March 2023 – Drew Theological Faculty‘s Minjung Noh, assistant professor of transnational Christianity and gender research, joined us for our Deal with College collection, the place we spotlight the various accomplishments, analysis, and scholarship of Drew’s unbelievable college members.
We sat down with Noh, who can also be a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, to debate her expertise educating in Drew’s Partnership for Faith and Training in Prisons Program (PREP) program at East Jersey State Jail, and demystifying archival work in her Historical past of Christianity in Korea course.
How has the relaunch of Drew’s PREP program been impactful for each inside and out of doors college students—and for your self?
By way of the mentorship of Dr. Traci West [James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Ethics and African American Studies], I started educating at East Jersey State Jail in spring 2023. It’s a grasp’s stage course on Engaged Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, and the affect of introducing a non-western spiritual custom and deciphering it to college students’ contexts have already been fruitful.
For out of doors college students who’re within the Theological Faculty’s Grasp of Divinity program, it is a crucial a part of their curriculum to have interfaith competency and demanding evaluation of spiritual variety within the modern international society. As well as, most of the outdoors college students from Drew are worldwide college students who’ve begun to study in regards to the legal justice system and restorative justice within the U.S. They’re offering distinctive international views in discussions and actually increasing their horizon of thought within the PREP program.
For the within college students, seeing the parallels and divergences of the Buddhist and Christian interpretation of struggling, ethics, and path to liberation challenges their earlier assumptions of faith and its relationship to restorative justice. For instance, it fosters resilient and out-of-the-box pondering for the scholars who search to handle social points after we focus on the Buddhist response to the Vietnam Struggle, the atrocity of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and up to date Black Lives Matter motion within the U.S. For myself, as a global girl scholar of Korean origin, I’m stepping out of my consolation zone and difficult myself as an educator. I’ve actively used educational expertise in lecture rooms, however the PREP educating depends solely on the normal mode of educating: blackboard, handwritten notes, books, and the discussions. I’m pleasantly stunned on the truth the tech-free lecture rooms are efficient and supply extra centered means to realize the training objectives. The within and out of doors college students, I discover, all have a real thirst for the mental problem and pursuit of social and restorative justice, which introduced me the pure pleasure of educating.
You interact Drew’s United Methodist Archives and Historical past Heart to make archival sources accessible to your college students. How does this inform your educating?
My Historical past of Christianity in Korea course can’t be separated from the historical past of Drew Theological Faculty and United Methodist Archives. That is due to the primary Methodist missionary to Korea, Henry Appenzeller. He was a Drew graduate and had an important affect on Korean Methodist historical past since he arrived in Korea in 1886. The vast majority of college students in my class are Korean or Korean Individuals who’ve direct reference to the American Methodist missionaries or part of the Korean diaspora embedded within the transnational community of Korean Christianity.
From this background, the scholars have already got numerous related tales to inform in regards to the historical past of Korean Christianity. I’m offering them entry to historic information by means of studying historiography and the archival work, and introducing digital expertise (Omeka). With these instruments of their arms, I ask them to hunt solutions to a selected query: how will we narrate the historical past of Christianity in Korea in accessible, related, and significant methods for the Drew neighborhood, the general public, the church, and ourselves? I count on them to be public historians of Korean Christianity, which has been shaping and informing the U.S.-Korea relations, transnational cultural historical past, and the Korean diaspora because the early twentieth century. This objective begins from a small and real looking exercise, which we’re engaged on proper now.
Not too long ago, college students and I visited Drew’s United Methodist Archives. With the assistance of our archivist, Alex Parrish, college students selected a single artifact associated to Korean Christian historical past. They may establish the context, narrate the journey of the artifact, and discover the implication of the artifact. This small, manageable, and materiality-oriented project is meant to demystify archival work and strategy of writing historiography, in order that they’ll really feel rather more snug producing the ultimate net storytelling exhibition on the finish of the semester.
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