Women Religion And Hiv Aids In Africa

The book has 3 parts: re-reading the Bible, challenging faith communities and practical resources for faith communities. It is the fruit of a conference of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians on "Sex, Stigma and HIV/AIDS: African Women Challenging Religion, Culture and Social Practices."

The first comprehensive empirical account of how religion affects the interpretation, prevention, and mitigation of AIDS in Africa, the world's most religious continent.

The first comprehensive empirical account of how religion affects the interpretation, prevention, and mitigation of AIDS in Africa, the world's most religious continent.

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display peoplea (TM)s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.

This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.

This book critically interrogates emerging interconnections between religion and biomedicine in Africa in the era of antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Highlighting the complex relationships between religious ideologies, practices and organizations on the one hand, and biomedical treatment programmes and the scientific languages and public health institutions that sustain them on the other, this anthology charts largely uncovered terrain in the social science study of the Aids epidemic. Spanning different regions of Africa, the authors offer unique access to issues at the interface of religion and medical humanitarianism and the manifold therapeutic traditions, religious practices and moralities as they co-evolve in situations of AIDS treatment. This book also sheds new light on how religious spaces are formed in response to the dilemmas people face with the introduction of life-prolonging treatment programmes.

It's common knowledge that in developing countries--Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America--the burden of HIV/AIDS falls disproportionately on women, who are generally the victims of male carriers of the disease. In this book, Roman Catholic women theologians from all over the world will discuss the pandemic in terms of their particular geographical and social location. The model for the volume is Continuum's "Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention" (2000), edited by James Keenan, S.J. The occasion or impetus for the volume was the First International Crosscultural Conference for Catholic Theological Ethicists, single-handedly created by James Keenan (he raised 3/4 of a million dollars) and held at Padua, July 2006. (The plenary sessions will be published by Continuum under the title "Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church." ) The mentors for the volume will be James Keenan (editor Iozzio's Doktorvater) and Margaret Farley, "America's leading Catholic feminist theological ethicist" (19 Dec. review of "Just Love" in "America"). Farley's advocacy both in the US and Africa on the issue of women and AIDS is renowned, and she will be the best-known contributor. The leading contributor from English-speaking Europe is Linda Hogan from Trinity College Dublin.

How can Bible-reading communities, be they faith or academic ones, re-read the Bible for liberation in the HIV and AIDS struggle? Given the epidemic's close link with social injustice, what are the justice-oriented ways of re-reading the Bible in the light of HIV and AIDS? Grant Me Justice: HIV/AIDS & Gender Readings of the Bible anthology proposes gender-sensitive multi-sectoral readings of the Bible in the light of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. The approach factors how the epidemic works with class, gender, age, race, migrant status, violence, international relations, sexual and ethnic identity to expose the world and certain groups to infection. The book, therefore, proposes justice seeking ways of re-reading the Bible that affirm life, the right to healing, care, medicine and treatment, the human rights of all, while it counteracts the social structures of poverty, gender injustice, stigma, violence, international injustice, which are the fertile grounds for the spread of HIV and AIDS. Book jacket.

As the world watched the biggest global epidemic in history evolve, many anticipated that Christians would embrace those who were affected just as Jesus during his time embraced those who were sick and dying. Mostly, the Christian church stood back and observed. Sometimes Christians responded with stigma and discrimination. Many who sought refuge in the churches--churches where they had served the sick and the poor--were turned away as they now sought refuge for themselves and their children. Individual authors address the critical issues related to the HIV epidemic, women, and the Christian church: how the HIV epidemic affected so many women and children; what the Old and New Testaments teach about our responsibility to the poor, the needy, the sick, the widow, and the orphan; and how difficult it should be for Christians to ignore these teachings. The HIV epidemic continues, and millions of women and children bear a disproportionate share of the pain and suffering without a refuge. Although HIV is a specific disease, it serves as a paradigm for all Christians to ask what other needs they may be ignoring.