Dr. K. Christine Pae

Keun-Joo Christine Pae is associate professor of Religion and Women’s and Gender Studies, and Chair of the Department of Religion at Denison University (Granville, Ohio). Taking social ethics as a discipline, Pae teaches and researches transnational feminist ethics, spiritual activism, faith-based popular resistance, ethics of peace and war, Asian/Asian American feminist theology and ethics, and prostitution and U.S. bases in Asia. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on these issues. 

Supported Project:

Dr. K. Christine Pae, Dr. Nami Kim, and Dr. Boyung Lee, “Sexual Abuse and Korean American Christian Communities”

Acknowledging the complexities of tackling sexual abuse in Korean American communities, this project brings together Korean American scholars whose work and expertise have encompassed issues ranging from gendered violence, sexuality, race, immigration, and trauma in the fields of Christian studies. The scholars will critically engage one another’s work, aiming to produce an anthology that interrogates sexual violence in Korean American Protestant churches; maps out ethics of sex with cultural and religious sensitivities; fosters intergenerational dialogue among Korean American feminist scholars of Christianity; and challenges the continuously racialized gender-based sexual violence against Asian women. Our goals are not only to study sexual abuse, co-constitutive with spiritual abuse in the Korean American Christian community but also to create educationally effective materials to eradicate the abuse. For these, the project will interrogate gender-based violence and compulsory heterosexism in the communities while critically engaging both religious studies and theological studies on the matters related to pedagogy for healing sexual trauma, justice-oriented sexual ethics, homo/transphobia, and cross-racial/intergenerational/interfaith solidarity.