We’ve been discussing TB Joshua on and off for weeks, but thus far I’d mainly been listening and asking questions. They had obviously picked up that I was not enthusiastic about him, but I haven’t actually said why. But this week I decided to take the plunge, and what it […]
A while ago, I floated a theory about the emotional life of Tanzanians. It went something like this: the hierarchical nature of society in Tanzania means people do not get practice at identifying and expressing their emotions, because they are expected to repress them and obey those who are over […]
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 […]
My post office adventures are turning into a bit of a thing! This one is about our local post office, on campus at St John’s not the big one in town. Our campus post office is tiny, with just one worker, and the worker has changed again. First there was […]
We’ve already looked at Jesus as Creator (and therefore conqueror) but the question remains: if Jesus is so powerful, why doesn’t the name of Jesus ‘work’ or ‘win’ every time? Why do Tanzanians so often experience the spirits as more powerful than Jesus? The typical evangelical answer is that we […]
Christ has been presented as the answer to the questions a white man would ask, the solution to the needs that Western man would feel, the Saviour of the world of the European world-view, the object of the adoration and prayer of historic Christendom. But if Christ were to appear […]
As Tamie and I prepare to move to Tanzania, we’ve been trying to get a sense of the religious world of East Africa. ‘Animism’ — the world of tribe and tradition, of folk religion — is an ever-present background to religious life in Tanzania, whether Christian, Muslim or otherwise. One […]
Meet Jesus at uni 