Killjoy Prophets, Asian America, Evangelicalism (Part 2)

“For some reason the term “oriental,” as a label for those of Asian descent continues to remain in the vernacular of US American culture whether it is the 80 year old grandmother making a side comment about the dry cleaners or the college freshmen from small town USA talking about the international student that sold her a mattress”

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In seminary I took a course called Cultural Hermeneutics team-taught by two professors. One would go on to become one of my favorite teachers and the other would become my senior thesis advisor. A close friend, at the time and now, Erica Liu, along with a handful of other Asian Americans and I sat eagerly looking through the syllabus on that first day of class. We would be introduced to African American, Latin@, African, and Asian frameworks for reading the Bible and doing theology. But…where was the section on Asian American hermeneutics? It would be an understatement to say we felt let down.

But, the professors were both very open to revising the syllabus right away and added a section including some relatively new resources by Asian American theologians. This is what made me love and respect these teachers – their willingness to listen to us, and even be changed…

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. She now works at Capital CFO plus as the Non Profit Director. All opinions expressed on this blog are her own and do not reflect those of Capital CFO plus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

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