Planning a teaching week

This morning I went to Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, to help the local parish plan for a teaching week in the school holidays in June/July. We had originally thought we might be helped in this by a mission team from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC) in the USA, but that fell through, we we [...]

What I really need… according to Google

He didn’t tag me, but Alan Knox writes about an interesting meme on his blog The Assembling of the Church:
This is a very interesting meme, proving that Google truly is taking over the world, since Google is now taking the place of the Magic 8-Ball.
Here are the rules:
Google your full first name (not your nickname) [...]

Can Dandala COPE?

According to the Sunday Independent the appearance of Methodist church leader Mvume Dandala at the top of the election list of the Congrese of the People party (COPE) is causing a rift in the new party.
Sunday Independent:
Shilowa, who addressed a rally in Soweto yesterday, said: ‘(Dandala’s nomination) is a view of the organisation. It has [...]

Philosophy and the politics of abortion

One of the things that concerns me is the propensity of some Christians to believe and act on urban legends and this came up in a discussion about eugenics in Fr Gregory Jensen’s blog Koinonia: Eugenics Are Now On the Table.
Fr Gregory referred to an article by Gary Graham, Flashpoint! A Woman’s Right To Choose, [...]

Don’t send me messages on Facebook!

Don’t send me messages on Facebook — use e-mail instead.
E-mail is simpler, better, faster, as one of our banks used to say. Facebook is like the bank now, inspired, motivated, involved — very involved.
This morning I received an message from a friend about a Facebook discussion on darkie English. I’m always interested in questions of [...]

Ministries in the Church

When we had visitors at St Nicholas Orthodox Church last week, some were puzzled by the different ministers in the church, and this post is an attempt to explain them, especially for the benefit of Protestant visitors and others who may be wondering.
This is not intended for the instruction of the Orthodox, since I will [...]

Valentine’s Day

For the last couple of weeks there have been an increasing number of blog posts about Valentine’s Day.
As with Hallowe’en and many other commemorations, however, the Orthodox observance of St Valentine falls on a different day to that of the West.
In the Orthodox calendar the following are the main commemorations today:
Saturday 14th February 2009
* Tone [...]

Two years old today

Khanya blog is two years old today.
It began as a kind of experiment, when many of my blogging friends were moving from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger had recently been “upgraded”, which meant that lots of bells and whistles were being added, but many of the regular features no longer worked. As Blogger seemed to be [...]

Brains and belief

A recent article in the New Scientist suggests that our brains create God. Born believers: How your brain creates God – science-in-society – 04 February 2009 – New Scientist:
So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work where does that leave god All the researchers involved stress that none of [...]

Socialism — what is it?

Like many other political words, “socialism” is tossed around loosely, by many people who have only a very vague idea of what it means.
Hillaire Belloc does a good job of clarifying things in The ChesterBelloc Mandate: An Examination of Socialism Part I:
A Socialistic State need be neither more democratic nor less democratic than the present [...]