Biblical Texts and the Women Living with HIV and AIDS - Transforming Attitudes within the Indian Church and Community Alongside the Medico-Legal Exposure

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This book discovers the possibility of looking at the Biblical Texts through the eyes of women who are living with HIV and AIDS. In this postmodern world, there is always a stigmatic perspectival look towards the people who are living with pandemics such as HIV and AIDS. This research work is an attempt to excavate liberative elements from the Bible for the sake of attitudinal transformation. For this, the author has dealt in with three Old Testament passages in particular.

This learned work also ensures that the Biblical narratives could be re-interpreted from the perspectives of women living with HIV and AIDS to excavate practical implications and to contribute an alternative consciousness toward transforming the thinking of the Indian Church and society.

Thomas Aaron Martin is an ordained priest from Evangelical Church of India (ECI). He earned his BA in Sociology from Loyola College, Chennai and MA in Christian Studies from Madras University, Chennai. He pursued his theological education BD and M.Th from Gurukul Lutheran Theological College & Research Institute, Chennai. After completing M.Th in the field of Old Testament in the year 2011, he started his teaching ministry at Madras Theological Seminary & College (MTSC), Chennai. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at Asian Centre for Theological Studies & Missions (ACTS), South Korea.

HIV and AIDS pandemic has become a universal cancer by threatening the life sustainability of humanity. HIV and AIDS offer the greatest challenge to humankind in the form of widespread stigma, rejection, and discrimination due to fear, judgmental attitudes, etc. The impact of HIV and AIDS warrants a pedagogical response in biblical studies. Its incurability leads to fear, hopelessness, intense search for healing, poverty, death, orphans, widows, and overburdened families who have to take care of orphaned children. It underlines the need for transformative compassion.

In the Bible, there is no mention about the pandemic HIV and AIDS. But a similar outcome of the illness is recorded in the Biblical texts. The Bible is a source of authority which could be used as a tool to change the attitudes of an individual. In this research project, Biblical texts are looked at from the perspective of women living with HIV and AIDS, because they are doubly oppressed and are more vulnerable to this epidemic. In many cases, the Bible has been used to reinforce the discrimination and the stigma of the women living with HIV and AIDS. But, the Bible should no more be employed to subjugate sufferers, but its liberative elements need to be kindled for the welfare of the many sufferers. This is made possible by utilizing the "Reader Response Methodology". This postmodern approach accepts the reader to be an important contributor to the meaning of the text.