“Concert and Salsa Dancing” Birthday Party

Almost finals week… crazy, huh? Well, after turning in your last paper, everyone in the Church and Mission class (invited your friends) is invited to come to my birthday party, next Friday, December 7th. We will meet at Cristian Cazacu’s Romanian Concert in Travis Auditorium, which starts at 7:30PM. After the concert, we will move to a free salsa dancing club in the area. I’ll give more information on that later this week to those who ask me or are my friends on Facebook. It will be a great night of good, clean fun… for those of you worried about freaky dancing, don’t be! I’ve been told the people at this club respect their dancing partners  Yaya! 

Week 3 – The Prose of Counter-Insurgency – Ranajit Guha

Guha explores the different types of prose/discourses—primary, secondary, and tertiary—in terms of their effects on post-colonialism due to their “appearance in time and their filiation” (Castle, 121): primary, immediate and official response to an event; secondary, non-immediate and either participant/official in an event; tertiary, non-immediate, non-official and generally appears as third person (removed from the situation).              

Week 3 – Post-Colonial Critical Theories – Stephen Slemon

Slemon makes a great point that “the term post-colonialism […] reorients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial—post-colonial”, even though the whole idea of the post-colonial theory is to abolish opposing binaries (Castle, 103).  In other words, post-colonialism is in itself a contradiction as those who are forming the theory tend to be at least somewhat bias from their own enculturation. Maybe I am way off… if so, please let me know what you think.              

Week 3 – Renewal Movements and Resistance to Empire in Ancient Judea – Richard A. Horsley

Horsley points out that Judaism and Christianity should not be disconnected from one another. They should be able to be studied in order to “appreciate the historical struggles against imperial domination in which Jewish and Christian histories and literatures originated,” which Horsley claims scholars and “contemporary Jews and Christians[] are unable to discern” right now (Sugirtharajah, 76). Dialoguing with other religions—especially that which Christianity reformed—is very important in order to better understand and relate to those within and rid the world of the negative effects of colonialism.               

Week 3 – Making the Connections: Postcolonial Studies and Feminist Biblical Interpretation – Kwok Pui-Lan

The thing that fascinated me most about Kwok Pui-Lan’s article was that feminist biblical interpretation is so deeply connected with decolonization. I understand why women from the Two-Thirds World question the form of Christianity spread by the West as I learn more and more about imperialism and colonialism’s oppression, especially to women. I am not a feminist as I have no problem calling God “abba Father,” which Kwok points out that “an intimate relationship with God […] was something new and not found in Judaism.” (Sugirtharajah, 52)            

Week 3 – The Church in Scripture and in Vatican II – John Fuellenbach

  Fuellenbach’s insight of “the Trinitarian dimension of the church” (38) as God’s new people, Christ’s body, and the Holy Spirit’s temple intrigued me. I had never before thought of the church in such a way. I was also intrigued by the thought of the Roman Catholic Church secluding itself as the only place in which the body of Christ truly exists.

Week 3 – Wednesday

I found class very interesting today as new concepts were placed in front of me: mathematics and kissing not being universal, worlding (new words for concepts which don’t exist in one’s culture), ethnography as a part of anthropology, and self- and group-revelations during our learning task of naming non-universal concepts that were/are thought to be universal (e.g. education styles, hygiene, aesthetics, etc.).  

My favorite quote from Dr. Bolger was: “Self is always a part of observation of other… as really the person is saying, ”This is what I notice different than myself.” 

Week 3 – Monday

Today in class, I truly enjoyed exploring the differences between imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism because I had never been exposed to their unique qualities/characteristics. I was first intrigued by the fact that the West was not the only–nor the first–to rule over people of distant lands when all we focus on is Western Imperialism. Another thought I had was that “settler” colonies were a lot like when Cristobol Columbo came to America by pushing others off their native lands. What damage the United States has done by displacing American Indians!

Week 2 – Reflection on Stephen Mancari’s “The Burden of English”

I agree that English is a great way of communicating with others around the world as are other languages. ¿Hablas español? I also speak Spanish and find great pleasure in learning other languages as I feel that speaking with others in their heart/native language brightens their days, even if I can only speak one or two words.  However, I do not feel that Spivak’s main point was the burden of speaking English within the culture but rather the burden of the Western cultural values that English literature inevitably teaches as people from other cultures study it. It’s great to learn other languages, and even cultures, however reading another culture’s literature can be a difficult process of deciphering what cultural values to adapt to one’s culture—especially if one feels forced to accept the other culture’s values (as in colonialism and English literature).

Week 2 – Colonialism and the Desiring Machine

I was intrigued by Brown’s table by “mongrelity” (Castle, 88)—a chart exploring Hispanic names for people with mixed ethnicities. Colonialism can distort one’s feelings of attraction/repulsion toward people of other ethnicities/cultures because of the prejudices colonialism implanted against “white, but not quite” (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, 132 in Castle, 87). I have been blessed with a non-racial family and yet have struggled with being attracted to men from other cultures due to my enculturation in the West …