CHICAGO, IL (August 31, 2015) — The Covenant Quarterly, ministerial journal of the Covenant published by Covenant Publications through North Park Theological Seminary, is now online and available to all. The theme of the inaugural digital issue is reading the Bible interculturally.

The issue includes contributions from Max Lee, Nilwona Nowlin, Erik Borggren, and Bruce Fields.

Visit the Quarterly website to read articles and to register as a reader to receive notifications when new issues are published.

Additional dialogue takes place on the journal’s companion site, Forum: Dialoging with the Covenant Quarterly.

In her introduction to the most recent issue, editor Hauna Ondrey writes, “If an underlying contention runs through the May 2015 issue of the Covenant Quarterly, it is this: only at great cost does the church say ‘I don’t need you’ to the particular ethnic communities that comprise its very body. The claim of both Max Lee and Bruce Fields is that the North American church desperately needs to see its need for the scriptural interpretations of minority Christian communities and biblical scholars; the two additional articles provide intercultural readings that further support this claim.”

On the Forum site, Dominique Gilliard, who is on staff at New Hope Covenant Church in Oakland, California, and serves on the board of directors for the Christian Community Development Association, praises part of Fields’s article, “The One and the Many: What Can Be Learned from a Black Hermeneutic,” for stressing the importance of contextualized scholarship. But Gilliard also expresses several concerns, including a critique of some wording that he says contributes to a persistent negative stereotype and hinders contextualized theology.

“I was surprised Fields used the phrase ‘black on black crime’ since statistics reveal that all races are overwhelmingly more prone to commit intraracial crimes,” Gilliard writes. “The fact that we routinely say ‘black on black crime’ and not ‘white on white crime’ or ‘Asian on Asian crime’ reflects the correlation between blackness and criminality embedded deep within our nation’s psyche. Employing this phrase only serves to reify and legitimate this correlation. When ghettoized, ‘black on black crime’ is propaganda, a political talking point.”

To contribute your own voice to the conversation, click here.