Lecture by Prof. Sigridur Gudmarsdottir 25 February 2026

Continuing the Polin Day theme, Prof. Sigríður Guðmarsdóttir from the University of Iceland will lecture on Decolonizing Theology on February 25 after the Wednesday Coffee event in the Round Room at 10:15 a.m.

The lecture is hybrid via Zoom. The link is https://aboakademi.zoom.us/j/62909949699, Meeting ID: 629 0994 9699.

Sing you Islands: Blue Theology and Climate Change in the Arctic

Sing to the Lord a new song…
    you islands, and all who live in them. (Isaiah 42:10 NRV)

In Deutero-Isaiah´s poetic summons he addresses the most isolated and remote places he can think of and asks them to sing. Islands and islanders are asked to sing a new song to God along with other complex ecosystems in deserts, meadowland and mountainous regions. Isaiah has briefly shifted the focus from the land-based perspective to the sea, from the center to the margins of the known world, from the green to the blue.

Clement of Alexandria (2nd century AD) interpreted Isaiah 42:10 in his Exhortation to the Greeks and postulated that Christ was the new song to sing from the margins of the inhabited world. For Clement, this is because Christ as the Word points to the divine source and creation of the world as well as the event of incarnation for liberation and well-being. If Christ sings from the islands, what then is Christ up against in the Arctic? What kind of new song is this and what relevance does it have for climate sensitive theologies to speak from the islands? What stories of hope, praise, survival, anguish, anger, oppression and relation are included in these insular refrains, new and old? How are these stories connected to watery places?

The interpretation calls for an examination of a theological relationship between divinity and (other) abyssal bodies of water, including humans. To sing this song from an island perspective, insular identity and attachment to place is important both to the choice of theoretical framework, to the way in which theory and method are connected and how the texts are interpreted. In this presentation I will reflect theologically “about”, “for”, “in” and “from” the Arctic, but not “of” the Arctic, because the Arctic

Photo by Kristinn Ingvarsson.