Beginning June 4, Adult Summer Education will have a little change. The song from Porgy and Bess says, “It’s summer time and the liv’n is easy.” People kick back. Take vacation. Go fish’n. You name it. We do not usually plan adult education in the summer time. But this summer we are going to try something different.
I will lead a 9:00 Sunday morning class based on the book The Postcolonial Bible beginning on June 4. You can purchase the book online. Someone found a copy for $12. But, you don’t need to buy the book. You don’t need to sign up for the whole series. We will take it a week at a time. If enough people are interested in attending we will continue to meet. If summer schedules and plans make it difficult, we won’t meet. I’ll be prepared enough to present some material every week, and leave plenty of time for discussion.
The editor of The Postcolonial Bible, R.S. Sugirtharajah, sums up postcolonial biblical studies this way: “Colonial reading can be summed up as informed by theories concerning the innate superiority of Western culture, the Western male subject, and the natives, heathens, women, blacks, indigenous people, as the Other, needing to be controlled and subjugated. It is based on a desire for power and domination. . . . The move towards a postcolonial biblical criticism seeks to overturn colonial assumptions.” Should be fun. Will be challenging. And, I hope, interesting.