When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, the sea of change swept in a whole new vocabulary for most people in the country. The “Rainbow Nation” was our new identity: celebrating not only a diversity in skin tone, but cultures as well. Read more …

After getting engaged last year, I started listening to an audio book on marriage preparation. The primary author of the book was a prominent American evangelical pastor. While it contained many good things, I was shocked by the chapter on sex. I was not blushing at the subject matter, but at the fact that the authors had turned the book Song of Songs in the Bible into a how-to guide for sex: virtually a Christian version of the Kama Sutra. Suddenly, I found myself doubting the credibility of the authors as teachers. Read more …

On one particular day during my time in primary school, I was in art class1. This alien environment was in a basement, bathed in the strange smells of pastel chalks and powdered paint. But on this day we were not drawing: the teacher had asked us the very inane question of what are colours. "Red", said one, "blue", another, "green", "yellow", "white", "purple", "pink", "black", "turquoise" (ooh!), "brown"... The kid in class who was known for his excellent drawing skills was quiet, until we became quiet. "I think that they are all colours, except for white and black." "What rubbish," thought I. Then he explained that white is the composite of all primary colours (so a kind of super-colour), and black the absence of any colour. The teacher was pleased with this answer, and the discussion continued around primary and secondary colours2. Read more …

This article is the last in my current series on science. I want to share one final thought on this debate. At the end I link to a set of slides which I presented to my Bible study group a couple of years ago. It does not have any notes and is not exhaustive, but does briefly capture many of the thoughts which I had shared in this series. Read more …

Science is a truly noble ideal: it is a way to interrogate (physical) reality with rigour to arrive at a probable truth. Just as with other ideals, though, it falls short of being really ideal, because the agents of it are human being, who will always be fallible.

In this second part of my series on science, I am going to look at problems in contemporary science and research. Read more …

The notion of "separation of church and state" is popular in our contemporary world. How this looks can vary dramatically from country to country. In the USA, there is a tension of keeping religion and state separate, but also fiercely defending religious liberty. In France, with their concept of laïcité1, the break is much more severe: the state is always favoured and personal beliefs are personal and should only be shared with like-minded people in private2. The principle of separation of church and state raises interesting questions when we shift our focus from religion to worldviews. Read more …

The world grows increasingly complex. There are issues which the church did not have to may much attention up until a few decades ago, but is now part of our everyday lives. In this article I am going to discuss Christians and copyright.

This article is not about piracy; it is about how Christians handle the copyrights which they own on the works which they create to spread the gospel, whether sermons or booklets or videos. Read more …

This article describes an informal survey which was conducted to see if and how the definition of the word "faith" has changed over time. The survey is non-exhaustive and spans 14 dictionaries (including different editions) and 250 years. The impetus for this survey was continued disagreement between especially Christian theists and atheists on the former group's use of the word. The latter group generally insists that to have faith means to abandon all reason and logic. The former group contests that they are able to have faith exactly because of reason and logic. This article concludes that the "negative" view of faith developed gradually over time and was probably driven by growing apostasy and eventual anti-theism. However, the application of the word remains broad and a narrower, more precise term is available for the latter camp to use. Read more …