This Sunday at church I was struck by how fear/power language permeated everything. (I wrote recently on the fear/power cultural paradigm, and we’ve previously written on it referring to it as animism, and with reference to the prosperity gospel.) In the children’s program… great attention was given to scripture memorisation. Last week’s […]
In the last post I suggested that Tanzanians do not necessarily view hierarchy as inherently abusive, in contrast to how I and many westerners think. So if hierarchy is not abusive, what is? How do you define abuse? Here I try to process some of the factors involved in this […]
A well-known egalitarian scholar once told me that the reason Africans read hierarchical gender roles in the Bible is because they don’t have the theological scholarship that we do, so we need to go and educate them. I smiled politely because this guy was significantly older than me, and ironically wasn’t […]
One of the striking things about women in Tanzania for us as Aussies has been the number of women who work, and how this is largely uncontroversial. Tanzanian household structures provide for this. So does the cultural concept of the ‘strong woman‘. And the way they access cultural paradigms around […]
When we moved to Tanzania I was told that we would need house help. So Mama Velo did our cleaning. (I cooked. I enjoy the creativity of it, and it gives me some headspace – like how some people do their best thinking in the shower.) And she was great, and we kept […]
Elliot has started preschool at an English-medium school where there seems to be a whole lot of Swahili going on. We’re not sure of the exact balance or how much he’ll pick up of what. Since he started 2 or 3 weeks ago, we have been puzzling over the words […]
Have you seen this article doing the rounds? Aside from the assumptions that missions is (a) to unreached people groups and (b) that those unreached peoples are poor, Nik Ripkin raises some super important issues that can be considered beyond the immediate context he is addressing, which is persecuted Christians in […]
Meet Jesus at uni 