{"id":36682,"date":"2024-03-14T17:36:01","date_gmt":"2024-03-15T00:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36682"},"modified":"2024-03-14T17:36:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T00:36:01","slug":"perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Life in the Russian River Valley has been an eye-opening experience. Our summertime tourist hotspot becomes a deadly menace in the midst of winter storms. Even the small creek on my property can quickly evolve into a dangerous torrent. We do not take lightly the threat of flooding or falling branches. I had no idea what \u201cRainy Season\u201d meant prior to moving here. I used to live in Southern California \u2013 rain was a myth! The ebb and flow of the seasons here have helped to elucidate the passage in Joshua 3:15a for me, \u201cIt was the harvest season, and the Jordan was overflowing its banks.\u201d It is the beginning of the story where the Israelites enter the Promised Land.<\/p>\n

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(images of my creek during flood season and just a few months prior at the end of the summer)<\/p>\n

I have been to Israel and stood in the Jordan River. When I went, it was not harvest season. The river did not overflow the banks. I had a hard time imaging why it would be dangerous and hard to cross this river. Where was the need for a miracle of God to make it across? After living through flood season for three years and seeing the changes in the river, I get it. I now have a better understanding of what it looked like for the Israelites and why it took a miracle for them to cross at that time.<\/p>\n

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What, you may ask, does this have to do with Nigel Biggar\u2019s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning<\/em>? Perspective. How we perceive the world impacts how we view the past. Biggar writes,<\/p>\n

We cannot help but judge the past by our present ethics. We can make sure, however, that our present ethics are informed by a sensitivity to human limits and frailty and by a historical imagination that enables us to enter sympathetically into the moral constraints and demands of circumstances very different from our own.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Just as, prior to living on the river, I did not understand what flood season looks like, we have a limited understanding of life during the era of colonialization. We can look at it and say, \u201cthat is wrong,\u201d but we do so with a limited perspective. Our view is marred by what we do and do not know. In the same respect, the actions of the British Empire were also marred. They did not know that they would bring terrible diseases to indigenous populations nor did they view slavery as morally reprehensible.<\/p>\n

We have the luxury of looking at the actions of the British Empire with hindsight vision. We can look back and judge the way they did things without living in the reality of the times. In a literary review of Biggar\u2019s book, Jonathan Sumption writes, \u201cThere are few notions more pious or conventional than that empires are wicked and that the British Empire was unutterably and irredeemably so.\u201d[ii]<\/a> He further adds, \u201cBiggar\u2019s point is that it falsifies history to collect together everything bad about an institution and serve it up as if it were the whole.\u201d[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Biggar expresses the intent of his book in saying, \u201cWhat I have written is not a history of the British Empire but a moral assessment of it.\u201d[iv]<\/a> This book is a means of looking at the history of Colonialism from the balcony of perspective. As Sumption puts it, \u201cDepending on one\u2019s values, one can read\u00a0Colonialism<\/em>\u00a0and conclude that the British Empire was on balance a very good thing or a very bad thing. But one cannot read it and plausibly suggest that there is nothing to balance at all.\u201d[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

If we judge the history of Colonialism from our twenty-first century perspective, what does that say about us? Additionally, how will future scholars judge the actions of our time?<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning<\/em>. (London: William Collins, 2023).<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Jonathan Sumption, \u201cCruel Britannia?\u201d (February 2023). Literary Review.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning<\/em>. (London: William Collins, 2023).<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning<\/em>. (London: William Collins, 2023).<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Jonathan Sumption, \u201cCruel Britannia?\u201d (February 2023). Literary Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life in the Russian River Valley has been an eye-opening experience. Our summertime tourist hotspot becomes a deadly menace in the midst of winter storms. Even the small creek on my property can quickly evolve into a dangerous torrent. We do not take lightly the threat of flooding or falling branches. I had no idea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1300,3111],"class_list":["post-36682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-colonialism","tag-nigel-biggar","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36688,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36682\/revisions\/36688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}