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Short Bio

LIM Chin Ming Stephen sees himself as a Strait Settlement kid who was born in Malacca to diasporic Chinese parents and then moved back to their hometown in Penang before migrating to Singapore where he spent more than half his life there. Currently, he is a Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Ming Hua Theological College and is the author of Contextual Biblical Hermeneutics as Multicentric Dialogue: Towards a Singaporean Reading of Daniel (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Situated as a decolonial reader of the Bible, one of his greatest desires is to read the Bible from spaces that are regarded as unfamiliar and uncanny by the modern/colonial world system in the hope of bringing the centre into the margins. His experiments often revolve around reading the Bible with East and Southeast Asian literature and film that work with the banal lived experiences of minoritised and marginalized peoples, fantastical worlds where animals can sometimes be protagonists, and futurities through the medium of science fiction. 

He welcomes research students who are interested in contextual biblical hermeneutics, critical regionalism, reading the Bible in Asia as well as those who wish to read Bible with contemporary culture, postcolonial studies, decolonial thought, and Utopianism/Futurism.

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Publications

Select Publications

Book

Contextual Biblical Hermeneutics as Multicentric Dialogue: Towards a Singaporean Reading of Daniel. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2019. 

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

‘Southeast Asia as Method: Reading the Bible through Eclectic Regionalism’ in Multiracial Biblical Studies (Semeia Series) edited by Wongi Park (Atlanta: SBL Press, forthcoming).

‘Reading 1 and 2 Kings from the Causeway between Malaysia and Singapore’ co-authored with Wei Hsien Wan, in Multiracial Biblical Studies (Semeia Series) edited by Wongi Park (Atlanta: SBL Press, forthcoming).

‘When the Divine Meets Dust: Re-imag(in)ing Imago Dei with Cyborg Logic of Ghost in the Shell’ in Cyberpunk Theologies edited by Seong Won Park and Miguel Algranti (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).

“Celebrating Uselessness in an Age of Toxic Productivity: Jesus’s Parable of the Barren Fig Tree and Zhuangzi’s Story of the Useless Tree” in Haunting Questions of Liberation Theology edited by Jione Havea (London: SCM Press, forthcoming).

‘Does the Wind Speak? An Aeolian Listening to Ruach in Exodus 1–18 with Fairoz Ahmad’s Interpreter of Winds(2019)’ in Troubling (Public) Theologies: Spaces, Bodies, Technologies edited by Jione Havea (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2023).

‘White Woman’s Burden and the Bible during the British Occupation of Singapore’ in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism’ in Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Criticism edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

‘Ruth as Esperanza?: A Transtextual Reading of Ruth with Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore’ in Faith, Class and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context edited by Jin Young Choi and Joerg Rieger (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2020).

Undoing Chinese Privilege through Reading with the Other. Journal of Law and Social Sciences 7:1 (2018): 3-10. 

The Impe(/a)rative of Dialogue in Asian Hermeneutics within the Modern/Colonial World System: Renegotiating Biblical Pasts for Planetary Futures. Biblical Interpretation 25:4-5(2017): 663-678.

 

Select Paper Presentations

‘Between Utopianism and Futurism: Re-reading Utopic Aspirations in Chronicles with nor’s “End” through Indigenous Futurism’. Society of Asian Biblical Studies Conference, Hualien, Taiwan, 2024.

‘Dabbling in Robotic Futurities in the Torah and Today’s World: An Asian Reading of Fictive Futures with Biblical Pasts’. DARE Global Forum, Council for World Mission, Bangkok, Thailand, 2023.

‘Reading the Bible and Human Care Between Majoritarian Privilege and Minority Positionalities: Facing Migrant Construction Workers in a Clinic in Singapore’, SBL Annual Meeting, Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation, 2021.

‘Teaching in Context,’ Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars June Meeting, 2021.

‘Reading the Bible Other-wise in between East and West: A View from Southeast Asia,’ Public Lecture, Sheng Kong Hui Ming Hua Theological College, Hong Kong, 2020.

‘(Re-)Contextualising Contextual Methodologies from the Ground Up: Towards a Singaporeanisation of Asian Hermeneutics’, SBL Annual Meeting, Atlanta, US, 2015.

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