What difficulties in communication do cross-cultural workers face? How can these best be addressed in various settings?
Review 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
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 Jim Harries
Dominant Western engagement in Africa wrongly presupposes African people to be dualistic. This misleads Westerners to believe Africans should be able to accept and build on secular approaches to solving their society’s problems. The result is confusion and unhealthy dependency on the West. To benefit tomorrow’s Africa, a genuine holistic witness to Jesus, and the positive development possible as people within societies follow Jesus, must use local categories and languages.
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
Eighty percent of the world, and nearly 100% of the majority world, are from primary oral learning cultures. This means the people— whether non-literate, functionally non-literate, or even semi-literate—prefer to learn in ways other than through reading printed matter. Even listening to Western literate analytical forms (such as lectures, lists, etc) is foreign to their way of thinking. The importance of this is that most of our students work in societies where the people are oral learners. We want to help our students become familiar with techniques they can use in teaching their people. If all they do in their studies with WCIU is read and write, they won’t have learned how to communicate their learning well to the people with whom they work.
This short reflection gives an example of video as an oral strategy.
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