Abstract

This thesis project involved two inter-related activities. The first activity was the collective writing of a work, "Hope is the Struggle--A Community in Action", by five women, each deeply involved in an impoverished community. They wrote of the sources of hope in their years of engagement for social transformation. Four women were long-time residents of Point St. Charles, one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods in Montreal. They know poverty first-hand and have been involved in different groups working for social change in the community. The author of the thesis has been engaged in community work over the past 14 years at Saint Columba House, an Outreach Ministry of the United Church. She initiated a process of discussion and collective writing about the forces that shape such a community and about the power structures from within and without that effect the struggles for social change. They have written about the place of women in this community and the factors that encourage victims of poverty to become empowered as agents of change. Together the five women reveal a new understanding of the meaning of hope in the midst of struggle. They were able to do so through dialogue and story telling about their daily lives, wrestling with ethical dilemmas they face and biblical critique from the underside. This work is included in its entirety in the thesis. The second part consists of reflections and analyses of this initial collective writing. The thesis discusses ways in which this group engaged in collective reflections, which are in themselves liberative. It suggests new insights into the meaning of hope as integral to a methodology of "feminist liberative ethics". It focuses on the intersecting and circular processes of liberation, reflection and action in a lived community experience. From the starting point of the context of engagement in the struggle against oppression, new principles are introduced for a methodology that requires the participation of a community in all aspects of ethical and theological reflection on their own situation. Such a methodology arises from the conviction that ethics must be an active, engaged, process which requires the involvement of those whose lives are being analyzed. This necessitates an epistemological shift in the approach of the academia engaged in liberative ethics and suggests a new role for the theological ethicist in such a method.