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Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction

 
Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities.

It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topics. Questions raised throughout the text focus readers on relevant contemporary issues and encourage critical reflection and dialogue between student-teachers and teacher-students.
 

 
Reviews
“This is the book I wish had been assigned in my days as a young Christian college undergraduate student. The authors go beyond pointing out the hubris of those who think a New Testament introduction can somehow be politically objective or ideologically neutral. Instead, they show us how a ‘de-centering’ of Scripture–in all its messiness–can serve as a form of ‘resistance literature’ which opens up ways of thinking otherwise and of imagining new worlds altogether.” –Roberto Sirvent, Hope International University

“This exemplary volume represents refreshingly unchartered terrain in New Testament introductions, with conceptual and theoretical analyses that will help the reader understand why apprehending the noetic complexities of the politics of empire and power, gender, race, intersectionality, migration, postcolonial theory, and questions of hybridity, and subaltern agency, are thoroughly indispensable in interrogating early Christian origins, and in adjudicating the ever-evolving iterations and often contested implications of what this history means for critical pedagogies and practices of resistance, hope, and justice in our times.” –Clarice J. Martin, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York

“Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim offer a refreshing orientation to the New Testament that privileges marginalized perspectives, and deftly challenges many traditional assumptions about texts. Impressive in its scope and depth, the book masterfully explicates both historical-cultural contexts such as slavery and contemporary issues like migration. Anyone who reads this book will see the New Testament in a very different light. A much-needed addition to biblical scholarship.” –Raj Nadella, Columbia Theological Seminary
 
Mitzi J. Smith, M.A. (OSU), M.Div. (HUSD), Ph.D. (Harvard), Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Ashland Theological Seminary/Detroit. She is also an ordained minister and preacher. Her interests include, but are not limited to, Luke-Acts, Philemon, Christology, Womanist and African American biblical interpretation. Dr. Smith’s latest three books are: Womanist Sass and Talk Back, I Found God in Me and Insights from African American Interpretation. Her website is www.mitzijsmith.com

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