Book Review - Living Mission Interculturally

When we visited the spiritans in Houston they lent us this book, written by a fellow spiritan priest. I would certainly recommend!  Its a little dense, and written more on the side of sociology textbook than casual read, but it really has helped me think about and codify my own beliefs about multicultural living.

The book, as it is written, is aimed mostly at religious community members, but anyone seeking to like the marginal life of Jesus can find plenty to think about. The driving aim of the book is to better enable religious community members to blend the cultures of their constituent members into a new community. “Cultures” can be interpreted right down to the individual level; even if persons were raised in ostensibly similar environments, locales, religions, etc. each person has a unique lens for viewing the world formed by their experiences at a formative age. Any community, even if it is not an international one, must merge the cultures of its constituents to form a new, composite culture. With the addition or loss of any individual from the community the composite culture will change.  The community must evaluate, frequently, its values and how to best enact those values through culture.

I have found in my own experience that nothing so clarifies values a living and working among people who do not share them, or who express them in a culturally different way. Financially supporting parents, calling them frequently on the phone, and following them into the family business are all different cultural expressions of filial piety. None of them are right or wrong, per se, but different cultures will emphasize/de-emphasize one or another of them based on history, traditions, and other values. The book offers some tools for assessing why one might have a negative reaction to an action from another culture. What value does the behavior or action represent for the other culture? What value does it act against in your own culture? It also gives some tools for evaluating said behavior in light of the values of Jesus and the church. Does the behavior or action devalue the dignity of the human person in body or soul? How?

As Chris and I prepare to move to Vietnam we are excited to be exposed to an entirely different paradigm where we hope we can solidify our marriage on a bed of consciously enculturated shared values. I’m sure we will come back as different people, but I think we will be stronger for it. This book isn’t very long, but contains a lot of dense topics, and I look forward to being able to follow its trajectory of thought as I experience it for myself in Vietnam.