultural and ecclesial issues, such as the place of women in ministry, concerns for creation care, and the inclusion of those of various ethnic and racial identities.
Don Schweitzer, St. Andrew’s College
The Christology of George Soares-Prabhu, SJ
George Soares-Prabhu, SJ (1929-1995) was one of India’s foremost Biblical theologians. His contributions to a liberating Biblical theology for India, collected in four volumes, are distinguished by the high quality of his exegesis and his insistence on interpreting Scripture in relation to India’s massive poverty, religious pluralism and caste discrimination. Christology was one of his central themes. This presentation will ask what Canadian theologians can learn from Soares-Prabhu. It will answer this through examining five aspects of his christology: 1) his negotiation of the tension between the contextuality of a liberating theology and the universality of its truth claims; 2) the dialectical relationship of Indian culture and the Biblical traditions in his approach to christology; 3) his notion of the Jesus of faith as a way of surmounting the tension between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith; 4) his emphasis on understanding Jesus through his public ministry as narrated in the Synoptic Gospels; and 5) his repudiation of Chalcedon’s christological affirmations.
Canadian theologians can learn from Soares-Prabhu on all these points, though from a Western perspective, his repudiation of the Chalcedonian Definition seems one-sided.
Zane Chu, Regis College
Good despite Evil: Reformulating Lonergan’s Law of the Cross
Bernard Lonergan concisely articulated the meaning and practical significance of Christ’s saving work as the law of the cross. God saves us not by the exercise of power, but by converting or transforming evil into good. This develops a fundamental element of reflection on God’s saving work in the tradition of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. My paper interrogates the meaning of “converting” or “transforming” evil into good, particularly in light of experiences of the trauma of sexual abuse or the colonization of Indigenous peoples that would rightly resist such an expression. Speaking of “transforming” such evils into good seems not only inappropriate but also perverse. Therefore, it is incumbent on Christian theologians to clarify this meaning, and possibly to reformulate it in other terms. First, I collect the various explanations of the transformation of evil into good according to the law of the cross in Lonergan and his interpreters. Second, guided by these explanations I offer one possible reformulation: that the law of the cross means the possibility of good despite evil and invites the doing of good despite, and against, evil. This reformulation, I then argue, relates the law of the cross to hope and charity, further specifying its practical import. My ultimate goal is to open up reflection on the cross and reconciliation in the trajectory of Augustine, Aquinas, and Lonergan, such that theological understanding listens more attentively to concrete experiences of evil, and responds more sensitively, not with harmful words but with the hope of “Good News.”
Patrick Nolin, Regis College
Memory, Forgetting, and a Defense of Narrativism in the Retrieval of Recollection
In the translator’s notes to the English edition of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary to Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscientia, Kevin White argues that Aristotle’s treatise offers a precision in vocabulary concerning the idea of memory which has been significantly thinned in contemporary English. The nomenclature between remembering, forgetting, and recollecting is at times difficult to parse. Given their three distinct, yet related functions, and our common language regarding their affective and cognitional responses in human operations, no wonder there exists a conflation between the operations of each of the three faculties. Nevertheless, it is important to retrieve a theory of recollection that differentiates itself from the category of remembering – which is associated more aptly with the affectivity of memory – in the attempt to produce what Freud called “a geography of the subject.” This paper thus will serve as a retrieval of recollection apart from the categories of remembering and forgetting within our memory. In doing so, it will demonstrate how a theory of recollection rescues a narrativist school of thought concerning the role of memory in healing from crippling relativism and how it can adequately address traumas that have been undertaken by both the individual and community. The inability to adequately reflect on the operations of these three faculties poses tremendous difficulties in how we may attempt to move forward in peace.
Panel 8:
Intersectional Feminist Imagination
Many had hoped that by 2022 diverse feminist theologies would have transformed Christian theology. However, mainline theological circles often treat critical feminist interventions as a side conversation, or even a conversation of the past. Intersectional feminism recognizes that there is no universal human experience and no prototype for women’s experience. Experiences of gender, racialization, dis/ability, class, religion, and sexuality interrelate and transform one another. This panel makes the case that the conference theme, “Remembering Trauma/Imagining Hope” is incomplete without intersectional feminist perspectives that imagine the past, present, and future otherwise. Invested in the Canadian theological world from different perspectives and disciplines, the panelists ask: How are mainline ecclesial practices rooted in colonial, patriarchal, exploitative worldviews, even when these communities explicitly state their commitments to do otherwise; and how can intersectional feminism bridge the ideological divide between ministry and administration and bring a more holistic approach? How are postcolonial ecofeminist theological contributions necessary for preachers and homiletical scholars to engage climate crisis effectively? How can a priority for indigenous women as the most marginalized identify cracks in socio-economic and political structures—including those designed as safety nets—that perpetrate injustices? How can queer and critical feminist perspectives build theological understanding about diverse gender identities? The panelists will foster dialogue among panelists and audience by posing the question: what might an intersectional and explicitly feminist collective look like in the contemporary Canadian theological landscape?
Panelists:
Michelle Voss Roberts, Emmanuel College
Sheryl Johnson, St. Stephen’s College
HyeRan Kim-Cragg, Emmanuel College
Carmen Lansdowne, First United Church Community Ministry, Vancouver
Moderator:
Alexa Gilmour, Pacific School of Religion
