The other day a Tanzanian friend shared over a whatsapp group qualifications of a good husband or a good wife. Each one began with a list and explanation of lesser types of husbands and wives. Today I provide summary translation of the qualifications of husbands and wives. In the next […]
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 […]
“The first year of marriage is really hard,” we heard over and over again in the lead up to our wedding, so I set my expectations low and braced myself for conflict. Would it be about how to squeeze the toothpaste and the cleanliness of the house, or would it be over […]
Once upon a time I taught cyberpunk fiction to middle schoolers and we would talk about body modifications. Now I’ve got one of my own, even if it doesn’t come with any dystopian grime or anti-heroism… In Christian circles, there is perhaps a received wisdom that children are a blessing, […]
The topic of the TAFES Dodoma Associates dinner we went to was ‘The Rising Divorce Rate’, and after contributions from several members, the speaker gave his point of view. He largely argued that the reason for divorce is that people have left God’s design for marriage. What followed was an […]
The issue of women changing their names when they married resurfaced in 2014 when Amal Alamuddin decided to add George Clooney’s surname to hers when she married him. There are questions of professional and personal identity at stake, as well as the troubling history that changing a woman’s name was […]
I haven’t read Annabel Crabb’s new book The Wife Drought but I’ve read a couple of articles she’s written on the same premise, that is, that men with big careers are only able to do so because they have a dedicated support staff, a ‘wife’ at home doing the unpaid […]
Meet Jesus at uni 