DEADLINES

Please be reminded of the following class requirements:

1. Use of inclusive language (10% of your grade)
2. Attendance and class participation (10% of your grade)
3. Individual Journal Reflections/Reactions (40% of your grade)
4. Group Project (40% of your grade)

Four (4) of your best reflection/reaction papers (on parables, redeemers in stories, forums, film analyses, etc.) will meet your requirement for #3 (individual journals). If you have not submitted the minimum 4 reaction papers, post your entries here. You have until October 17 to write your reaction papers. Your Curriculum Guide Group Project is due on October 10. Due to many requests for an extension, we have decided to move the deadline to October 13. You can put your projects in our boxes or email them to liztapiaraquel@utsem.net or rvelunta@utsem.net.

Do take advantage of our remaining class sessions to complete both your individual and group requirements.

(SGD)Prof. Lizette G. Tapia-Raquel (SGD) Prof. Revelation E. Velunta

Life of Brian

How did you find the movie? Many people find the movie disturbing. Would you agree and why? Many film critics call the movie a "masterpiece." Would you agree and why? Is laughter really the best medicine in the case of this film? Why? How can this movie help in the education programs of the church? Please provide concrete examples.

Unforgiven and Mirrors

If texts serve as windows to the past for historians and serve as "stories that never happened but always happens" to literary critics, then, for cultural studies practitioners, texts serve as mirrors.

Mirrors help us see ourselves better. Many stories in the Bible serve as mirrors. They resonate with our experiences. They echo our joys and our pains. They inform our decisions and our struggles. Films serve a similar purpose.

For this particular exercise, the class will watch the award-winning film, Unforgiven. Please respond to the following questions after you watch the film: (1) Who among the characters did you identify with and why? (2) In what ways does the film mirror reality? Be specific (3) The film has been called a parable. Why? How does it subvert tradition, norms, and the status-quo? (4) What key themes resonate in the film? (5) What theological/religious/biblical images/metaphors does the film conjure up for you?

Questions for Reaction Paper on GRP-MILF Forum

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God's Fart, Our Farts

Imperialism exists when a single truth is forced on a plural world. This is why, despite the fact the women hold up half of the sky, majority of men and women believe that men are stronger, more intelligent, more gifted, and closer to God. This is why, to this day, many churches only ordain men as priests. This is also why Christianity has, in the past two thousand years, killed more people in the name of Jesus than all the victims of wars, ethic cleansings, and religious genocide combined.

Those of us who read our Bibles and pray everyday, know that God is a God of surprises. Each person, each plant, each snowflake, each butterfly, each pebble is different from the rest. Our Bible has 66 books that offer us 66 different ways of articulating faith and faith experiences.

Our Bible offers us four portraits of a man, whom his followers confess is God-in-the-flesh, who lived, and loved, and labored with the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, those whose only hope was God. His enemies, those who protected the status quo and maintained the ideologies of empire, tortured and executed him. He was dead. His message of liberation has been silenced. His enemies have won. So they thought.

But God has the last laugh. God always has the last laugh. God raised Jesus up from the grave. And he is loose. Laughing because death has no hold on him. Not anymore.

Filipinos, according to research, are among the happiest people in Asia. Despite our problems, despite our miseries, despite the seeming hopelessness of our situation, we laugh. We laugh at our leaders and their broken promises. We laugh at our churches and the superstitions we confess. We laugh at ourselves, all the time. And this is why, I believe, we have survived all these years.

Filipinos have the last laugh. Maybe it’s a gift from God. The Spaniards taught us the pasyon to domesticate our broken spirits, but we used the pasyon to ignite revolution. The Spaniards used bamboo poles to punish and to drive Indios to and from the fields, but we used bamboo poles to create a dance of celebration, and called it tinikling. The Americans banned the singing of the Philippine National Anthem and the unfurling of the Philippine Flag and sentenced those who disobeyed to prison; we used the American’s principle of separation of State and Church to bring both the anthem and the flag into our worship life. The American’s built the jeep as a weapon of mass destruction. We turned it into a vehicle of Filipino culture—and called it jeepney. We always have the last laugh.

For over 100 years, we have been forced to speak, to think, to believe, to worship, to sing, to make love, to pray, to be… in English. Constantino, in his “The Mis-Education of the Filipinos,” said, “For a sprinkling of English, we sold our souls.” Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire said that the worst kind of colonialism is when the colonizer has possessed the colonized’s soul.

We need an exorcism and, as I have been arguing for a few minutes now, laughter plays a critical role in our collective decolonization.

English is the imperial language. It is the language of our theologies, our liturgies, our books of discipline, our confessions. English is the master’s tool. We all know this. We also know that one of the best ways to dismantle the master’s house is to use the master’s tools. Any student of peasant revolt theory and the different schools of tradition on resistance, from passive to active non-violence, to armed revolt, know that the colonized has over four centuries of tradition to draw from. I will offer one simple model. In postcolonial studies, this is called THE SCRIPT AND THE SUB-SCRIPT, more specifically, mis-pronunciation as deconstruction.

In the Pentateuch, Moses requested to see God’s face, but God said, those who see God’s face will die, so God allowed Moses to experience God’s back FART. When the Israelites were fleeing from Pharaoh and was trapped between the Egyptians and the Red Sea, God FARTED the waters and God’s chosen were able to escape towards the Promised Land.

In the letters of Paul, we are challenged to celebrate the church as the body of Christ. The body is composed of many FARTS and each FART is as important as the other. No FART can say to another FART that it is more needed or more important. Each one of us therefore, has a FART to claim, to share, to be proud of.

As a laughing people, we worship a God who laughs. Let us go continue doing so…. Let us always affirm what God has done and what God is doing, and commit to what we can do, as communities and as individuals, celebrate God’s FART and the unity of our FARTS.

Midterms

BIBLE STUDY METHODS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
Take-Dorm Examinations
Due on or before Friday, August 1, 2008, 7 a.m.

You can put your papers in our boxes, email to rvelunta@utsem.net and liztapiaraquel@utsem.net, or post to our class blog at http://utsbibleandcurrdev.blogspot.com/.

Please answer the following questions as extensively as possible.

1. If parables are subversive speech then offer brief interpretations of the following parables of Jesus:
1.1 Tenants in the Vineyard (Matthew 21. 33-45, Mark 12. 1-12, and Luke 20. 9-19). What is the message/challenge of this parable for you and the communities you serve? What is the message/challenge of this parable to peasant farmers who have been dispossessed of their lands and have to work under unjust tenant systems?
1.2 Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20. 1-16). What is the message/challenge of this parable for you and the communities you serve? What is the message/challenge of this parable to daily-wage earners who have no security of tenure and whose families have to face the threat of starvation each day?

2. If biblical narratives talk about redeemers and or God’s champions, identify the redeemers/champions in the following stories and explain why in each case. Assume that you are leading a Bible study among women.

2.1 “The Fall” (Genesis 3)
2.2 Ruth, Naomi, and Orpah (Ruth 1)

3. Which character in the Bible do you best identify with? Why? How would this help explain your sense of calling or vocation?
4. Theological Education in many South East Asian countries is grounded on the Critical Asian Principle. How do you understand this fundamental cornerstone? What are its strengths and its weaknesses?
5. What is your understanding of the Church’s ministry to the present Philippine context and what is its implications in your task as cultural transformers?

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Vision Mission Statements and Needs Analysis are due Thursday, 31 July 2008. Please put in Prof. Lizette’s box.

The Parables of Jesus

How does one get crucified for telling Parables?

Introduction

Two very important reminders: First, If there is one fact we are perfectly sure about Jesus of Nazareth, it is that he was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate, in the mid-30's CE for allegedly being "King of the Jews." And we don't need the Bible to confirm this. Two historians, the Jewish Josephus and the Roman Tacitus, attest to the “pernicious” superstition called Christianity and its crucified and supposedly risen leader.

Second, if there is one thing most scholars agree about Jesus is that he was a storyteller; that he taught in parables (like the many rabbis of his time). And his followers remembered and we have many of his stories in the gospels we now call Mark, Matthew and Luke.

The key question we hope to answer this term is one which has bothered many for centuries: If Jesus were a teacher of heavenly, spiritual truths then why was he executed as a political subversive between two social bandits or freedom fighters (lestes in Greek)? It appears that Jerusalem elites collaborated with their Roman overlords to get rid of Jesus because he was a threat to their political and economic Interests? How do we reconcile the teacher with the subversive? How does one get crucified for telling stories?

To answer this question, we need to try to construct the context of those so-called stories that may have gotten Jesus killed. If parables offer glimpses of everyday life in first-century Palestine, they also infer the larger whole of which those glimpses are part. We cannot understand the parables without first attending to the social reality they imply. For this task, we have Josephus, rabbinic and Roman sources. We also have anthropologists who do peasant studies. Then we have macro-sociologists' work on agrarian societies and aristocratic and bureaucratic empires.


The World of Jesus’ Parables

Social scientists map the contours of antiquity. These maps (like the maps we have in our cars) are but representations of reality. They help us understand the world of Jesus’ parables. Many of these scientists agree that the introduction of the plow (yes, the lowly “araro”) ushered the dawn of the domestication of animals for agricultural use, the eventual settlement of cultivators in villages, and the rise of an exploiter class. Agrarian societies dominated human life from about 3000 BCE to the advent of the industrial revolution in 1800 CE. One consequence of this social evolution was institutionalized bureaucracy. In the beginning there were cultivators and armed nomads who preyed on the cultivators by destroying their settlements and plundering their goods. Eventually, in order to save their settlements, the cultivators—instead of fighting—offered a portion of their produce to the nomads as bribe. The bribe eventually became tribute. The nomads soon discover they could live off the produce of villages. Warfare and plunder became their way of life and bureaucracy is its legitimization. Financial bureaucrats made sure that wealth remained in the hands of the few and the military made sure more not less came in. The elite had to legitimize exploitation through education, record-keeping (of debts particularly) and religion. The economy was based on redistribution of wealth through tribute and other forms of enforced obligations whose effect was to leave peasants at subsistence levels while urban elites lived in luxury. Sociologists also have remarked that agrarian societies have no history. Trans-historically or cross-culturally, if you see one, you've seen them all.

The world of ancient Palestine may be represented by the following levels (and one can argue that these tiers are as true today as they were then).

High-level elite, power players-1-2%
Retainers (agents of control), 5-7%
Merchants, peddlers, barter, 5%
Artisans, manual-skilled laborers, 3-7%
Peasants, 70-80%
Unclean, despised trade, nothing to sell but bodies,5%
Expendables, excess children of peasant farmers sent away as
Day laborers and beggars, 10-15%

This is the world of Jesus' parables. Jesus’ parables were not earthly stories about heavenly things; rather, they were earthy stories about heavy things: the reality of empire, of colonial rule, the violence of poverty and oppression, and the dispossessed’s collective longing for God’s intervention.

Jesus’ parables—stories that disclosed the structures of empire, evil and greed during his time and offered glimpses of God’s reign breaking through via the struggles of the dispossessed—were, most probably, the reason he got executed. Yes, telling parables can get one killed.
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From the works of William Herzog and the collective wisdom of Carlos Abesamis, Elizabeth Gravador-Dominguez, Benito Dominguez, John Dominic Crossan, Paulo Freire, and and Gerhard Lenski.