Our context intersects with the historical-linguistic work of exegesis, whether by raising questions of the text, being challenged by the text, or challenging other readings of the text. The goal is to show how deeply valuable it is to be aware of our contexts while we read Scripture, and invite the global church to the table to read with us, helping to correct where our own vision might be too narrow.

I am blown away by how much Pauline scholarship has changed in the last 30 years. The guild has become more diverse, more voices contributing, including Jewish scholars, more archaeologists, more global voices , and thinking more about the human experience with disability studies, deeper conversations about gender, ethnicity, wealth and poverty.

In writing my chapter, one of my “aha” moments was when I realized how powerful it is when we consider our own language. In Tagalog, the line which says “Let your kingdom come” in Filipino is “mauwi sa amin ang paghahari mo,” which literally means “let your kingdom come home to us.”

I wrote this book because I want more people to understand a fuller conception of biblical lament so that they can experience the healing and hope that it brings. Too often when people talk about lament, they describe it as sadness or even wallowing in pain. The Bible offers a much deeper perspective, which I seek to unpack in my book.

Traditionally, Exodus is considered a book of redemption, law, and God’s presence. However, through a diasporic lens, it is also a book of migration, the ambivalence between home and new lands, liminality, a journey of becoming God’s people and experiencing God’s presence through local churches in the diaspora.

Numbers has much to teach us about ecclesiology, the doctrine of God’s people, and the relationship between God and his people. In other words, the Camp of Israel is not simply God’s organizing his people for departure, for traveling through the desert—no, it’s God’s creation of his covenant community!

It is clear to those who attend our Latino/a churches that many believers have never thought of how their immigrant experience and heritage might impact their reading of the Bible. Our hope is that this book might stimulate more Bible readings from that perspective, for the sake of Latino/a churches as well as for those from other communities who could learn much from Latinos/as.

Each chapter explores a different portion of Scripture, exploring what it might suggest about just discipleship and drawing that discussion into dialogue with a contemporary justice issue. So, for example, I explore Deuteronomy’s feasts as practices that shape the community for justice, and bring that into dialogue with the contemporary issue of economic segregation.

We wanted to provide, in one volume, a beautiful example of socially located exegesis, attentive to the power and authority of the Biblical text in its historical context along with insights that are born out of one’s culture and experience.

The biggest “aha” moment for me was learning about the non-Western influences that shaped Western culture and civilization. This clearly problematizes the claim of cultural independence (also, superiority or inferiority), which has a  significant implication for global theological reflection. It means that theological constructions in non-Western contexts should be free to draw helpful insights from  outside our cultures without thinking that we are using something foreign.

In many colleges and universities there has been an interest in attracting more Hispanic students but not enough focus on attracting Hispanic faculty. We wanted to hear Hispanic professors describe their journeys in the academy and the challenges they faced because we believe that representation is important.

I wanted to bring Black voices together to address the value of Black lives, theologically, biblically, and sermonically—especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and many other events like that in our nations’ history.