Workshops & Plenary Talks
Workshops
Gallery Talk and Art Exhibition: Four Historical Stages of the Indigenization of Chinese Christian Art
He Qi
This gallery talk describes the four periods of Chinese indigenous Chrisitan art history: from Nestorian-Tang Dynasty to the Society of Jesus in the late Ming Dynasty, the semicolonization after the Opium War, and the Contemporary Cultural Revolution. Many images will be shown to help the audience understand Chinese Christian art history more clearly.
He Qi has been committed to the artistic creation of modern Chinese Christian Art since 1983. He hopes to help change the “foreign image” of Christianity in China by using artistic language, and at the same time, to supplement Chinese Art the way Buddhist art did in ancient times. In his works, He Qi has blended together Chinese folk customs and traditional Chinese painting techniques with the western art of the Middle and Modern Ages, and has created an artistic style of color-on-paper painting.
His work has been well received overseas. He has exhibited in Kyoto, Hong Kong, Geneva, Hamburg, London, St. Paul, San Francisco, Berkeley, New Haven, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Washington, Princeton, Detroit, Toronto, as well as in mainland China. His art works have been introduced through some main medias including: Washington Post, BBC, HK Cable TV, Asian Week, Far Eastern Economic Review, Christianity Today, Upper Room, Augsburg Fortress, Sing Tao Daily News, and The World Daily. He won the 20th Century Award for Achievement in the field of Religious Art Theory and Christian Art Creation by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England.
Exodus in America: Already There or on the Way?”
Morris Davis
The Bible and its transformational stories have followed the spread of Christianity around the globe. A few of the more powerful narratives have captured the imagination of Christians who read them in the full and immediate contingencies of their particular time and place. In this workshop we will explore one example of this pervasive practice of exegetical adaptation: the Exodus story in America. From the Puritan vision of the building of a promised land, to the absence of Native Americans in the new story of their own land, to slave dreams of America as a journey toward that promised land, to Ronald Reagan’s assurance that the promised land has been built and yet already degraded, we will trace the ways America has been, from the earliest days of the Christian invasion, a Biblical contest.
Conceiving the Exodus: Insights for Study and Preaching
Danna Fewell and Gary Simpson
The Exodus remains the definitive account of liberation, not only for ancient Israel, but for many communities throughout history. Too often it is seen as the story of Moses alone. But liberation, both in the Bible and beyond, is a communal effort. Can we ever comprehend the full liberative power of the Exodus as long as we hold so many of its true liberators hostage in our re-tellings of the story? In this workshop we meet a lesser-known cast/e of characters whose initiatives pave the way for communal survival and emancipation and who invite us to preach fresh words of hope.
World Christianity or World Christianities?: An Inter-Faith Hermeneutics of the Christian Tradition in the Multi-Religious World
Hyo-Dong Lee
This workshop introduces the practice of comparative theology, which is the practice of reading the authoritative texts of the Christian tradition within a context shaped by the authoritative texts of other religious traditions. The workshop explores this practice as a work of theological contextualization in the religiously pluralistic world of today. A particular focus will be on the context of Asia.
Children and the Bible: The Ethics of Reading About and With
Kathryn Ott
Asking questions about children and the bible often raises two starting points: how children are depicted in the biblical narrative and how we teach scripture to children? Far from the 21st Century North American call for adults to “become like” the well-dressed, angelic faced images of Sunday School children, we will use the Gospel of Mark as an example of how children are understood to participate in and disrupt narratives of empire and poverty. The Gospel of Mark is one example of taking children seriously in their real and diverse contexts. It provides clues about how our current practices of imaging children in the bible and reading scripture with children raise ethical issues related to justice and Christian formation.
Plenary Talks
Reading from This Place: Recalling, Reviewing, Revisioning
Fernando F. Segovia
The project “Reading from This Place,” which involved a series of two major conferences and three volumes, is widely regarded today as having marked a distinct turn in biblical criticism in its attempt to examine the relation between critical production and cultural-social context. More than fifteen years later, this lecture seeks to recall that endeavor, to review what has happened to contextual analysis in the meantime, and to revision where such a discussion might go in the future. In so doing, the lecture begins to ponder the possibility of a similar venture for the twentieth anniversary of the project in 2015. In effect, why, and how, do, and should, people and place matter in the light of a Global Bible?
Divine Murder, Inc: Power, Violence, and Conquest
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan
In the early part of the 20th century, the Syndicate, a formally organized group of Prohibition mob lords, infiltrated daily life in the United States. “Murder, Inc.” became the moniker of the Syndicate’s firing squad, a ruthless group of men who professionally committed 1,000 murders. In the books of Joshua and Judges, murder, though under divine sanction, can seem to parallel systemic, gangland culture. Patriarchy, sexism, and violence abound in these texts of colonial expansion. How do people–and women in particular—from around the globe, read and hear these texts? How can women and girls find their voices, assume agency, and be whole, flourishing human beings, while taking the books of Joshua and Judges seriously? The Bible has inspired humanity to greatness, fostered faith formation, and creativity; the Bible also reflects systemic and individual violence. To engage the words of Walter Wink, can we “name, unmask, and engage,” these powers and principalities in Joshua and Judges? Can we find good news in these texts?
What Has Been Done? What Can We Learn? Racial/Ethnic Minority Readings of the Bible
Tat-Siong Benny Liew
In many ways that were related and indebted to various liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s (whether in terms of gender, class, and/or anti-colonial struggles), racial/ethnic minorities in the US began to emerge in the world of biblical scholarship with new perspectives, sensibilities, and voices. Racial/ethnic minorities have, of course, started reading and engaging the Bible much, much earlier, but it was not until the 1970s that they were able to create a place of their own in the academy. In this paper, I will trace the development of racial/ethnic minority readings of the Bible. By focusing largely (though not exclusively) on Asian American readings of the New Testament, I will suggest that we can understand this development in three main phases: first, when racial/ethnic minority readers and readings mainly sought to establish their identity and legitimacy as well as be acknowledged and recognized by white scholars; second, when these readers and readings mainly worked on identifying and acknowledging various identity differences within and among each racial/ethnic minority group; and third, when these readers and readings no longer saw white scholars as their major or only conversation partners but began to read and work across different racial/ethnic minority groups to form minority alliances.
Who Made You Ruler and Judge over Us? Identity and the Construction of a Nation
Kenneth Ngwa
On the one hand, the biblical character of Moses is a local Hebrew leader who liberated Israel from Egyptian oppression; on the other, he is presented as a leader who, in the shadow of the empire, is rejected by a local Hebrew. Using the concept of conviviality, the lecture examines how a “local” reading of the Bible simultaneously resists and embraces the “global” and the “local,” and in so doing constructs a new local. To illustrate this point, I will read Moses’ birth story in Exodus 2:1-10 in light of what Bruce Berman has described as a “politics of uncivil nationalism” that characterizes much of post-independence sub-Saharan Africa, with particular focus on Cameroon.