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 [...]

Anglicans and Orthodoxy

The news that the Roman Catholic Church has set up a new mechanism for receiving disaffected Anglicans has caused a bit of a flurry in the Christian blogosphere. The Orthodox have also been talking to disaffected Anglicans; recently Metropolitan Jonah, of the Orthodox Church in America, addressed a breakaway group, the Anglican Church of North [...]

Vanishing articles

The following missiological articles will be disappearing from the web on 26th October 2009. Read them while you have the chance.
Most of them were originally published in Missionalia, the journal of the Southern African Missiological Society (SAMS).

African Independent Churches – judgment through terminology? by Stephen Hayes
African “Jews” for Jesus – mission among the Lemba, by [...]

Ennui, entropy and apathy

Today is Blog Action Day
More than 7000 bloggers have registered to participate and thousands more will join in the next 24 hours. There’s already buzz growing across the blogosphere and on Twitter in anticipation, with updates from around the world every minute about the upcoming event.
If you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late.
We will [...]

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 [...]

Righteous anger

A couple of days ago one of my Pagan blogging friends wrote The Stroppy Rabbit:
It has long been observed that some Odinists have right-wing tendencies (though by no means all, as the Heathens against Hate campaign demonstrates). The other two Pagans described above may not be Odinists, however.
There is no place in Paganism for far [...]

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, [...]

Christianity, Hinduism and Maoism

Relations between Christians and Hindus appear to have been strained recently, as militant Hindus have accused Christians of making ungodly alliances with Maoists to weaken Hinduism. Dion Forster mentioned Christianity and Hinduism  in a comment on my previous post, and I’d no sooner read that than I came across the following (hat-tip to egregores): U.S. [...]

Inculturation, indigenisation, syncretism and cultural appropriation

Big words in the title, but those words are quite often used by missiologists and other students of religion to refer to one religion borrowing beliefs or practices from another. I recently wrote a blog post about the new fashion in some Christian circles for observing the Muslim fast of Ramadan (Notes from underground: A [...]