A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth The ‘word of thanks’ to the reader at the start of this mammoth novel jokes that you’ll sprain your wrists reading it. At 600,000 words — almost 1500 pages in soft cover — the length would be prohibitive for most people, but the problem for […]
Arthur and I have been working on a new project, launching soon, called Tanzania Snapshots. It’s a video library of us talking about some hot topics to do with Tanzania. It’s kind of scary for us because it feels like setting ourselves up as experts about Tanzania when we are […]
Before continuing with Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations, let’s dip into a different book, Subverting Global Myths (2009), and Vinoth Ramachandra’s chapter on postcolonialism. Ramachandra begins by making a case for decentred world history.* To characterise globalisation (good or bad) as a recent product of Western capitalism is to engage in top-down, […]
We in Tanzania have faith, but not power. People in Ulaya (the West) have power but not faith. But Luke says the good news is that God gives us faith and power. These are the intriguing words of Canon George Chiteto, one of the chaplains at St John’s University, as […]
Part of the narrative of modern-day Africa is that it is all changing so fast. Working at a university and living in a university town, we get to see some of that change. Expats who were in Dodoma 10 years ago tell me that they owned one of the few […]
I know this author a little so I’ve been especially looking forward to this one: Robert Heaney’s chapter in Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations is ‘Prospects and problems for evangelical postcolonialisms’. He’s asking: in what sense might evangelical and postcolonial go together? It’s a pretty academic chapter covering a lot of ground, but this is a key question. Heaney spends time defining both […]
After I told the story of Jephthah’s daughter in Songea, we split into groups to discuss five questions. They’re ones Arthur and I have used before in storytelling and we like them because anyone can answer them, no matter their theological background. The questions are: What do you like about […]
Meet Jesus at uni 