Respacing the Sacred: Hope among the Diasporic Communities in their Exilic Journey - Man-Hei Yip

Summary:

This project aims to establish the voice of the diasporic communities as a theological method. The term, voice, refers to the experience including the agency of the experiencer; establishing the voice of the diasporic communities as a theological starting point means to counter what is made normative in theological construction. That tends to prioritize doctrines and dogmas as the way to know God. Through engaging psychological research, this theological method offers a transdisciplinary approach to theological explorations on hope and its relations to our way of knowing and living.

In this project, I will focus on the hope of the Hongkongers living in the diaspora who continue their struggle for liberation after the 2019 pro-democracy movement. No one can speak for the diasporic communities that are deterritorialized and traumatized; and yet, looking through and beyond these fragments, the project will show how these people realize who they are upon their encounter with the divine. The question of this project: “How does giving attention to voices of the diasporic community change both epistemology and eschatology?” attempts to reimagine a theological space that connects the materiality of experiential particularity to the spiritual.

A project of such nature is needed in our current contexts where thousands of millions of people are on the move, displaced, and in exile. Their experience will tell us the role of hope that plays in circumstances where human rights and dignity are denied and distorted. Furthermore, challenges and joys arisen from their exilic journey will widen the scope of understanding Christian hope as an apocalyptic event and how that empowers these diasporic communities to find meaning and new directions in their life situations.

As principal investigator of this project, I will collect data and stories from the diasporic community of Hongkongers in the United Kingdom through conducting interviews and surveys. These data and stories, along with psychology literature are important resources for the task of theological imagination and meanwhile, reflection on these materials can well connect with the program’s theme, i.e. how humans conceive of and think divine realities.

In terms of the outputs of this project, I will produce an article using the data and stories I collected to open a conversation of hope among theologians and church leaders. I will publish the article in a theology journal and eventually, the article will become a chapter of a book. The book is about diaspora theology, which will touch on issues about what it means to be human, one of the core questions for theological anthropology. I will also offer a course on diaspora theology.

This project will shift our perception of diaspora from seeing them as an ethnic enclave that is inward-looking to a source of knowledge that widens our worldview and informs our ethical obligations to one another. In other words, a deeper inquiry into the hope of diasporic communities will expand our understanding of the human condition that will further give insights into perceiving divine realities in challenging situations.