The Widow and the Judge: Memory, Resistance, and Hope

Book, 2020, 255 pp
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The research this volume documents, on multiple communal interpretations of Luke 18:1-8 and on the processes of communication between various groups of readers of this biblical text, has been carried out from the perspective of otherness. In effect, the otherness of the text and the otherness of the readers constitute the point of departure for the biblical and hermeneutical reflections that are presented here, which arise from the painful situation in which thousands of people in Latin America live. Ever since their fundamental rights were violated, these people have been waiting for justice to be done.

Violence has had a twofold impact on these people and their communities. First their human rights were violated, and then they suffered again because of the state's negligence, its institutional role of explaining away - of justifying - the actions of the victimizers. The cry of the widow before the judge is a real outcry in Latin American societies, as real as their hope that justice will be done, and in this way, that the eschatological sense of the Lucan text will be updated. In the Lucan text, the participating communities see reflected their pain but also their struggle for justice.

The faith of these communities has allowed them to interpret their painful experience so as to find in the biblical text a living message of redemption. The communities of those who have lived the experience of intercultural reading of the text of Luke 18:1-8 give testimony in their reading reports to how this brief narrative has helped them overcome the loneliness in which their suffering had locked them up.

This volume
  • examines the context of impunity in which groups in Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala read Luke 18.1-8;
  • looks at previous volumes in the Intercultural Biblical Hermeneutics Series;
  • describes the groups' readings of the text, and their exchanges with their partner groups;
  • takes stock of the results of the interaction; and
  • shows the richness of the intercultural Bible reading process and its usefulness for these communities affected by impunity.

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