Marvin Mayers first explored the tensions felt by missionaries attempting to impact people from different cultural backgrounds. Mayers had been a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators and an educator at Wheaton College prior to his writing of Christianity Confronts Culture in 1974. Sherwood Leingenfelter became acquainted with Myer’s model of basic values during his time at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1975. He too served in various fields with Wycliffe and used the model to teach at Biola University in 1983 where it was welcomed by students and members of the surrounding community alike. Working off of Mayer’s Model, Leingenfelter utilized his own personal accounts of these tensions with people in the Pacific islands to write …show more content…
Likewise, we should practice incarnation of ourselves to the cultures we are to serve. Chapter two provides the model of basic values and a questionnaire designed to help the reader understand their own cultural biases. In Chapters 3-8, Leingrenfelter deals with each tension and explains their opposing views. These tensions include time-orientation vs. event-orientation (ch. 3), holistic thinking vs. dichotomist thinking (ch. 4), crisis orientation vs. non-crisis orientation (ch. 5), task orientation vs. people (ch. 6), status focus vs. achievement focus (ch. 7), and the concealment of vulnerability vs. the willingness to expose vulnerability (ch. 8). At the end of these chapters, Leingrenfelter implores the reader to be willing to adapt and accepting to any culture’s bias on this model of basic values. In chapter nine, he highlights that sin is social, not just personal and that we as cross-cultural ministers should bridge the gap between personal and other people’s values by becoming a 150-percent person whose incarnation requires complete submission and dependence on …show more content…
I had not realized that these tensions were so intrinsic and core to understanding and relating to other cultures. Furthermore, I had not realized that valuing either side of these tensions as more true than the other was unfair and bigoted. As Leingrenfelter establishes, these tensions are culturally and morally subjective. No side is right or wrong. I had concluded in my own life that some sides of these tensions were more right than others. For example, I had always assumed that an achievement focus stood as a more righteous set of system for determining prestige than that of a status focus. This was probably due to the fact that I grew up in America where capitalism reigns and people work to become great in the eyes of their peers. But neither of these systems is better. According to Leingrenfelter and Mayers, Jesus rejects them both and establishes a system of servant hood where no one is worthy but that worthiness comes only from God. We can’t achieve nor ascribe to this worthiness. It is freely given to us. This truth penetrated me to the heart and a challenged me to stop seeing my cultures ways, despite the western world’s success as better ways. According to my plots on the questionnaire, I prefer holistic thinking over dichotomist
In Barre Toelken’s essay “Seeing with a Native Eye: How Many Sheep Will It Hold?”, the ways in which one culture perceives another and the criteria used to make judgements are explored. Toelken states “I think I can say something about how differently we see things, envision things, look at things, how dissimilarly different cultures try to process the world of reality” (10-11). In essence, Toelken is alluding to how different cultures will interpret their experiences and rituals according to their own set of beliefs and practices. This complicates situations in which the experiences or rituals are not comparable across cultural lines; someone will always be missing an aspect or a significant purpose if they do not try to “see it as much as possible with the ‘native eye’” (12). In other words, one must immerse themselves in the culture they are analyzing, while not comparing it to their own cultural experiences. One must consider all the cultural implications of that specific culture when wondering why things are done a certain way. Toelken provides
Hanser, Matthew. “Killing,Letting Die And Preventing People From Being Saved.” Utilitas 11.3 (1999): 277. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 April 2014
Through the study of texts a number of concepts can be established which can have a deep and moralistic value. These values can be experienced in varied and complex ways but all explore the conflicting notion of belonging through the text and context.
Winter, Gibson. Address. "Religious Social Ethics in a Postmodern World." Temple University, Philadelphia, 22 March 1995.
Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. Second Edition, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2001
In Western society and culture, religion and morality have often intertwined and they have reflected their values onto each other. Today it is sometimes impossible to make a distinction between the two, since their influence has transcended generations. In modern Western culture, religion and society preach conformity. In order to be a “good” person, one must conform to the values imposed by the church1 and state.
In the text, “The American Cultural Configuration” the authors express the desire of anthropologists to study their own culture despite the difficulty that one faces attempting to subjectively analyze their own society. Holmes and Holmes (2002), use the adage “not being able to see the forest through the trees” (p. 5) to refer to how hard it is for someone to study something they have largely taken for granted. The Holmes' article focuses predominately on paradoxes within our own culture, many of which we don't notice. In a paradox, two contradicting statements can appear to be true at the same time. This essay looks at two paradoxes commonly found in everyday life: the individual versus the family and religion.
The essay, “A Christian World View,” by Mickenzie Neely seeks to address some major themes that pertain to a Christian worldview. The essay, in summary, states that “serving others, accepting and giving grace, sacrifice, and justice are all essential to living for Christ.” This essay was presented in a way in which she used facts and scriptures from the Bible to support her point. This paper will analysis Neely’s main arguments and will evaluate my opinion of her writing. The main topics that apply to my Christian worldview are love, service, grace and forgiving.
Before this class my initial stance on the human predicament was the abuse of power by exploiting others to gain more power, but based on our course readings, and my own reflection, I have learned that this is not entirely the case. Now I believe that the basic human predicament is that we are insecure with our being as individuals because of social standards that have taught us it is right to exploit others for our own benefit. To resolve this issue, we need to take time to reflect, ask questions, and trust in God. When we take these steps, God will empower us to gradually learn to exhibit a “self-forgetting love” as Karl Rahner contends, and taking us closer to social justice and confidence with our purpose in life. To support my claim, I will mainly draw on three theologians who share a similar perspective on our predicament.
historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; Culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action.”
Cunningham, Lawrence S., and John J. . Reich. Culture and Values. 7th ed. Vol. 1. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2006. Print.
He focuses on the need and importance of teaching ancestral values to the young people, in a way that they can relate and understand. Young people of the world have become un-rooted from tradition, not knowing how they are connected to the world, who they can turn to for guidance and support, and lacking in spiritual leadership. This has caused increased violence, disparity, and suffering around the world. It is the responsibility of all leaders, cultural, spiritual, ethnic, religious, and educational to assist in the understanding of traditions, heritage, ancestral roots, belief systems, and values in a way that the young people of today can comprehend and feel connected. The young people of today are the leaders of tomorrow, they need our guidance and support to grow and mature into responsible adults. They must become re-rooted in tradition and beliefs to maintain a since of stability for the
Charles Kraft was a mentor by practice, teacher by trade, and functioned in the classic sense of a professor taught what he practiced. In the 1950s, he served as a Brethren missionary in northern Nigeria and, leaving the field, taught anthropology and African languages. Moving into the faculty at Fuller Seminary, he taught Christian anthropology from a Gospel centered, critical realist approach. Pioneering the field of ethno-theology (Paris, 2015, p. 81), he taught that to navigate effectively across cultural boundaries one needed to, in face of the scripture, deconstruct their own culturally based perspectives, discover the meaning of the original culturally based message, and then - with dynamic equivalence - reconstruct the original meaning into the form of a new language/culture. To illustrate, he gave us a book to read by a Donavan, a catholic missionary’s story of the gospel given to the Masai of Kenya (Donovan, V., 1982).
What is the value of culture? This is the question that Lewis is addressing in this essay. He wrote this collection of papers for a periodical called Theology. They were published in March 1940. He seems to have wrestled with the amount of attentio...
These issues are also raised in "Death and the King's Horseman", but more with showing how important and determinant our culture is for our personal identity. Thus, living in an era where this one is changing, because of the rough imposition of a new one, can torn one's personality, making them doubt all of their beliefs.