Vespers and Slava

St Nicholas Church just before the beginning of Vespers
On Saturday evening we celebrated Vespers at the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johannesburg, followed by our family Slava.
Unfortunately our parish priest, Fr Athanasius Akunda, was not able to be present, as he bhad to attend a meeting in Nigeria, and his connecting flight [...]

Culltural rituals and globalisation: Hallowe’en and Slava

Eroticdreambattle – Not Paella: “In Leeds, the Muslim kids went trick-or-treating with witches’ hats over their hijabs. It was unspeakably cute.”
I once knew a couple of American kids in Namibia (now comfortably middle-aged) who were discussing what they should do about Hallowe’en. They realised that Hallowe’en was not big in Namibia. None of the other [...]

Miscellany: church photography, snoopers, writing, privatisation

This morning I had to take my son to the Pretoria Showgrounds on the other side of town to write an exam. To fill in the couple of hours while he was writing, I decided to visit an old friend in West Park. I couldn ‘t quite remember where he lived, so I drove around [...]

Visiting bishop

Bishop Milutin, of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Australia and New Zealand, visited St Thomas’s Church in Sunninghill, Johannesburg, for their patronal festival last weekend. Bishop Milutin has been Bishop of Australia for three years, and after visiting Serbia, returned to his diocese via Africa. It was his first visit to Africa, he said, and [...]

Emerging church in Russia

The Russian Orthodox Church’s emerging role – Telegraph:
In the 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet system, the Russian Church has been rebuilt from ruins inhabited by shuffling old women and somewhat eccentric zealots into the most powerful body on the post-Soviet stage.
No other Russian social institution has experienced such a rising from the [...]

Early Jamaican Orthodox priest in the USA

Tshepo Morongwa Chéry, who is doing research into the African Orthodox Church, and visited us a few weeks ago, tipped me off about this web site with information about an Orthodox priest in the USA 100 years ago who originally came from Jamaica. The article was published in 1913.
The African Times and Orient Review, [...]

Child “witches” in Congo

In recent years there have been disturbing reports about children being accused of witchcraft in Central and West Africa. There have been even more disturbing reports that some Christian groups are not only not part of the solution, they are part of the problem.
Now at last there comes some good news of some Christian groups [...]

Holy Places–Thin Places

Recently Bishop Seraphim Sigrist posted some pictures of Radonezh in Russia on his blog, and asked his readers to suggest what might be the spiritual heartland of their own country. Radonezh is where St Sergius of Radonezh established his monastery at the time that the Russians were resisting Tatar imperialism, and so it is of [...]

Tales from Dystopia II: Enemies of the State

A few years ago a shortlived South African newspaper, This Day, published a list of Enemies of the Apartheid State.
The South African archives had discovered and catalogued some of the files that the government kept on people they regarded as enemies of the state. This Day published the list in several successive issues, and I [...]

District 9 — science fiction as social satire

I’ve just been to see District 9, probably the best and most ambitious South African film of the year, if not of the decade.
I thought generally it was pretty good, and I wonder how it was received by audiences outside South Africa, since it had fairly heavy dollops of South African culture, and many of [...]