Season 4, Episode 6. Samuel Salim Munayer
This podcast includes a conversation with Palestinian Liberation Theologian Samuel Salim Munayer. The episode ends with a twenty minute talk that he gave at a day long conference Corrymeela ran in Belfast in August 2026. The event was called the Oak Tree Sessions, and was an event platforming voices articulating Public Theology which engaged with questions of liberation, ecology, peace, solidarity and decolonisation.
Samuel Salim Munayer is a Palestinian theologian based in Jerusalem who works for a humanitarian organisation serving in Gaza and the West Bank. He holds degrees in philosophy and theology from Durham University and in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Exeter, where he was supervised by Ilan Pappé. Samuel recently co-edited and authored with his brother John the book “The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza”.
This episode cannot possibly say all that can be said in relation to the mass displacement of the Palestinian population in Gaza, or the mass slaughter of over 70,000 innocent men, women and children by the Israeli army, or the brutal attacks on the Israeli civilian population on the 7th October 2023 by Hamas. It also cannot fully capture the fear felt by so many Palestinians in the occupied West Bank whose land is being stolen from them by a new wave of settler colonialism. But this podcast can create the space for an articulation of a theology of liberation in a time of genocide or what Samuel refers to as “the ongoing Nakba”. There will always be a need to hear the voices of those who can imagine peace, but unless we name the horror of reality, we are possibly merely dreaming fantasies and not laying the foundations of justice, truth and mercy needed to house “the beloved community”.