Resources compiled by WCIU Librarian, Timothy Skinner, MLS
Read MoreResources compiled by Timothy Skinner, MLS.
Read MoreReview by Gilles Gravelle
The Return of Oral Hermeneutics (ROH) is bold, somewhat controversial, certainly single-minded, and appropriately so. Significant research over the last 40 years provides us with enough understanding about orality and the oral origins of the Bible to begin to arrive at some well-founded conclusions. Add to this, current postmodern reflection on the Enlightenment era and its influence on biblical studies. However, it’s not all negative reflection.
Read MoreThe “People of the Book” are the people of the Story. There is an ancient and continuous biblical and Jewish storytelling tradition, with continuity to the present time in the Aggadic/Haggadic and Midrashic tradition in Judaism. Authors Tom Steffen and Bill Bjoraker re-dig some of these wells of Hebrew hermeneutics for effective use today.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
In terms of it being yet another example of the West telling Africa what to do, little that is happening with the COVID-19 crisis is original. Africa, in practice, has had to discount a lot of “good-sense” coming from the West. The sharpness of today’s COVID-19 concern is heightened by its life and death nature, and its sheer magnitude. But the way it is unfolding in Africa I should say is typical: serious advice sincerely given, that neither makes sense nor “works” in the African context. …
Who the West is today by comparison with other parts of the world, leads to the realization that the strength of the West arises from its profound Christian history. This strongly implies a need for evangelism and mission work as prerequisite for successful implementation in non-Western societies for anti COVID-19 strategies.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
Why am I writing this? Partly, simply to explain a context in Africa that the West doesn’t seem to be getting. Partly, to justify why I am, in terms of contemporary wisdom in the West, on a course of suicidal folly.
Read Moreby Kevin Jones (pseudonym) and Sunny Hong
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was one of the deadliest and far-reaching natural disasters in recorded history. Disaster relief efforts poured in from many places—locally all the way to the international level—bringing assistance to the many affected areas. One such area was an Asian seaside village inhabited by a minority indigenous people group. The purpose of this article is to show how disaster relief efforts in this case created a dynamic in which the church of the country’s majority people group became a rival to the church of the minority indigenous people group—because of an apparent lack of sensitivity to certain cultural issues—so that the lessons learned from this case study could be useful for future cross-cultural ministry opportunities.
Read Moreby Sunny Hong
This is a French translation of the original article in English, “Cross-Cultural Mentoring: A Brief Comparison of Individualistic and Collectivistic Cultures” that was originally published in the WCIU Journal Volume 1, Issue 3.
Read Moreby Sunny Hong
Where those involved in mentoring relationships are from the same or a similar culture, there are fewer misunderstandings and differing expectations due to different communication styles, corresponding perspectives, assumptions, concepts, and worldviews. In a mentoring relationship, similarity and shared experiences provide an easier interpersonal relationship between a mentor and a protégé, and it is therefore usually easier to have a mentoring relationship with someone from the same or similar culture. But to have a successful cross-cultural mentoring relationship, cultural differences behind mentoring issues, such as communication styles, need to be understood. The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe how individualistic and collectivistic cultures understand key mentoring concepts and to ponder how to use the strengths from different cultures so that cross-cultural mentoring can be even more fruitful than mono-cultural mentoring.
Read Moreby Anne Thiessen
(This article was originally published in Spanish.)
Native speakers of minority languages experience increasing pressure to abandon their languages and adopt the dominant trade language. Such pressure places the world’s minority languages under threat of extinction. This article explores the responsibility that cross-cultural workers have to value and learn minority languages, to recognize their own role in the displacement of these languages, and to offer help to indigenous communities in maintaining their languages through stable bilingualism. The author proposes ways that sending agencies can support cross-cultural workers in learning and championing minority languages.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
A case study considering the use of the term “spirit” in Western English (that is misappropriated into African discourse) graphically illustrates errors being made when considering deliverance ministries in African Christian churches. There is an urgent need to overcome linguistic naivety and secular hegemony in this regard. Careful exploration of the literature on gift-giving, in light of African people’s affinity for ministries of exorcism, reveals the means by which “material” and “spiritual” are, in Africa, not mutually exclusive.
Read Moreby Anne Thiessen
Native speakers of minority languages experience increasing pressure to abandon their languages and adopt the dominant trade language. Such pressure places the world’s minority languages under threat of extinction. This article explores the responsibility that cross-cultural workers have to value and learn minority languages, to recognize their own role in the displacement of these languages, and to offer help to indigenous communities in maintaining their languages through stable bilingualism.
Read Moreby Brett Molter
Navigating conflict in light of varying intercultural communication experiences is a learned skill and looks very different depending upon the context in which it is manifested. A growing body of research has emerged concerning how individuals manage and negotiate conflict, including face-negotiation theory (“saving face”) to help explain and work through interpersonal conflicts.
Read Moreby Adder Abel Gwoda, Ph. D.
From a cultural point of view, a universal uniformity is emerging which absorbs or dissolves any differences. Under the booster of neoliberal economics, globalization attempts to homogenize different identities following the Western model, resulting in tremendous reactions from endangered cultures. These reactions of identities are of two kinds: the zealot, which is belligerent and can turn into terrorism and the Herodian, which is essentially pacifist and adaptive. A phenomenological analysis of authentic African cultural experience presents an ethnicist acculturation attempt in a bid to diminish the mega-culture of Globalization. This identity reaction which is rather adaptive, known as ethnicist-nationalism, will appear as a valuable contribution to the global justice project in so far as it provides a cosmopolitan flexible citizenship, built out of the postures of sentimental-nationalism and instrumental-globalization.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
When a European language is used in East Africa for making decisions and setting courses of action, the ability to communicate in that language will be hampered by its rootage in non-indigenous contexts. The author suggests this is severely limiting to healthy indigenously-rooted growth of African Christianity.
Read Moreby Dave Datema
Paul Hiebert championed “critical contextualization” and identified phenomenology (“exegeting humans”) as the weakest link in its practice that often led to split-level Christianity. In this paper I evaluate this assessment by locating the practice of critical contextualization among the Mende people of Sierra Leone, West Africa. I show how split-level Christianity took place there historically, examine phenomenological data to better understand Mende culture and ponder contemporary attempts of critical contextualization in Sierra Leone by Sierra Leoneans - all to support my thesis that critical contextualization is not so much a knowledge problem as it is a control problem. Cross-cultural missionaries will never have enough local knowledge to be the best contextualizers and until real control of contextualization is relinquished and given to nationals, critical contextualization will remain as a good idea rarely accomplished.
Read MoreBy Sheryl Silzer
When people receive the Scriptures in their language for the first time, they interpret the message through their previous knowledge and experiences. If the new information is not understandable in relation to what they already know, the Scriptures may not impact or change their lives. A major challenge for Bible translators coming from a scientific worldview is the ability to recognize how their scientific worldview may fit in and even promote the magical worldview of the receptor language speakers (Harries 2011, 18). Early missiologists linked this clash of worldview to a lack of applicability of the Gospel message (Hesselgrave 1978, 68; Kraft 1978, 94; Dye 1987, 39).
Read Moreby Jim Harries
Western thinking, shaped by years of compulsory education dominated by “Western dualism,” is preconditioned to view material reality as superior to spiritual, secondary understandings. Globalized education carries this materialistic approach far beyond the geographical boundaries of European peoples and their descendants’ “homelands” (i.e. North and South America, Australia, and so on). This thinking explains the nature of physical reality following “laws” of chemistry, physics, geography, maths, and to a lesser extent biology, history, physical education, business studies, and so on. The acceptability of infiltration of these concepts by individuals and communal societies does, however, differ according to levels of receptivity by the peoples concerned.
Read MoreBy Jim Harries
Interpretation of use of the ladder symbol, then other examples, show how cognitive science aligns with theological analyses. Cognitive science and theology both claim a legitimate basis for approaching the material world through the human body and mind. Cognitive science, by following ‘correct’ understandings of God’s nature, undermines notions that objectivity formed the basis for the development of science. Western people’s extra-rational determination to hang-on to intellectually defunct Cartesian dualism explains much contemporary theological confusion. Global English use, and active countering of racism, undergird defunct philosophies in the West. Christian theology promotes human well-being. Image schemas designing user-interfaces demonstrate God’s obscurity.
Read Moreby May Nor Clara Cheng
Interweaving with stories of her cross-cultural experiences in three countries, Cheng contends that the context of conflict management is the emotional wholeness of a cross-cultural worker. One of the two starting points of cross-cultural conflict management is self-awareness of the impact of one’s national character in their personality, especially in relevant to individualistic and collectivistic cultures. The other one is the understanding of the conflict dynamics and the issues in cross-cultural conflicts. For cross-cultural workers from an individualistic cultural background, the core lesson is to move their social life and conflict management from a self-centered orientation towards more of a communal life orientation.
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