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 [...]

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 [...]

Visitors at Vespers

We had a couple of visitors at Vespers at St Nicholas Church in Brixton last Saturday evening — Professor Masango, who teaches pastoral care at the University of Pretoria, and his daughter Tshepo Morongwa Chéry. We went to coffee afterwards, and decided the most convenient place to go to from Brixton was Killarney Mall. Melville [...]

Funerals and inculturation

Today we had Nicholas Sibiya’s funeral at Mamelodi and as it was the first funeral of a baptised Orthodox Christian to be held there, it was probably unique for that place, and one of the challenges was the contrasting assumptions of the Orthodox service books and the cultural practices of Gauteng township funerals.
South Africa has [...]

Reading: The man in the moss

Man in the Moss: Crybbe by Phil Rickman

My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Phil Rickman’s books are difficult to find, and one buys them when one can. This was one of his earlier ones, which we hadn’t read. Many of his other books have characters that appear again, but this one is in a different [...]

Amahoro: modernity fights back

I came across this critique of the Amahoro gathering, parts of which I attended last week. I was going to say that it was an “interesting” critique, and then realised that I hadn’t found it interesting at all, but too much bother to read. Posting extracts of some of the things that were said [...]

Countercultural Christianity

I found the following blog widget, and tried it out for this blog:

Created by OnePlusYou – Free Online Dating
This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* abortion (5x)
* missionary (4x)
* death (2x)
* pain (1x)
‘Nuff said!

More on Amahoro

My previous post on the Amahoro Conference, Truth, reconciliation and smelly feet, covered the session on Tuesday afternoon where the former Minister of Law and Order of the apartheid regime, Adriaan Vlok, had his feet washed by a former member of the dreaded Koevoet.
After that we had supper, and had a very interesting discussion with [...]

Amahoro Gathering 8 June 2009

I left home at 6:00 am to fetch Hierodeacon Nektarius to travel to Hekpoort for the Amahoro Gathering, and got back about 11:15 pm, a long and quite tiring day, but definitely worth it.
There were about 250 people there, mostly from Africa, but from several other parts of the world as well, mostly young, and [...]

The difficulty of Orthodox evangelism

Here’s a very interesting account of Orthodox evangelism — “gossiping the gospel” — and some of the attendant difficulties. If people are interested in more, where do they go?
They seemed impressed, in the sense that it made sense and they wanted to know more.
And that’s the problem: where can they go to get this ‘more’? [...]