Talks and Papers
LINKS to articles (some overlap)
Some of us are more colonized than others; some of us have more work to “unlearn our privilege as loss.”
My mother can count 13 generations of settlers in America back to the Mayflower, in most generations a parson. My father is a fourth generation German from a Marxist cigar maker fleeing Bismark.
There is an inexorable link between religion and American foreign policy in my family. I spent the first seventeen years in the Philippines as the child of Presbyterian missionaries, my father involved in urban industrial mission. And I have been involved in aftermath of US wars ever since – twenty years refugees from Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodians, in US, a transit camp in the Philippines, visiting refugee camps on Thai-Cambodian border, finally doctoral research on Cambodian Americans returning to Phnom Penh as entrepreneurs of democracy in 1990’s.
As a white lesbian American citizen, an anti-imperialist ally with the Philippine struggle for justice, I’ve thought through the sexualization of militarism, nationalism, and empire as a member of several transnational interfaith anti-Empire networks, but found both queer Americans and transnational interfaith alliances wary of each other.
Plenary speaker, “Empire at Home,” International Conference for Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines, Manila, Philippines, July 2013
“Sexless Allies in Anti-Empire Interfaith Alliances,” panel on Religion and Gender: Identity, Conflict, and Power, Centre for Conflict Studies, Monterey, California, November 8-10, 2012
Plenary Panel, “Is there life after tea? Interfaith Solidarity in an era of Empire” Interfaith Summer Institute on Justice, Peace, and Social Movements, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, August 6-10, 2010
“Saying No to Empire: Filipino Feminist Theologians against America’s Unjust Wars” panel on Grassroots Peacebuilding around the Globe: Case Studies, American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Washington DC, November 18-21, 2006.
Plenary Speaker, “A US Feminist Critique of the US War on Terror,” in Sowing Seeds of Peace in the Era of Empire: Christians in Solidarity with Muslims, Davao City, Philippines, November 28-December 4, 2004
Speaker, “Women and Peacemaking,” National Council of Churches of the Philippines Annual Conference, Manila, Philippines, November 12, 2003
Keynote speaker, “Dreaming Terror, Keeping Vision: Creating a Transnational Feminist Theological Praxis for Troubled Times,” Con-Spirando Feminist Collective Encuentro III, Santiago, Chile, January 8-16, 2002
Plenary Speaker, “Women and U.S. Wars of Aggression,” in Women’s Voices to Overcome Violence, International Solidarity Forum, Ecumenical Women’s Forum, Manila, Philippines, September 22, 2002
“Women and U.S. Wars of Aggression,” Bulatlat, Volume 2, Number 34, September 29 – October 5, 2002.