Kwok Pui lan

Biography

Kwok was born in Hong Kong to Chinese parents who practiced Chinese folk religion at home. She converted to Anglican Christianity, when she was a teenager.

She is the current William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She started her BA at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, before moving on to do her BD and MTh at Southeast Asia Graduate School of Theology. She gained her doctorate from Harvard University and is the author of twenty books, including Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (2005). She has published in the disciplines of feminist theology, postcolonial theology and biblical hermeneutics from her personal perspective of an Asian woman.

In 2011 she was elected President of the American Academy of Religion, a position she ran for on account of her desire to make more visible the presence of Asian women in theology and academia. She writes '...as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come'

Theology

Kwok's work has used as a locus her position and identity as an Asian woman. Writing in feminist theology, postcolonial criticism and biblical hermeneutics, she has maintained as her identity as an Asian woman, incorporating it into her work. She writes 'As Asian Christian women, we have our own story, which is both Asian and Christian. We can only tell this story by developing a new hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of double suspicion and reclamation'

Her focus and aim is to explore the lives and experiences of marginalised women and as such she is considered part of the movement of Third World theologians.

She has engaged with postcolonial theory in her work, most prominently in Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, where she argues against the inadequacies of traditional feminist theology. She states that traditional feminist theory has not sufficiently considered the experiences of non-white women, and the effects of colonialism, neocolonialism and slavery. Her aim is to marry postcolonial theory to feminist theology and she writes for the need to overcome the binary concept of gender, arguing for a more fluid interpretation of gender and the inclusion of queer sexuality. She writes 'the most important contribution of postcolonial feminist theology will be to recapitulate the relation of theology and empire through the multiple lenses of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and so forth.' The aim of her work is to create a theology that more accurately reflects the multiple levels of oppression that women in postcolonial contexts face.

Kwok views God as organic, and places it in context of the growing ecological crisis in Asia. She also examines the concept of constructing a Christology using an organic model, referring to the multiple nature references Jesus uses to describe himself and his relationship with believers.

Kwok advocates for the incorporation of oral methods within theology, writing ‘we must allow the possibility of doing theology in poems, songs, stories, dances, rituals, and even lullabies.’ For Kwok, the storytelling tradition within many Asian societies offers a rich resource for innovative ways of doing theology as women engage with biblical stories through drama and the sharing of life experiences.