Centering Survivors: "The Work is Not Finished"

Biblical narratives of sexual violence have done harm to real lives. At the same time, some biblical texts may enable healing. In recent decades, scholars have understood the value of survivor perspectives in understanding the impact of biblical rape texts. Lisa Oakley and Yehudis Fletcher explain what centering survivors looks like, and why survivor experience is essential to the study of rape culture in the Bible. Gerald West and Sithembiso Zwane describe their work with survivors through Contextual Bible Study (CBS), a learning modality that empowers survivors of sexualized violence to acknowledge the presence of violence and sexual assault in biblical texts and to discover how “texts of trauma” can be used to liberate and transform themselves and the communities they belong to.