The South African Police now seem to be playing a game of “blame the victim” was we are seeing scenes that we have not seen since apartheid ended in 1994.The government has watched as Zimbabwe turns into a fascist dictatorship and hundreds of thousands of refugees have poured into South Africa. The SA government has [...]
Entries from January 2008
31 January 2008
Page 123
I haven’t been tagged with a meme for ages. I’ve been tagged with this one before, but not ever on this blog. David has tagged me with this:
The Rules:-
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.
The book nearest to [...]
31 January 2008
Christianity and shamanism
Nic Paton has written a very interesting series of posts on Christianity and shamanism, which I am only beginning to catch up with now, since we were offline while most of it was being posted.
I’m not responding to it directly here, but I’m tossing together a few reflections on the topic, and some quotes. There [...]
30 January 2008
God, moral judgement and the death penalty
In an article on Religion and the death penalty Walter Berns argues that religion and the death penalty are inextricably linked, and suggests that you can’t have one without the other.
Dr Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the USA, summarises the article as follows:
In a fascinating new look at capital punishment, [...]
29 January 2008
Christianophobia and secularism in Europe
Back in the secular sixties an American theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote a book called The secular city, in which he made an important distinction between secularisation and secularism. Secularisation is the process by which certain tasks and functions are taken over by secular agencies.
For example, in England it was the State that made it [...]
29 January 2008
St Theophan the Recluse on prayer
A prayer rule for one who is on the path of a God-pleasing
life.
You ask about a prayer rule. Yes, it is good to have a prayer rule on account of our weakness so that on the one hand we do not give in to laziness, and on the other hand we restrain our enthusiasm to [...]
28 January 2008
Ethiopian Orthodox Church
Diliza Valisa (Fr Wolde Selassie) came to see us on Saturday, accompanied by Pascal Schmitz and Wolde Emmanuel Solontsi Sindiso. He gave me various documents and pictures relating to the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of South Africa. He explained how they had come to make contact with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church after [...]
23 January 2008
Rethinking church
You can stay as you are for the rest of your life, or you can change to Mainstay.
So ran an advertising slogan I used to hear in my youth. Mainstay was a brand of cane spirit. I don’t know if they still sell it even, I haven’t heard the ad for several years.
But the phrase [...]
21 January 2008
SAFCEI blog
I recently started a blog on behalf of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI). The blog is simply called SAFCEI, and will contain news on environmental issues that may be of interest to Southern African faith communities, or news of environmental action by Southern African faith communities.
All pretty straighforward, so all [...]
21 January 2008
What were you looking for again?
I’ve sometimes been amused by the search tearms that bring people to my blog, as recorded in the WordPress stats, and have sometimes commented on it in the past.
Here, for example, are the terms people entered in to search engines yesterday to find this blog.
Yesterday
Search
Views
jesus
8
what to do on sunday
7
jesus christ
3
Jesus Christ
3
sunday bored
2
stuff to do on [...]
