Decolonizing God: African Women’s Epistemic Challenges to Patriarchal Jesus
Speaker: Professor Esther Mombo
Our inaugural seminar was in May 2021. Our thanks to Professor Esther Mombo for generously sharing her scholarship and insights on this topic.
Abstract
African women are decolonizing God through their epistemic strengths of not only surviving disease, but examining solutions that are most relevant for their own communities. The effects of COVID-19 are felt, disproportionately, in African nations. Mitigating the financial strain of the disease, African women live in fear of exceptional vulnerability contained in housing, work, and family structures, which yield little to no shelter if the disease is in close proximity. Such women represent an increased susceptibility to COVID.
By exploring the plight of Continental African women, Professor Mombo contextualized a focus on the intersectionality of religion and society’s role of exacerbating a gendered dialectic, which often pits women and men against one another, as a function of colonizing God through patriarchal systems. She explored class through a lens of profound poverty and the normalizing effects of violence against women’s bodies. She concluded by identifying key ways the Christian Church can work toward the wholeness of women during the Pandemic as a form of decolonizing God. The seminar link is below.
https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/5ec632dc-1b5a-444d-bdee-41914573bd40
Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network 