Abstract
Before I make my remarks, I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers of this panel for inviting me to participate in this discussion. Stony the Road We Trod is a landmark volume, an essay collection of rigorous scholarship, laying out the issues in African American Biblical Hermeneutics clearly, cogently, and prophetically. It is a great honor to read and review this book. It certainly has opened my Asian-American eyes to the subtle ways in which racism creeps into our biblical interpretation. Furthermore, on a practical level it has helped me in my teaching just three weeks ago. I successfully used Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “AnteBellum Sermon,” as analyzed by David Shannon, in a discussion to introduce my students to prophecy. My students loved this poem and were able to understand the nature of orality, the contextualization of ancient traditions for the present, the prophetic challenge to an unjust society, among other things, by thoroughly examining it.