Reading the Bible, Learning Ourselves: A Contextual Bible Study with Culturally Hybrid Youth

Abstract

While the resources for biblical interpretation are multiplying, there are no current models for reading biblical texts in community with culturally hybrid persons. Contextual Bible Study (CBS) presents a pedagogical framework to help fill the gap. This article offers an overview of CBS as well as a case study that looks at a reading community (a specific group of culturally hybrid young adults) that uses a relevant experience (migration-related grief) to interpret a resonant text (Lamentations 1).

Keywords:

• Cultural hybridity
• Contextual Bible Study
• Third Culture Kids
• disenfranchised grief
• Lamentations

Acknowledgements

I want to express my gratitude to my co-creator TCKs, whose work is reflected here, along with Israel Kamudzandu and Anne Walker, who shepherded the research on which this article is based. I also want to thank Eser Kim for bringing my attention to issues of marginalization among youth, as well as Lauren Calvin Cooke for her helpful feedback. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sarah Cariaga for the time and encouragement she gave to make this article possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See West (1993). West is also the uncredited main author of Ujamaa Centre (2015).

2 West specifically uses “ordinary readers” in reference to those “who are poor and marginalized” (1999, 10), though the general meaning of “untrained” is still present.

3 West (1999) later writes, “The contextual Bible study process is not simply a naive and romantic ‘listening to,’ nor is it a paternalistic and marginalizing ‘reading for’; it is a process in which we ‘read with’ each other, where we vigilantly foreground our respective subject positions and where we become explicit concerning the power relations implicit in the reading process” (135-136).

4 Hall (2019, 92) notes that “an epistemological privileging of ordinary readers” is at the heart of the CBS process. It is important to note, however, that being untrained in Western critical methods does not hinder someone from being a skilled and critical “reader” of their own social context or written texts (Akper 2005, 8-11).

5 One of West’s former students offers an insider’s critique of CBS on this point: “The uncritical acceptance of indigenous knowledge appears as almost sacrosanct [in CBS], without an acknowledgement that the community can themselves be in possession of destructive and life-denying interpretations, which may be exposed, interrogated, and ultimately transformed!” (Nadar 2009, 393).

6 Groome’s (1991) five movements are as follows: (1) naming participants’ present action or current experience; (2) critical reflection on participants’ experience; (3) accessing the Christian Story (i.e., scripture and tradition) and Vision (“the demands and promises that this faith makes” [Groome 2011, 68]); (4) dialectical exchange between Story and Vision and the lives of both individual and community; and (5) movement toward response.

7 Sociologists first coined the term “Third Culture Kids” in the 1960s to describe “children who accompany their parents into another society” (Useem 1993, 1). Pollock, Van Reken, and Pollock’s (2017) definition has been the most influential in the literature since 2000 (Tan, Wang, and Cottrell 2021).

8 These transnational backgrounds, of course, do not reflect all childhood and adolescent cross-cultural experiences. See Pollock, Van Reken, and Pollock’s (2017) discussion of “Cross-Cultural Kids,” or “CCKs” (43–52), of which TCKs are a subset.

9 The term “Third Culture Kid” is not without its issues. It is not a universally recognized term among those who grow up transnationally; other terms, such as “global nomad,” are used in some expatriate communities and segments of the literature on transnational youth. Moreover, the idea of a “third culture” reflects essentialist assumptions about culture, and its value as an analytical concept is debatable; see further Tanu (2015). In this article, I use “Third Culture Kid” and “TCK” as emic (or insider) terms, ones that I and other insiders in my local group use to refer to ourselves.

10 These anonymous laments were written as part of a camp for TCKs in 2015 and were collected with the permission of the authors. Individual laments are cited as “TCK Lament [number]” in the text of this article. The full collection is available upon request (please email [email protected]).

11 This quote comes from an interview I did with a TCK in 2013, a portion of which I presented during a camp for TCKs later that year.

12 TCK grief also appears related to migratory grief, a form of disenfranchised grief common among immigrants (Casado, Hong, and Harrington 2010). Migratory grief has not been associated directly with TCKs in published research thus far, but descriptions of the experience track closely with those of TCK grief. See Henry, Stiles, and Biran (2005), Casado, Hong, and Harrington (2010), and Achotegui (2019).

13 One aspect of disenfranchised grief among children and adolescents is the perception that they are “incomplete adults” (Corrie 2021), unable to regulate their emotions and therefore are to be comforted or silenced but not taken seriously.

14 Please note that special care must be taken with Lamentations 1 because it contains imagery of gendered violence. It may not be an appropriate text to read with younger youth or persons who may be retraumatized by the content.

15 Marduk’s role as supreme god can be seen in the Old Babylonian creation epic “Enuma Elish” and “The Laws of Hammurabi.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter H. Cariaga

Peter Cariaga is an adjunct instructor in the Division of Bible at Oklahoma Christian University and director of the university’s Third Culture Kid (TCK) Group, a multicultural student organization for young adults who grew up cross-culturally. E-mail: [email protected]