All are invited to join in this international, online consultation featuring Rev. Prof. Mitri Raheb, Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem and author of Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible. Responses will be offered by Atalia Omer and Revelation Velunta. This event is being co-organized with the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice.

Main Speaker:

Rev. Prof. Mitri Raheb is the Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, Dr. Raheb is the author and editor of 50 books including: Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible (2023) and The Cross in Contexts: Suffering and Redemption in Palestine (2017). His books and numerous articles have been translated so far into thirteen languages. Rev. Raheb served as the senior pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from June 1987 to May 2017 and as the President of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land from 2011-2016. A social entrepreneur, Rev. Raheb has founded several NGOs including the Christian Academic Forum for Citizenship in the Arab World (CAFCAW). He is a founding and board member of the National Library of Palestine, and a founding member of Bright Stars of Bethlehem, a US 501c3 non-for-profit organization. He is an elected member to the Palestinian National Council as well as the Palestinian Central Council. Read full bio at https://www.mitriraheb.org/en/page/short-bio

Respondents:

Atalia Omer is a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies Professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She is also a senior fellow and Dermot TJ Dunphy Visiting Professor at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life program. She earned her PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the study of religion and Palestine/Israel studies. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in the publication of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Revelation E. Velunta is Associate Professor of New Testament and Cultural Studies at Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines. He also coordinates the Master of Theology Program and the Union Theological Open Seminary (UTOS). He has taught at Vanderbilt University, Teologiska Hogskolan Stockholm, Philippine Women’s University, Philippine Christian University (Manila and Dasmarinas campuses), and Southern Christian College. His work celebrates the pedagogy of the oppressed and insists that there are other ways of reading and doing. More specifically, his Jeepney Hermeneutics (featured in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Gender Studies) invites students of the Bible to “beat swords into ploughshares.” His latest book, Reading the Parables of Jesus inside a Jeepney, both in its Kindle and Printed versions are Amazon.com bestsellers. Velunta has graduate and postgraduate degrees from Vanderbilt University and Princeton Theological Seminary.