Founders’ Day — September 21, 2011
Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford
Pre-registration is closed; please register on-site tomorrow.
“My eyes cause me grief at the fate of all the young women in my city” (Lamentations 3:51, NRSV). Violence against women in Latin America and against Latinas in the United States is on the rise. The ongoing feminicide in Juárez is a symptom of that violence, but the violence is not limited to the border. Undocumented migrant women in the United States are often the target of gender violence as well. How do our ideas about God and human beings change when we try to confront such violence? How might a theology informed by the experience of migrants and migration help the church respond creatively to resist violence? Such questions put theology “on edge.” The lecture will explore some answers from the perspective of a theology on edge which is also a theology in migration: able to take the reality of migration seriously, and also able to change and grow in the face of new realities.
Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Dr. Theol. (Tübingen), was born in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina. She has written many book chapters and journal articles, which have appeared in five languages, and has written or edited five books, among them Nuestra Fe (with Guillermo Hansen; Buenos Aires: ISEDET, 2008) and La porfía de la resurrección. Ensayos desde el feminismo teológico latinoamericano(Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2009). Her current book projects are a theological commentary on Galatians for the Belief series (WJK) in English and a Christology of the marvelous exchange from a Latin American perspective (for the ASIT series) in Spanish. Her research interests focus on global feminist theory, theologies and hermeneutics, Latin American theologies, Latino/Latina theologies in North America, theologies in migration and intercultural theologies, food and theology, liberating readings of Scripture, and the rearticulation of classical doctrinal loci from the perspective of critical and poetic reason (especially pneumatology, Christology, theological anthropology and the doctrine of the Trinity). Dr. Bedford is a member of Reba Place Church (Mennonite) in Evanston, Illinois. She is married and has three daughters.
Schedule of Events
- 8:30 — Registration & Refreshments
- 9:00 — Greetings, Graduate Awards, Introduction
- 9:30 — Lecture
- 11:00 — Eucharist
- 12:30 — Lunch
- 1:30 — Discussion
- 2:30 — Closing
