Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer as a Case of/for Feminist Public Theology

21st-century Europe has faced substantial societal and academic developments that present serious challenges to 'classic' feminist theology, which has been established mainly in western and predominantly Christian contexts. Incisive challenges emerge from developments such as (1) the rise of international and interfaith feminisms (and their impact on the academic study of religion and gender); (2) the significant changes of the position and intellectual agenda of theology and religious studies in western universities, which are strongly interconnected with both secularizing and reconfessionalizing tendencies in Europe; and (3) the increased presence of religion(s) in the public domain as 'medium' or 'arena' of political and cultural conflicts. This paper consist of an effort to sketch the outlines of a European feminist public theology that aims to address these challenges. The first parts of this paper discuss the position and tasks of this feminist public theology in relation to both (feminist-theological) reflections on public theology and to post-secular critical theory. The last part of this paper exemplifies these considerations through an analysis of the Punk Prayer ('political art performance') of the Russian feminist formation Pussy Riot in Moscow’s central Russian Orthodox Christ the Saviour Church on February 21, 2012, which led to the accusation of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' and the subsequent prosecution and sentencing of three group members in August 2012. The focus is on the intertwining of political, artistic, and theological aspects in both the actual performance and the corresponding court case, in which one of the accused members defended their performance by stating: 'In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual image of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia'.