Uni Podcast 3: Rosemary Dewerse, Breaking the Second Calabash by Listening to Silenced Voices

An upbeat conversation between two voices about Rosemary Dewerse, “Breaking the Second Calabash by Listening to Silenced Voices”, in Breaking Calabashes: Becoming an Intercultural Community (Adelaide: MediaCom Education, 2013), 43-80. Week 10 reading for Faith in a Fractured World, paired in class with the ladder of participation. About 25 minutes.

Covered: who Dewerse is and the book as a rewritten PhD; the Ngarrindjeri and the Coorong; the second calabash, “my voice is most worthy”, and power as the authority to speak; the women in the doorway; three forms of erasure (paraphrase, names, denying history) and “present but invisible”; multicultural versus intercultural, Ruth and Naomi; the six practices (relationship and manaakitanga, mission-in-reverse and Jim Page, Eric Law’s Mutual Invitation Method and the third-day hoe, question-asking leadership as quilter and midwife, listening beyond speech, learning another language); Letty Russell’s “who is missing, whose voice is not heard”; a critique of genre, agency, Ruth, generalisation; and what it means for a liturgy of gender affirmation and renaming.

Sources

• Rosemary Dewerse, staff profile, University of Divinity
• bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1990)
• Eric H. F. Law, The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community (Chalice Press, 1993)
• Claude Marie Barbour, “Seeking Justice and Shalom in the City”, International Review of Mission 73, no. 291 (1984)
• Russell Bishop and Mere Berryman, Culture Speaks: Cultural Relationships and Classroom Learning (Huia, 2006)
• Charles R. Foster and Theodore Brelsford, We Are the Church Together: Cultural Diversity in Congregational Life (Trinity Press International, 1996)
• Letty M. Russell, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference (Westminster John Knox, 2009)
• Tracy Spencer, “White Lives in a Black Community: The Lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes in the Adnyamathanha Community” (PhD thesis, Flinders University, 2011)