Breaking the Glass Box : A Korean Woman?s Experiences of Conscientization and Spiritual Formation

Breaking the Glass Box includes spiritual formation process for liberation from gender oppression through multiple awareness practices of conflicts in han-based Korean culture of society and church. The metaphor has multiple liberation process: "invisible glass box," "visible glass box," "breaking the glass box," and "sticky rice." This liberation process includes consicentization, consciousness-raising, and a heightened cultural awareness in discerning the reasons of interpersonal conflicts in Korean socio-cultural contexts. By exploring the multi-faceted han-jeong dynamics with Feminist theology and Asian Feminism, the important aspects of re-imaging the self and God as spiritual formation have been examined with contemplative practices of Internal Family System (IFS) and self-compassion to create the healthy jeong-filled solidarity group. The "sticky rice" is a new cultural paradigm for Korean women's jeong-filled hospitality. The broken pieces of the glass box will be transformed into the grains of rice by the positive jeong-filled hospitality of cooking sticky rice. In the solidarity group of jeong-filled hospitality, represented by rice ready to cook a serving of delicious sticky rice, people can enjoy the fellowship of healing, forgiving, and reconciling of the sticky rice. These images are intended to promote a healthy community of ministry and spirituality for Korean women.

JungJa Joy Yu is a feminist scholar and minister who graduated from Sogang University (Life Science, 1993), Fuller Theological Seminary (MDiv, 2008), and Claremont School of Theology (MA, 2013). She has been involved in various multicultural ministries in Korea, the United States, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Morocco, Spain, and East Malaysia through her local and international outreaches. She currently pursues both her PhD program and her call as a pastor.

Rosemary Radford Ruether earned her MA and PhD at Claremont Graduate University in 1960 and 1965. She has taught at the Howard University School of Religion in Washington, DC; at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; and presently at the Claremont School of Theology and Graduate University. She is author or editor of forty-seven books.