New Book: Embracing the Other

Tags

Eerdmans, grace ji-sun kim, Holy Spirit, justice, pneumatology, Prophetic Christianity Series, reconciliation, Spirit God

Embracing the Other: The Transformative Spirit of Love will be released this Fall 2015 by Eerdmans.

It is book for the Prophetic Christianity Series. Co-editors Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinda Elizabeth Berry.

Book Description:

We live in a time of great racial strife and global conflict. How do we work toward healing, reconciliation, and justice among all people, regardless of race or gender? In Embracing the Other Grace Ji-Sun Kim argues that it is possible only through God’s Spirit.

Working from a feminist Asian perspective, Kim develops a new constructive global pneumatology that works toward gender and racial-ethnic justice. Drawing on the concept of spirit breath in Asian and indigenous cultures, she reimagines the divine as “Spirit God” who is restoring shalom in the world. This “Spirit God” concept, Kim says, provides a holistic understanding of both God and humans that extends beyond skin color, culture, religion, or power within society. Through the power of Spirit God our brokenness is healed and we can truly love and embrace the Other.

Endorsements:

Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s book Embracing the Other represents a bold, original and insightful challenge to prophetically confront the sins of racism and sexism through the life-giving power of the Spirit. This book is an important Korean-American contribution to the spiritual revitalization of North American churches and the struggles against everyday racism and sexism. I highly recommend it.- Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Harvard Divinity School

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A prolific and rising Asian American feminist theologian, Grace Ji-Sun Kim has written another exciting book from the perspective of Asian American women suffering multiple oppressions from both the white American culture and their own Asian traditions. A compelling blend of part biography, part sociology, part anthropology, part political economy, and part theology, it presents, in the last two chapters, a challenging reconstruction of the doctrine of God as Spirit who as erotic power vitalizes, connects, heals, liberates, and reconciles all things and leads them into the perichoretic communion of the triune God. A very readable liberation theology for Asian American women, Embracing the Other deserves serious hearing from many, especially from white feminist theologians and Asian male theologians most likely to ignore their plight. Anselm K. Min Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Grace Ji-Sun Kim continues to offer us insightful and original work that makes a difference in both the church and the academy, a rare accomplishment in the scholarly world. This books shows the growing impact of her fresh voice — prophetic, priestly, and practical. From the particularity of multiple women’s experiences, Embracing the Other brings us in with love, urges us to see ourselves as we are, and challenges us to work with the Spirit into new community and new individuals.
Dwight N. Hopkins, author of Being Human: race, culture, and religion

In Embracing the Other Kim constructs a theology of Spirit-Chi of love to liberate, empower, and transform the Other, envisioning the postcolonial reality of human liberation, justice, and equality regardless of one’s skin color, culture, religion, and power. The “Spirit of God” she adopts here is a radical affirmation of all colonized, marginalized others. This significant, must-read book offers a revitalizing Christian theology of the Spirit in and for our highly racialized and genderized world.” Namsoon Kang, Brite Divinity School

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Grace Ji-Sun Kim is an Associate Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. She is the author of Embracing the Other (forthcoming); Here I Am; Christian Doctrines for Global Gender Justice co-edited with Jenny Daggers; Theological Reflections on “Gangnam Style” co-written with Joseph Cheah; Reimagining with Christian Doctrines co-edited with Jenny Daggers; Contemplations from the Heart; Colonialism, Han and the Transformative Spirit; The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other; and The Grace of Sophia. She is a co-editor with Dr. Joseph Cheah for the Palgrave Macmillan Book Series, “Asian Christianity in Diaspora”.