Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of AIDS

Notes

Notes 185 Introduction 1 H. R. Englehardt Jr. “The Bioethics of Care: Widows, Monastics, and a Christian Presence in Health Care,” Christian Bioethics 11 (2005): 1–10, p. 9. I have added “visions” in place of Englehardt’s original word “conceits.” Moral perspectives of today are not merely conceits. 2 Taken from the Christian hymn, “Under His Wings” by William Cushing, printed in Sing Joyfully, ed. Jack Schrader (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tabernacle Publishing, 1989), 483. 3 Alexander Irwin, Joyce Millen, and Dorothy Fallows, Global AIDS: Myths and Facts, Tools for Fighting the AIDS Pandemic (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003), 15. P. A. Treichler reports those who have come up with other explanation of HIV/AIDS in Africa listing the causes as “unadmitted homosexual or quasi-homosexual transmission, unadmitted drug use, the practice of anal intercourse as a method of birth control, the widespread use of unsterilised needles , a history of immune suppression and infectious diseases, scarification, clitoridectomy , circumcision . . . and violent, excessive, or exotic sexual practices” (Treichler, How to Have a Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999], 253–54). 4 The inspiration for the concepts “reveal” and “conceal,” which I do not develop here, comes from Brown, who argues that extensive studies of gay men and HIV/AIDS both reveals and erases them. See M. Brown, “Ironies of Distance: An Ongoing Critique of the Geographies of AIDS,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 159–83. 5 See R. M. Anderson, R. M. May, and A. R. McLean, “Possible Demographic Consequences of AIDS in Developing Countries,” Nature 33 (1988): 228–34. 6 See David Sanders and Abdulrahman Sambo, “AIDS in Africa,” in Kenneth R. Overberg, ed., AIDS, Ethics, and Religion (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), 40–52. 7 Lisa Sowle Cahill, Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 45. Elsewhere, Cahill proposes a theory of human rights that is based on the belief that God has created a person free, intelligent, with a sense of purpose, and is social by nature, who thus bears rights. See her essay, “Toward a Christian Theory of Human Rights,” Journal of Religious Ethics 8.2 (2001): 277–301. 8 The Yoruba conception of reality includes the view that all things created by Olodumare, the Supreme Being, are important and that one needs to treat all of the created order with respect and dignity. 9 Gordon Kaufman has argued that Christians might do well to think of themselves as biohistorical beings. Kaufman suggests that this calls for rethinking the concept of creation as creativity. See his “The Theological Structure of Christian Faith and the Feasibility of a Global Ecological Ethic,” Zygon 38.1 (2003): 153–54. 10 Charles Villa-Vicencio, A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-Building and Human Rights (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 276, 279, 283. 11 See here P. A. Treichler, How to Have a Theory in an Epidemic; B. G. Schoepf, “Inscribing the Body Politic: Women and AIDS in Africa,” in P. A. Lock and M. Kaufert, eds., Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 98–126; R. Chirimuuta and R. Chrimuuta, AIDS, Africa and Racism (London: Free Association Books, 1989); Q. Gausset, “AIDS and Cultural Practices in Africa: The Case of the Tonga (Zambia),” Social Science and Medicine 52 (1993): 509–18. 12 This visit is reported in the church’s publication, God’s Voice in the Synagogue (2001). 13 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: SCM Press, 1949), 147. 14 Agrippa G. Khathide, “Teaching and Talking About Our Sexuality: A Means of Combating HIV/AIDS,” in Musa Dube, ed., HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2003), 1; Donald Messer, Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004). 15 Sheryl Bainbridge has argued: “The most basic tenet of the Jewish faith that pertains to prevention of HIV/AIDS is the value of present life . . .” (“The Second Decade of AIDS: A Call for Jewish and Christian Communities of Faith to Respond and to Collaborate With Public Health,” Religious Education 39.2 [1998]: 244). On the priority of the personal see also Elias Kifon 186 Notes to pp. 2–6 Bongmba, “The Priority of the Other: Ethics in Africa—Perspectives from Bonhoeffer and Levinas,” in...