From time to time I read Jayson Georges’ blog Honorshame.com as a way of working my cultural anthropology skills. We have often used the three cultural paradigms – guilt, shame and fear – in order to unpack differences between Tanzania and Australia, and the way theology comes to bear on […]
Tanzanians draw their gender roles and distinctions in all kinds of different places to us in Australia. They call themselves a patriarchal society, but women have freedom in places where they don’t in the west. So when our friend Isaac got married to Jema on the weekend, there was no […]
Last time we looked at a tool widely used in Australia, and the next of our ‘iCatechisms’ has the same basic approach — but with a few big tweaks. It’s dubbed ‘the big story’ and has been developed by James Choung, who is currently the national director of evangelism for […]
Like so much of Rob Bell’s work, What We Talk About When We Talk About God is really a sort of sermon: accessible, full of anecdotes, and with a clear persuasive thrust. The content, too, is what we might have expected. When We Talk About God shows Bell drawing on his […]
Part 1 If Quiet Time — ‘personal Bible reading’ — is working for you, that’s fabulous. Don’t give it up. If it’s a constant struggle, there might be a bunch of reasons for that. But there comes a point when you can’t just pin it all on laziness. It might […]
Against the backdrop of the medieval Scottish highlands, Brave presents wild-haired, free-spirited Merida. She is Pixar’s first female protagonist and, perhaps more significantly, Disney’s first heroine without a romantic connection by the end of the film. In our world where little girls’ futures are often reduced to finding the right […]
Meet Jesus at uni 