Hi Antonia,

I am with you on your thoughtful and tragic reflection, “I find this interesting as in most of my church experience the poor are rarely mentioned. If they are mentioned it almost seems to be as an afterthought.” I think this situation also happens to other churches, including mine. I hope that some day the Holy Spirit will visit every single church to remind it how to live out the kingdom of God spirit– the kingdom that redraws the social boundaries– to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the marginalized, the voiceless, the powerless, and “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) in order to be on the right side of Jesus on his judgement day. Thank you for sharing your truthful thought. Shalom!

It is interesting to know that the way of biblical translation can affect the change of the social status of a specific group of people in India. For example, the lower caste group, such as the Nadars, finds out that the missionary project to revise Tamil Bible “enables them to ascend the social ladder through literacy, education, and government jobs” (p 281).

It seems to me that Karen L. King relies too much on extra-biblical materials, such as the Gospel of Mary, to back up her point of view against what we understand about Mary of Magdala from reading the Bible. If someone keeps using extra-biblical texts to do the same thing on making other points on other biblical issue, I wonder if that person still believes in the Word of God from the Bible anymore?

This article from Fernandez fits my situation well as a refugees living in the United States. I share the Filipino Americans’ struggle pursuing their American dream in this country. Fernandez mentions that the Filipino Americans suffer because of their color. Color of the skin is one of the aspects of racism as many people think it that way. But if we think of color the way Fernandez puts it “God is colorful and cognizant of the beauty of each color” (p300), our attitude toward color is positive, because all God’s creations are good. As we know that all of us are created in the image of God, so never let anyone mar our God-given best images.

Wow! Time really flies. Today is the last day in class. Wess helps us how to put our three-part paper together to make things flow properly from one part to the others. Professor Bolger helps review what we learn from week one to week 10 in order to have a general picture of what we have learned so far and at the same time gives us some ideas of how to incorporate these lecture materials into our final papers. Dr. Bolger also admits that the reading materials are complicated but he wants his students to have a chance to engage in these readings to learn something new and helpful. For example, learn how to read the Bible the postcolonial way.

Wess did a good job of lecturing this afternoon in spite of the technical difficulty. I love the idea of incarnation as a starting point entailing incarnation as God’s missional activity to the world and Jesus the missionary. I try to apply this model next summer on a trip back to my homeland, Vietnam, after thirty three years, to work with the poor children in the small villages to find the way to help them have access to education and at the same time to introduce them to the kingdom of God where everyone loves and cares for one another as well as loves one’s enemies.

Even the British colonizers and the Irish colonied look the same but for the purpose of oppression, the colonizers have to find something else to justify themselves by their own rules, and their own standards to dominate their Irish colonied. The comparison of the native Irish to American Indians was what they did for justification of conquest (p487). Here is what these people thought of the Indians: “The Indian is hewn out of rock…[wrote Francis Parkman] He will not learn the art of civilization, and he and the forest mush perish together” (p488). Sin is the only reason that placed this wicked thought in the colonizers’ minds. Because of their sinful nature, these people abuse their God-given gifts to play god on other people who are also created in the image of God.

Realizing the importance in the role of language in colonization and decolonization, Douglas Hype tried to bring back his Irish original language, Gaelic tongue, to the areas of literature, poetry, and many other areas in the Irish people’s daily lives, in order “to restore self-respect to Irish people, based on a shared  rediscovery of the national culture” (p461). The most effective way in helping this former colonized do this is to make English, the language of the former colonizers, less influent through the strategy of deanglicization.

I agree with Alex Lazo that we should repect other’s view point and we also expect others to respect ours as well. But in Michael Cleary’s case of believing in the legends of fairies and ending up to burn his wife, Bridget Cleary, to death. Instead of being punished for his criminal act, Michael Cleary’s murder was favored by both newspapers and courts of law (p454). I think that it is very difficult for a regular person like myself to imagine something like that as a norm by other’s world view. Am I so conservative?

Murder is a crime. I don’t understand why people could make this terrible thing a fairy tale, a so-called the idiom of oral legend and described in detail how Michael Cleary killed his wife Bridget Cleary instead of condemning him for his criminal act (p433). Tragically, this murder account was “favored by both newspapers and courts of law” (p454). I may have to use the traditional world view lens in Ireland at that time to understand this story. I actually don’t want to understand this thing anyway.