If there’s any book of the Bible that lends itself to allegorical interpretation, it’s Revelation! In chapter 12, a pregnant woman appears, clothed with moon and sun and a crown of twelve stars. She’s pregnant and about to give birth. There’s a great dragon too, which we’re told is Satan, […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Our friend Samaki was telling us about his ministry in another part of Tanzania. He is introducing people to Isa Al-Masih in a Muslim part of the country. When people start following Jesus, they don’t announce, “I’m now a Christian!” but their lives are changed and people notice and ask, […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
This week there was a discussion in my network here in Tanzania about Psalm 51:5: Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me. Did David being conceived ‘in sin’ mean that his mother committed adultery and he was illegitimate? Admittedly the grammar of the […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
As a little girl in the west, the stories you hear are of princesses. Though this trope is being critiqued and perhaps modified, it is still the case that traditionally the girls in these stories are sweet, beautiful, compliant, and often awaiting rescue. They look for the prince in the […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
It has become commonplace in the west in recent years to assert that the ways in which women experience oppression in Australia are minor compared to the oppressions that women in the majority world face, from gender based violence to lack of access to education, to maternal health, to poverty […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
“I want us to start with university students, to give girls opportunities for leadership and to build their confidence while they are still studying,” said one of our colleagues. This is a common sentiment among many in Tanzania’s middle class, that women’s welfare rests on them seeing what they could […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
One of the striking things about women in Tanzania for us as Aussies has been the number of women who work, and how this is largely uncontroversial. Tanzanian household structures provide for this. So does the cultural concept of the ‘strong woman‘. And the way they access cultural paradigms around […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes