Christian mission and culture

Interesting comments on Christian mission and culture from Far Outliers:
My desire to avoid areas of strong Catholic Mission influence was rather misguided, because Christianity was ubiquitous in Papua New Guinea and an integral part of the social and cultural change I intended to study. Just a few years later, in 1980, the Pacific Council of [...]

You only have one life

You only have one life — therefore get world-class entertainment.
That was the message I heard on a TV ad the other day.
And Jonathan over at Thicket and Thorp observed:
I was driving on the interstate the other day when I noticed a big billboard for a church. Now, here in the American South religious oriented billboards [...]

How NOT to do mission

I came across this textbook example about how not to do mission on the Elizaphanian blog recently. If you want to see a compendium of missiological errors, it’s almost all here — arrogance, condescension, cultural insensitivity and rank injustice.
What saddened me especially was that this particular example, the St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust, claims [...]

Christian understandings of paganism and witchcraft

This is a rough and raw version of the paper I read last week at the conference of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa (ASRSA) in Durban. Several people have asked where they could read it, so I thought I would post this version here. One day I may polish it [...]

Gleanings from the Inklings

A Mule in the Chapter House reports on favourite scenes from the books of the Inklings, with commentary.
It seems a very interesting exercise, and something that might be interesting to do as a synchroblog, though I doubt whether I could find such interesting images to illustrate my choices.
One of the more interesting ones was this:
[...]

Orthodox megachurches

Orthopraxy writes:

I live near two Orthodox mega-churches. They’re even on the same side of town as the other mega-churches. And they actually work the same way. There are a gazillion programs for people 20-40, for teens, for feminists… you name it, there’ a committee or a program for it. I think they have well over [...]

Backtracking on secularisation

Father David MacGregor has linked together a number of reports in his Contact Online blog about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s views on introducing Sharia law into Britain, which has set a herd of cats among the pigeons. Here’s an example of what people have been saying Contact Online Weblog: Archbishop backtracks amid calls to resign
The [...]

Christianity and shamanism

Nic Paton has written a very interesting series of posts on Christianity and shamanism, which I am only beginning to catch up with now, since we were offline while most of it was being posted.
I’m not responding to it directly here, but I’m tossing together a few reflections on the topic, and some quotes. There [...]

Ethiopian Orthodox Church

Diliza Valisa (Fr Wolde Selassie) came to see us on Saturday, accompanied by Pascal Schmitz and Wolde Emmanuel Solontsi Sindiso. He gave me various documents and pictures relating to the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of South Africa. He explained how they had come to make contact with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church after [...]

Holy Foolishness Synchroblog

Here, as far as I can get it, is the list of links for this month’s synchroblog on holy fools.
I’ve posted my own contribution on my other blog at Notes from underground: Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed, and you’ll find the list of links at the bottom of that as well.
The [...]