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About Us | Admissions | Programs | Faculty | Alumni/ae | Giving | Library | Bookstore | For Students | Search | Site Map | Contact Us Hartford
Seminary 77 Sherman
Street Hartford, CT 06105 860-509-9500 info@hartsem.edu
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In
my first year of seminary education James Cone’s The God of the
Oppressed and Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation shook
me up from my pious stupor, which sheltered me from seeing
injustice and oppression that were all around me. These two books
taught me the importance of one’s particular sociopolitical
setting in doing theology and that the commitment to the
liberation of the oppressed was not a luxury or an option but a
matter of necessity. During my doctoral study I read Edward
Said’s Orientalism, which made a significant difference in my
scholarship. Said brought to attention the West’s intellectual
habit of construing the rest of the world as inferior in order to
legitimize its domination of the world. Many point to Orientalism
for paving the way for a new discipline now called postcolonial
studies, which draws attention to the connection between the
Western imperialism and the production of Western knowledge by the
intellectual use of the experience of those who have lived as the
other. My scholarship is informed by the experience of the
marginalized in order to connect the world of biblical studies
with the world at large and to draw attention to the failure of
biblical studies to come to terms with its colonialist legacy.