Revelation 7:9 Conversations

What are we missing when we fail to (or are afraid to?) bring our full ethnic, cultural selves in reading the Bible? A lot, actually, because God meets us in the concreteness of a person whose meaning is fully formed in a particular time and culture. Dr. Janette Ok is a professor of New Testament at Fuller Seminary, a preacher, and the co-author of New Testament in Color (IVP). Vania Gomez and Jin Cho have an encouraging and important conversation with Janette, on having early gender and cultural role models; how owning our own authentic ethnic/cultural  identities is a gift to the church; and how justice at a defining characteristic of God is a divine imperative for God's people.

Just in time for award season, Jin, Amanda and Jacilyn do movie-talk about Ryan Coogler's Sinners with historian Jemar Tisby! Jemar is the NYT-bestselling author of The Color of Compromise, How to Fight Racism, and The Spirit of Justice, but also a film buff who helps us to remember how movies can help stoke our prophetic imagination. Join us in this fun conversation, as Dr. Tisby pulls apart the historical intricacies interweaved into the movie Sinners--Jim Crow South, Mississippi blues, Delta Chinese--all wrapped up in a vampire-genre, that helps to make a very modern point.

Dorena Williamson is the bestselling author of 9 children's books with a passion "for all children to hear the message of God's diverse kingdom." In this conversation with Jacilyn Goodwin and Vania Gomez, she shares her story of navigating the publishing world to find God's adventure in storytelling for children.  Telling these stories are an act of creating Godly imagination in all of us, as we learn to center diverse faces and voices to the table.

Our inaugural episode! Jin & Amanda talk to Terry Wildman, lead translator of the First Nations Version of the New Testament, and hopefully soon the whole Bible. Terry shares his journey from a musician and a worship leader to becoming a translator! Translation, according the Terry, is not so much an academic act in the isolation of an ivory tower, but a communal "dance" in the context of worship!