Antecedentes internacionales

Earl Shelp and Ronald Sunderland’s AIDS and the Church is one of the earliest works that attempted to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the theological implications for the church, i.e., American church. As a result of it, Shelp and Sunderland trace several early theological responses to the epidemiology of the disease, including discussion of responses from White Evangelical Christian voices such as Jerry Falwell and voices of several other mainline denominational leaders; responses from pastors of African descent are noticeably missing from their discussion.110 _{Donald Messer’s Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence moves away from} domestic theological responses and turns our attention to various international theological responses to HIV/AIDS. Whereas Messer’s work includes discussion about the most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, women and children, there is very little mentioned about, for example, the intersection of race, class, sexual orientation, and the attendant larger structural forces, e.g., poverty. Much like Shelp and Sunderland, Messer’s work does not give substantive conversations on the responses of pastors of African descent across the Diaspora.111

Robert E. Beckley and Jerome R. Koch’s The Continuing Challenge of AIDS: Clergy Responses to Patients, Friends, and Families compares and contrasts clergy (e.g., priests, rabbis, and ministers) responses to HIV/AIDS in the United States and the United Kingdom from 1987 to 1991. Beckly and Kock interview American clergy leaders from mainline Protestant denominations, Roman Catholicism, and the Jewish Faith, and analogously clergy members in the United Kingdom who were also leaders of mainline Protestant denominations, Roman

110 Earl Shelp and Ronald H. Sunderland, AIDS and the Church (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1992), 20-32. 111 Donald E. Messer, Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis

Catholicism, and the Reform Synagogues. No identification of clergy member’s race, gender, or sexual orientation was mentioned in their study.112

Studies of African American religious leaders’ responses to HIV/AIDS suggest that the church was reticent about the disease during the early years of the epidemic.113 For example, Bruce Lambert argues that African American religious leaders gave more attention to attending structural issues of HIV/AIDS rather than the disease itself.114 Others pointed to “homophobia” as the root cause of the African American church’s reluctance to address the HIV/AIDS issue.115 Billingsley’s “The Black Church Confronts the HIV/AIDS Crisis” takes a different approach, as his research presents a very small number of churches engaged in the battle against HIV/AIDS through education, prevention, and awareness programs. 116

Elias K. Bongma’s book Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of AIDS examines religious responses and the need for more religious responses to the epidemic within the African continent. He draws on the impetus of the aforementioned “Imago Dei,” or image of God discourse(s), to call African churches into dialogue and to further provide pastoral care for millions of Africans affected by HIV/AIDS. Bongma’s work focuses on the social and cultural, ethical, and epidemiological presence and aspect of the disease within several African countries (e.g., Congo, Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa); however, his discussion on the global church

112 Robert Beckley and Jerome Kock, The Continuing Challenge of AIDS: Clergy Responses to Patients, Friends, and Families (Westport, Conn.: Auburn House, 2002).

113 National Research Council, The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National

Academy Press, 1993).

114 Bruce Lamber, “Black Clergy to Address AIDS threat to Race,” New York Times, June 10, 1989.

115 For example, see Charles Perros and Mauro Guillem, The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of the Organizations in New York and the Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

116 Andrew Billingsley, “The Black Church Confronts the HIV/AIDS Crisis,” in Mighty Like A River (New York:

does not address in a compelling manner the rhetoric employed by the Diasporic Church to the epidemic.117

Gillian Genrich and Brader Brathwaite, for example, explore how several religious leaders’ incentives to respond to HIV/AIDS in their congregations--specifically those within a Caribbean context, i.e., Trinidad and Tobago--were affected by narrow perceptions of HIV/AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease. Furthermore, this project also explores how the presence of people within religious communities contribute to larger understanding of healing and coping with AIDS within those communities. This study was conducted through one interview questionnaire given to religious representatives and another survey for people living with HIV/AIDS who are a part of those communities. Within this study, no attention was given to the implications of pulpitized rhetorics delivered by any of the religious leaders.118 Nancy Muturi employs social influence theory to examine the contributions of Jamaican religious leaders across various traditions and practices in addressing HIV/AIDS. Muturi’s work, however, stops short of addressing the rhetorical strategies, warrants, and underpinnings of their communication on HIV/AIDS through prayers for healing, health fairs, seminars, and workshops.119

Scholars from diverse disciplines have examined the effects of religion and human health. In a seminal article “Church Attendance and Health,”120 epidemiologists Comstock and Patridge were the first to call for serious study into the practice of religion as a variable for health

117 Elias K. Bongma, Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of Aids (Waco, Tx.: Baylor

University Press, 2007).

118 Gillan Genrich and Brader Brathwaite “Responses of Religious Groups to HIV/AIDS as a Sexually Transmitted

Infection in Trinidad,” BioMed Central Public Health 5 (2005): 121-32. For other examples, see Nancy Muturi, “Faith-Based Initiatives in Response to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica,” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 108-131; Lisa R. Norman, Robert Carr, and Julio Jiménez, “Sexual Stigma and Sympathy: Attitudes towards Persons Living with HIV in Jamaica,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 8, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 2006): 423–33.

119 Nancy Muturi, “Faith-Based Initiatives in Response to HIV-AIDS in Jamaica,” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 108-131

120 George Comstock and Kay Patridge, “Church Attendance and Health,” Journal of Chronic Disease 25, no. 12

outcomes; several others have since followed their lead.121 Stephanie Mitchem and Emilie Townes’s edited text, Faith, Health and Healing in African American Life, examines religiously grounded approaches to health and healing in several historical and social contexts. Specifically, this volume addresses some of the ways people of African descent view sickness, disease, health, and healing across the Diaspora from the vantage point of being rooted in faith and various Diasporic religious traditions. This source examines issues of faith healing, race, and medicine across the intersection of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. In this project, I localize the rhetoric, religious performances, and discourses of health and healing of several pastors across the African Diaspora within one study.

In short, this dissertation is full of promise in its ability to contribute to several fields of scholarship beginning with the field of communication and rhetoric. Within communication and rhetoric, this project is participating in the international turn and building bridges to the ethnography of religion, to see how charismatic Protestant AIDS rhetoric plays out in systems of what Clifford Geertz called “local knowledge” that contributes to investigations of locally situated rhetorics that advance rhetorical theory with new concepts like pulpitization of spaces through embodied rhetorics.122 Furthermore, this project contributes to a growing body of religious communication scholarship that focuses specifically on rhetoric, religion, and HIV/AIDS with communication professional groups such as Religious Communication

121 For example, see Harold Koenig, Medicine Religion and Health (West Conshocken, Pennsylvania: Templeton

Press, 2008); R. Corey Remle and Harold Koenig, “Religion and Health in HIV/AIDS Communities” in Faith and

Medicine, ed. Thomas G. Plante and Allen C. Sherman (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 195-212; Edmund D.

Pellegrino and David Thomasma, Helping and Healing: Religious Commitment in Health Care (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Press, 1997); Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and The Practice of Medicine (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

122 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books,

Association.123 My contribution to African Diaspora studies is seen in that this study adds to knowledge about local histories and cultures and in understanding how people dealing with HIV/AIDS interact within their environments through salient or subtle African motifs and retentions of African traditions. Intercultural communication is another field of study that will gain from this study. There is already literature about intercultural communication, HIV/AIDS and spaces of discursive exchanges. This research makes stronger area of study as it addresses religious communication from both the global and local levels; above all, it helps to further understanding of the intercultural dynamic of communication across the Diaspora.124 _{Lastly, the} study hold tremendous possibility of contributing to the Rhetoric of Science in the vein of the great promise shown in Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, Vicki S. Freimuth’s Communication Perspectives on HIV/AIDS for the 21st Century, a work that currently explores HIV/AIDS rhetoric from various health communication scholars. My dissertation will provide further scholarship on the religious dimensions of this type of rhetoric.125