Jim Harries
Список книг автора Jim Harries
Theory to Practice in Vulnerable Mission
Missionaries from the West like to hit the ground running to solve as many of other people's problems as possible in the increasingly short term they have available for service. Hang on, says Jim Harries! After twenty-four years in Africa, observing how poverty, traditional practices, dependency, and misunderstandings continue, Harries asks, what is the point of bringing solutions that local people cannot reproduce? Harries challenges missionaries and development workers to counter dependency on the West by engaging in sustainable ministry that local people can imitate. This requires some Westerners to work on the basis of local languages and resources, a practice known as vulnerable mission. Rooted in personal experience, founded in a postmodern appreciation of language, drawing on anthropology, based in Christian theology, Harries provides a case for the necessity of vulnerable mission in the twenty-first century.
Communication in Mission and Development
Communication in Mission and Development identifies, unpacks, and articulates fundamental problems in communication in mission and development as it is being carried out in Africa and the majority world today. New technology, unique in the history of mankind, is throwing up vexing issues, to date barely recognized, in communication practice. This book reconsiders: –Previous work by mission scholars on communication. –Questions regarding materialism in Africa. –Widespread understandings on the nature of human equality. –The impact on communication of the holding of monistic vs. dualistic worldviews. –African and Western approaches to hermeneutics. –The use of European languages for communication in Africa. –Issues related to globalization and development. –And more . . .
Underlying differences in philosophical foundations amongst Western as against majority world people influences their respective communication to such an extent that the expectation that both sides simply understand one another because they happen to use the same international language is found to be unrealistic. Communication in Mission and Development concludes that the practice of mission and development will better cope with current realities when the use of local languages is once again given its proper decisive place.
The Godless Delusion
What if the whole «God delusion» approach is a neo-colonial imposition at the linguistic and philosophical level? Could it lead to unmitigated disasters in intercultural communication and development work? This paradigm-challenging book points to the necessity, in light of contemporary impasse in intercultural understanding, of God's involvement in the encounter between the West and the majority world, especially Africa. Failure to account for God, the cradle of imagination operative in human hearts and minds has resulted in a black hole that deeply troubles intercultural engagement between the West and others. While drawing on his personal long-term field experience in Africa, the author cites contemporary scholarly Western literature on philosophy, anthropology, «religion,» and beyond. Ironically, the West, which values dualism, instead of seeking to share it with majority world people, wrongly presupposes its universality. A proactive compliance to the countering of «racism» and to the demotion of impacts of human imagination on understanding contribute to this. Effective education must be from known to unknown, this text emphasizes. Enabling African people to build understanding on their own epistemological foundations might be more important than exporting of pre-packaged languages and educational systems from the West.
Secularism and Africa
Secular assumptions underlie much formal communication between the West and Africa, and even intra-Africa. Secularism is dualistic by nature, but thinking in Africa is mostly monistic. This book suggests that it is better to be rooted in faith in Christ than in so-called secularism. The great respect given to the Bible in much of Africa verifies this idea. Communication of and through Christ is a bridge that can enable indigenous sustainable development. The same gospel is the bridge over which the West itself passes. Maintaining supposedly secular presuppositions may be denying sub-Saharan African people the means for self-initiated sustainable progress.
This books draws on anthropology, linguistics, and theology, as well as the author's experience of living in Africa. Harries shares an autobiographical account of personal long-term grassroots ministry, and proposes a revision of widely held understandings of linguistics pertaining especially to the relationship between the West and Africa. He also looks at Bible teaching ministry in light of contemporary African contexts.