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 [...]

Arthur or Martha?

The controversy over the sex of athlete Caster Semenya has revealed that her sex is not the only thing in doubt.
Some journalists have written as though what is in doubt is her gender. But from reported accounts from her parents her gender is fairly masculine. As a child she was a tom-boy, played with boys, [...]

Musical genius

I didn’t intend to blog about the death of Michael Jackson, I really didn’t. After all, a zillion other people are probably blogging about him today — why should I add to the cacophony?
But then there was this dude on the TV, saying that Michael Jackson was the greatest musical genius of the 20th century. [...]

Human sexuality — bridging the gap

My post today is part of a larger initiative of more than 50 bloggers all sharing their thoughts on how to ‘bridge the gap’. You can check out the other links at www.btgproject.blogspot.com.
I’m still wondering why I’m participating in this synchroblog, since I don’t really have anthing coherent to say, but since I have [...]

Culture and death

My post about gated communities and culture has had a rather bizzarre spin-off that has got me thinking about the issue of death and culture. There was some discussion on the question of gated communities and Christian mission in one forum where I had mentioend it, in the course of which someone remarked
I’m not sure [...]

Gadarene swine flu

Yesterday while I was doing some routine tasks on my computer I had the TV news running in the background. Sky News had nothing but swine flu. As far as they were concerned, nothing else was happening in the world. I switched to CNN, and found much the same thing, though they had some reporing [...]

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 [...]

Death of “Clash of Civilizations” theorist

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist best known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died Wednesday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.

Mr. Huntington argued that in a post-cold-war world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nations, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.
He identified [...]

Moral equivalence: war and abortion

Excellent post on the topic of the moral equivalence of war and abortion here. I doubt that it will do much to convince those who regard those who have moral scruples about abortion as “fetus fetishists”, nor those who seek to convince us it is the supreme, if not the only issue to be taken [...]

How racist are you?

Ryland Fisher at Thought Leader comments on the response to his recent comments on black and white racism:
The response to my last blog on black racists proves what I have known for a long time: South Africans are still heavily divided along racial grounds and they find it difficult to have a discussion on the [...]