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In a secular age which dismisses once-revered matters such as Bible reading, is there still a point to reading and studying Christianity's foundational text? This book will answer an unequivocal'Absolutely[!].'Why? For us located in the West, the Bible is a vital part of our'spiritual ancestry,'a dominant idea of the book. Hence, learning how to read and interpret the Bible properly (particularly, the New Testament) is like getting to know our spiritual ancestry better. The main strategy that this work will suggest is to treat the New Testament as a metaphorical textual village where some of our most important spiritual ancestors continue to live. If we learn some good strategies to communicate with them, we will be able, as it were, to visit this village, have meaningful conversations with our spiritual ancestors and, thus, become better grounded in our spiritual ancestry here in the West. With that, we can return to our secular context, better equipped both to embrace and wrestle with that spiritual ancestry. Hopefully, that will also help us to create for ourselves a meaning-system or spirituality that would be appropriate for our present world while being well grounded in our spiritual tradition.

In this book, Julius-Kei Kato lets the theories and experiences of Asian American hybridity converse with and bear upon some aspects of Christian biblical and theological language. Hybridity has become a key feature of today's globalized world and is, of course, a key concept in postcolonial thought. However, despite its crucial importance, hybridity is rarely used as a paradigm through which to analyze and evaluate the influential concepts and teachings that make up religious language. This book fills a lacuna by discussing what the concept of hybridity challenges and resists, what over-simplifications it has the power to complicate, and what forgotten or overlooked strands in religious tradition it endeavors to recover and reemphasize. Shifting seamlessly between biblical, theological, and modern, real-world case studies, Kato shows how hybridity permeates and can illuminate religious phenomena as lived and believed. The ultimate goal of the move toward an embrace of hybridity is afurther dissolution of the thick wall separating ideas of'us'and'them.'In this book, Kato suggests the possibility of a world in which what one typically considers the'other'is increasingly recognized within oneself.

In the initial years of the third millennium, Asian Americans throughout all of North America still tlnd themselves located within diverse cultural worlds, and this diversity too often involves marginalization, relocation, ambiguity, and insecurity. The self-interpretation of many contemporary Asian-American students, in particular, is clouded with far-reaching imoads vis-a-vis their acceptance both by peers and by faculty. Too often these students lead a dual life - one at home where Asian values are honored and the other at institutions of higher learning where Asian values are too often ignored or even perceived as non-American. The author of this volume, Professor Julius-Kei Kato, clearly guides his readers through the major intricacies ofthese Asian-American joumeys. The struggles of many contemporary Asian Americans to negotiate the demands arising from many different and coexisting worlds complicate their self-identity. Asian Americans today are searching for credible guidelines to ameliorate their existence within a world that is diasporically hybridized. Professor Julius·Kei Kato focuses on the North American Christian environment and the multireligious environment of Asian peoples. This includes the tension between a dominant Euro-American modern and postmodem philosophy on the one hand and on the other hand the many thousand-year-old philosophical framework of the East Asian world. In the North American fields of higher education, the increasing number of Asian students is currently regarded as an acceptable situation. North American educational institutions will experience a slow but steady growth of Asian American students during the next fifty years, and the administrators and faculty of these institutions are eager to see the number of their students increase. In the educational world, particularly in institutions of higher learning, the administrative and professorial leaders are and will remain predominantly EuroAmerican for the foreseeable future. These same administrators and professors remain enormously busy and as a consequence have little time to acquaint themselves adequately with the cultures and histories of the growing Asian student body. Fortunately, Julius-Kei Kato has provided the educational world of North America with a major synthesis of the key issues in postcolonial theories of hybridity, diaspora, and culture. He has also provided major assistance to his readers with an analysi.s of some of the best minds among today's scholars who have dealt with the theme of hybridity, diaspora, and culture.