Hope for the Future

Although the HIV and AIDS pandemic has scarred our world for almost four decades, we still struggle to understand it and to stop it. In that time, we have learned a great deal about the etiology of the infection and the disease, the populations most at risk, and the possibilities for both prevention and treatment. We now know that halting the pandemic depends on multiple factors—not only scientific and medical but also social, economic, and political. Occasionally, we reach significant milestones. One of these has been the explicit recognition that a new paradigm is possible, available, and required in the study of HIV and AIDS, a paradigm that incorporates studies of gender and religion. This paradigmatic shift has been in the offing through more than a decade of women’s focusing on the pandemic through these combined lenses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the remarkable work of African women theologians. Everyone should be grateful for the explicitly focused analysis and argument presented in this regard by Sarojini Nadar and Isabel Phiri.

The heart of Nadar and Phiri’s argument is that empirical examinations of HIV and AIDS are deficient insofar as they fail to take account of gender and religion. It is the introduction of these factors into studies of the pandemic that has generated, indeed caused, a paradigm shift in focus and content. New attention given to gender and faith or religion has not simply added to biological, medical, and demographic concerns, or even economic and cultural concerns; it has transformed them. Important new insights into the relevance of community, the meaning of familial customs, and affirmation as well as critique of cultural patterns, would not have been possible without an exploration of gender, sexuality, religion, and multiple faith traditions. The evidence in support of Nadar and Phiri’s analyses and arguments is clear and persuasive, in my view, particularly in the multiple theological and empirical studies African women theologians have published in the last decade.

The inclusion of these studies in useful and significant published collections bears witness not only to the volume and diversity of these works but also to the collegiality out of which they were produced. Moreover, the narrative elements in Nadar and Phiri’s overall argument illuminate this collegiality, and in doing so strengthen their case, while holding together the significance of partnerships in a growing “school” of thought and an ongoing evolution of methodologies into a rich and varied African women’s hermeneutic. The insights that are ultimately shared (and which become part of the paradigmatic shift) are rendered persuasive not only in practice and in logic but also in the story of their unfolding. Within the story we come to understand a fourfold development out of a conviction that health cannot be understood without including gendered and religio-cultural aspects of health; to a prioritization of context over universal principles; to an opening in concern for women but also for men; and ultimately, to an “active,” critical but transformative, mode of research and its deployment for behavioral change.

Having articulated my agreement with Nadar and Phiri’s arguments, I turn to the questions they propose for further discussion. Or perhaps I should say, it is from this standpoint both theoretically and experientially that I turn to these questions. My interpretation of their position, as well as my concern for the thrust of their questions, indeed comes from my knowledge of their work and the work of many African women theologians who have addressed the AIDS pandemic. It also comes from the intersection of my own journey regarding the pandemic with theirs. In particular, my path has crossed the paths of members of the Circle of Concerned African Theologians many times—first as part of a mutual consultation on the AIDS pandemic in 2001 among women faculty at Yale Divinity School and Circle members, second as colleagues in the joint program focused on HIV/AIDS between Yale’s School of Public Health and Divinity School, and third at various gatherings and shared projects on the African continent. I have been much influenced by the insights of Circle colleagues and...