Religion in China

clipped from www.atimes.com

In China, it is now trendy to wear a cross, hanging from a small
chain at the neck and fully exposed on the chest. The cross might be made of
wood, metal or, even, silver or gold or with precious stones. However, the
cross is not always worn for the sake of fashion. While it may [...]

Orthodoxy — a way of life?

I joined an Orthodox discussion forum recently, and got involved in a bizarre discussion full of strange non-sequiturs.
Someone posted an article (written by someone else) about Islam, which began by saying, “Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In it’s fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life.”.
I pointed [...]

The securocrat’s guide to literary criticism

A couple of years ago I read the secret reports the Security Police had sent about me to the Minister of Justice, and recently a friend let me have copies of his, which he had scanned to PDF files. The overall impression one gets from reading them is the banality of evil. Occasionally there are [...]

Churches suffering from “spiritual Alzheimers”

Is it just the interesting expression that makes me want to blog about this? It’s certainly not the first time the phrase “spiritual Alzheimer’s” has been used, but it remains a vivid expression nonetheless.

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk

Liberal churches that have abandoned traditional teachings on homosexuality are suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, a senior figure in the Vatican [...]

What brings people to this blog?

Every so often I have a look at the statistics to see what people are looking for when they come to this blog, and today I thought I’d look at the most used search phrases ever since this blog started.
I wonder how many found what they were looking for. I hope that who entered the [...]

Sybnchroblog on God’s politics

This month’s synchroblog is on God’s politics, and I’ve writtn my contribution on my other blog at Notes from underground: God’s politics – synchroblog.
Here’s the full list of contributors:
Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Lainie Petersen at Headspace
Jonathan Brink enters The Political Fray
Adam Gonnerman explains The Living Christ’s Present Reign
Sonja Andrews at Calacirian
Mike Bursell [...]

Eucharistic theology and witchcraft

Elizaphanian has a good post on Western Eucharistic theology (and media ignorance of religion), in which he says
For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, the ‘corpus verum’, the body that could be touched and handled with reverence, referred to the church, ie the community of the baptised. So, your neighbour in the community [...]

Tshwane bloggers meet

Joe Reed, Cori, Kevin, Ronald van den Bergh, Cobus van Wyngaard, Roger, Steve and Chris got together at Greenfields cafe in Hatfield this morning.
Cobus van Wyngaard (left) is a theologicial student at the University of Pretoria (Tuks). He’s doing a mini-dissertation on David Bosch as a public theologian, and has a wiki page to discuss [...]

When I was a child

We’ve been having an interesting discussion on the alt.religion.christian.east-orthodox discussion forum on how our perception of the Christian faith has been shaped by our upbringing and reading.
My father was an atheist and my mother was an agnostic, and so we were not a churchgoing family when I was growing up. The first time I ever [...]

Rants in blog comments

When are blog comments spam?
I’m not talking about the ads for limos or products I’ve never heard of. In the case of WordPress those are painlessly removed by Akismet (over 20000 of them in the 18 months this blog has been in existence), which I never see unless I deliberately go to look for them.
But [...]