Elliot True Davis, our first child, joined us a week ago, filling us with thankfulness and joy! Beginning next year, we’ll be raising him in East Africa — the prospect of which has been on our minds for a while. When you think about who you want to be as […]
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 […]
An excluded middle denies the presence or at least the power of the spirits. Animism, on the other hand, seeks to control a situation by means of the spirit world: you need to have the most powerful spirit in order to get what you want. One way of viewing Jesus […]
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 […]
In our animism lecture, we talked about the idea of liminality. It’s the process of being ‘forgotten’ by your community, of being taken out of it and being brought back in. It’s often associated with rites of passage.
I’ve been thinking about family this Christmas. It’s a bit hard not to! I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard ‘Christmas is about family’. From church on Christmas morning to Christmas Eve Carols from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, it has seemed to be the refrain of the […]
Meet Jesus at uni 