I like the way Christianity lingers in the December experience of every Australian. I’d be really sad to see it go. But I do know that it is only on the periphery for many people… It would be so much more satisfying if the deeper meaning of Christmas could surface […]
Even though I’ve got the name of the great defender of Britain, I’m not English, or British. I once heard that I have some Scottish ancestry. My parents used to play Enya and ‘A Celtic Heartbeat Christmas’, so does that make me Irish? Anyway, I’m still drawn to the songs […]
Will it be a biblical name? It’s a question Tamie and I were often asked in the lead up to the birth of our two children. As Christians, we treasure the Bible as our story and its people as our people. Yet as white Aussies, our points of connection with […]
I love alternate histories and alternate maps! (My favourite world map is the dymaxion map; check out this rendition.) Here’s an alternate Africa called Alkebu-lan 1260 AH by Nikolaj Cyon (full-size version). It’s set in 1844, on the eve of Europe’s Scramble for Africa, but in a world in which Europe […]
‘Tracing the metanarrative of colonialism and its legacy’ is one of the shortest and sharpest chapters in Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations. Teri Merrick, a professor of philosophy at Azusa Pacific University, argues that Kant and Hegel’s version of how we know things sets up Western modern science as the arbitrator of truth. She writes, ‘This places an […]
Let’s return to Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations and the chapter by Victor Ifeanyi Ezigbo and Reggie L Williams, ‘Converting a colonialist Christ: toward an African postcolonial Christology’. Ezigbo and Williams begin by pointing to the African theological quest to reimagine Jesus’ identity and significance for today. It might sound strange to reimagine […]
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, […]
Meet Jesus at uni 