Book Description

If you've ever driven down the entire length of Aurora Blvd in Cubao (or any regular in-city route, for that matter), you would know how Jeepneys bring a whole new meaning to the word "disruptive." They snake through traffic at full throttle and screech to a full stop all while incessantly honking, cutting corners, and negotiating with passengers to scoot over and make room, so more passengers can board. Most private car owners (me included) will find jeepneys annoyingly frustrating. I am a church-worker, see, and I try to keep my cussing at a level minimum, but when I am sharing the road with jeepney drivers, all bets are off. I scream, and all hell breaks loose from my mouth. The object of irritation would be the Jeepney and its driver. The apparent lack of consideration for law-abiding motorists like me; the blatant disregard for traffic rules; and the thorough abandonment of all good manners and right conduct on the road. So it seems. You see, jeepneys ferry tired day-laborers, students, public school teachers, taho vendors, rank-and-file employees, fast food servers, strangers, and friends back to their homes after a very long day. The Jeepney (and its counterpart, the tricycle) is the only reliable means of transport in almost all major thoroughfares in the metro. Jeepney drivers are your salvation when it's monsoon season when you need to get from one end of the street to the other for just 8 Pesos. When you experience the jeepney by virtue of your road encounter from your airconditioned car with cherry bubble gum freshener and Bruno Mars on spotify, you will most likely hate jeepneys for everything that they are--annoying, frustrating, disrupting. But if you experience the jeepney as your everyday mode of transport, the rest of the bourgeois world is just one huge shitpile of things and people that make your life more difficult than it already is. Revelation Velunta's Jeepney Hermeneutics brings to the fore this contrast of locations. It surfaces a reading that, when done from inside a jeepney, could breathe a whole new truth into the text--any text--but more profoundly the Parables attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. In the era of allegory and standard interpretations and proper driving conduct and road manners, Velunta's Jeepney Hermeneutics is a necessary disruption to the ways in which we, as "faithful" Bible readers and "law-abiding" motorists capable of doing no wrong, conduct and view ourselves. Reading the Parables of Jesus inside a Jeepney is good news for everyone in the jeepney which is roughly 70% of the general population in the Philippines. It is bad news for those in the remaining 25% and an absolute horror story for those in the uppermost 5%. And if truth is a matter of statistics, the truth that is preached by Velunta, is indeed truest. Those who would feel insulted by these truths will realize, by the end of this book, that they are exactly that which is wrong in this world and they should--quite honestly--repent before a Jeepney runs them over.