The Bible And Art Perspectives From Oceania

This volume takes readers on a fascinating journey through the visual arts of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands, contemplating the multivocal dialogues that occur between these artistic media and the texts and traditions of the Bible. With their distinctively antipodean perspectives, contributors explore the innovative ways that both creators and beholders of Oceanic arts draw upon their contexts and cultures in order to open up creative engagements with the stories, themes and theologies of the biblical traditions. Various motifs weave their way throughout the volume, including antipodean landscapes and ecology, (post)colonialism, philosophy, Oceanic spiritualities and the often contested engagements between western and indigenous cultures. Within this weaving process, each essay invites readers to contemplate these various forms of visual culture through Oceanic eyes, and to appreciate the fresh insights that this process can bring to reading and interpreting the biblical traditions. The result is a rich and interdisciplinary array of conversations that will capture the attention of readers within the fields of biblical reception studies, cultural studies, theology and art history.

In a sense, Oceania can be considered a microcosm of World Christianity. Within this region are many of the same observable trends on the global level that impact Christian life, faith, and witness. The geography of Oceania—the “liquid continent”—is unique. Christianity arrived in Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth century via British colonial powers. Indigenous Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders, and Māori peoples were dispossessed of land, property, rights, and dignity. Christianity grew by migration and conversion (not always voluntary), and over time became tightly intertwined with culture. In the twentieth century, rapid secularization moved Christianity into the private sphere, and by 2020 Christian affiliation had dropped from 97 percent to 57 percent. However, the history of Christianity in the Pacific Islands—Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia—is quite different. Christianity arrived via Protestant and Catholic missionaries between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries and grew substantially in the twentieth century largely due to indigenous Christian efforts. Islanders brought Christianity to neighboring islands, indigenous theologies developed, and churches gradually separated from their Western mission founders. One of the great “success stories” of World Christianity is Papua New Guinea, which grew from just 4 percent Christian in 1900 to 95 percent in 2020. However, growth is never the entire story. Violence against women is endemic in Papua New Guinea and is often combined with accusations of witchcraft. An estimated 59 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime (and 48 percent in the last year). As Christianity continues its shift to the global South, it becomes increasingly critical to heed the experiences, perspectives, and theologies of Christians, particularly women, in the Pacific Islands.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible brings together 37 essential essays written by leading international scholars, examining crucial points of analysis within the field of feminist Hebrew Bible studies. Organized into four major areas - globalization, neoliberalism, media, and intersectionality - the essays collectively provide vibrant, relevant, and innovative contributions to the field. The topics of analysis focus heavily on gender and queer identity, with essays touching on African, Korean, and European feminist hermeneutics, womanist and interreligious readings, ecofeminist and animal biblical studies, migration biblical studies, the role of gender binary voices in evangelical-egalitarian approaches, and the examination of scripture in light of trans women's voices. The volume also includes essays examining the Old Testament as recited in music, literature, film, and video games. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible charts a culturally, hermeneutically, and exegetically cutting-edge path for the ongoing development of biblical studies grounded in feminist, womanist, gender, and queer perspectives.

Empires rise and expand by taking lands and resources and by enslaving the bodies and minds of people. Even in this modern era, the territories, geographies, and peoples of a number of lands continue to be divided, occupied, harvested, and marketed. The legacy of slavery and the scapegoating of people persists in many lands, and religious institutions have been co-opted to own land, to gather people, to define proper behavior, to mete out salvation, and to be silent. The contributors to People and Land, writing from under the shadows of various empires—from and in between Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Oceania—refuse to be silent. They give voice to multiple causes: to assess and transform the usual business of theology and hermeneutics; to expose and challenge the logics and delusions of coloniality; to tally and demand restitution of stolen, commodified and capitalized lands; to account for the capitalizing (touristy) and forced movements of people; and to scripturalize the undeniable ecological crises and our responsibilities to the whole life system (watershed). This book is a protest against the claims of political and religious empires over land, people, earth, minds, and the future.

Theologies are constructed in and from lived contexts, and contexts are shaped by borders. While borders are barriers, they are also steppingstones for crossing over and invitations for moving further. This book offers theological and cultural reflections from the intersections of borders (real and imagined), bodies (physical, cultural, religious, ideological, political), and voices (that endorse as well as talk back). With and in the interests of natives and migrants, the authors of this book embrace bordered bodies and stir bothered voices. The essays are divided into four overlapping clusters that express the shared drives between the authors--Noble borders: some borders are not experienced as constricting because they are seen as noble; Negotiating bodies: bodies constantly negotiate and relocate borders; Troubling voices: bothered voices cannot be muted or silenced; Riotous bodies: embracing the wisdom in and of rejected and wounded bodies is a riot that this book invites. The authors engage their subjects out of their experiences as migrants and natives. This book is thus a step toward--and an invitation for more work on--migrant and native theologies.

This book makes space (1) for Pasifika contributions to academic conversations on critical topics and (2) for influencing the conversations to account for, and thus reflect, Pasifika ways and modes. The critical topic that runs through the chapters is well-being, and the contributors were located at the time of writing in Pasifika—Aotearoa, Fiji, Kioa, Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu—but there are many more Pasifika voices and concerns than are represented in this work. Nonetheless, the ways in which this work seeks to influence the conversations on well-being reflect the intersectional modes of thinking that native Pasifika Islanders share. The essays are placed into three intersecting clusters: well-being of bodies and (is)lands, well-being of traditions and theologies, and well-being of imaginations and worldviews. The rationale for this arrangement is that the well-being of Pasifika requires attention to the present (bodies and islands), to the past (traditions and theologies), and to the future (imaginations and worldviews). The chapters address Pasifika questions and concerns, and they are placed so that the conversations they spark can take place—free of the traps of Western theories and disciplines—with Pasifika accents and rhythms.

We live in an ecological age. Science in the last few hundred years has given us a picture of nature as blind to the future and mechanical in its workings, even while ecology and physics have made us aware of our interconnectedness and dependency upon the web of life. As we witness a possible sixth great mass-extinction, there is increasing awareness too of the fragility of life on this planet. In such a context, what is the nature of Christian hope? St Paul declares that all of creation “will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” How are we to imagine this “freedom” when death and decay are essential to biological life as we currently experience it, and when the scientific predictions for life are bleak at best? This book explores these questions, reflecting on how our traditions shape our imagination of the future, and considering how a theology of hope may sustain Christians engaged in conservation initiatives. The essays in this volume are partly in dialogue with the ground-breaking work of Celia Deane-Drummond, and are set in the context of global and local (Aotearoa New Zealand) ecological challenges.

In this collection, scholars from diverse geographical locations revisit a cluster of five biblical texts: Ruth, Song of Songs, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), Lamentations and Esther. The volume presents various viewpoints and contexts-geographical, communal, religious, social, economical and ethical. Matching scholarship with social awareness, the contributors keep asking themselves and their readers a dual-faced question: how does our life context influence our scholarly and non-scholarly readings of the Bible, and how does reading the Bible critically influence our life? To answer this question and to show it at work the contributors employ a range of contextual lenses. Geography is a major factor of the contributors' contexts – with contributors from South Africa, Argentina, Israel, the Pacific Islands – but not the only one to influence their readings. Issues of society, culture and community are at the foreground for all contributors and their reading agendas with specific focus on the AIDs crisis in Africa, issues of migration and asylum, and feminist approaches to biblical texts.