Jessica Oya joined the PANA staff in fall of 2007. Welcome, Jessica!
Jessica says...
As a first-year MA student at PSR/GTU, I have found PANA's presence on PSR's campus to be incredibly refreshing. After having spent my undergraduate years at Scripps College, a member of the Claremont Colleges where we lacked any type of five-college resource center, coming to a school that provides support to their API students and members of the greater Berkeley/San Francisco area is a welcome change. In addition to my time at Scripps, I have also spent the last two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Swaziland, doing community HIV/AIDS education in a rural village. Living out in the rural area was a challenging experience, not because of the lack of amenities such as insulated houses, running water and electricity, but because of the feeling of detachment and lack of connection to an API community. Having had the opportunity to spend time with the PANA staff and the participants at the Capturing the Heart conference a few weekends ago, I am beginning to gain a sense of the API community within the Bay Area. Needless to say, it’s great to be in an environment where I feel supported and welcome!
I came to GTU/PSR with an interest in the dialogues surrounding science and religion (I did a double major in biology and religious studies as an undergraduate), about the effects colonization and transnational corporations have had on the developing world, bioethics, and Asian American theology. In my first semester at GTU/PSR I have been given the opportunity to touch on all of these issues and have begun to experiment with ideas and combine them into a theology that is uniquely my own. I am eagerly looking forward to the rest of my time here as I begin to get to know people both within the API community and within the GTU community.
Read a paper on Asian American Christian Theology by Jessica Oya.
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