Bible School and Missionary Work

This chapter recounts Naw Sheera's experiences at Bible school, where she strengthened her faith in Christianity. This would help her maintain her marriage later in life. Bible school proved to be a formative part of her life in other ways, as it taught her patience, consideration, and self-control. In addition to her academic experiences, the chapter reveals that Naw Sheera spent a year in Thailand to do missionary work. This too provided her with new challenges and new experiences, including an incident where Naw Sheera was nearly forced into marriage. And although she received no pay as a missionary, she was able to subsist on money and food as offerings.

The King of Kings

Born in 1926 outside of San Antonio, Texas, to a migrant farmworker family, Reies López Tijerina’s earliest years were defined by severe poverty and intense religiosity. Nevertheless, starting as a boy, Tijerina saw himself as destined by God for greatness. After attending a Pentecostal Bible college, he spent five years as an Assembly of God minister before becoming an itinerant preacher. As a preacher, he crisscrossed the United States, including several trips through northern New Mexico, which introduced him to the sordid history of land dispossession in the region. His marriage to a fellow Bible school student, Mary Escobar, produced an ever-growing family that joined him in his constant travels and life of precarity. In 1954, a collection of his sermons condemned the United States and its citizens for licentiousness and greed.

The Threat of Ambiguity: Risk and Faith in Relational Ethnography and Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Mary Douglas has identified the discomfort people feel in circumstances of ambiguity. For social groups, both informal and institutionalized, the wish for what Douglas calls “hard lines and clear concepts” (1966:200) can create in-groups that are self-referential and oppressive. While boundaries are integral to any community, I suggest that social groups must interact with one another with a sense of ontological permeability that is rooted in dialogical relationship in order to both transcend and affirm their boundaries appropriately. The same is true between ethnographers and those they study. In this paper, I will draw on a conversation I had with several young Norwegian Christians I interviewed during field research conducted at the Grimstad Bible School in Southern Norway to illustrate how reflexive ethnography and transcultural dialogue can be conducted with a sense of both risk and faith. I will also argue that both ethnographic work and interdisciplinary discourse can benefit from creating permeable boundaries, and that in order to do so, academics from all disciplines will need to let go of the myth of objective reporting and embrace the possibility of finding a sense of what John Milbank would call moving from “unity to difference” and back.