Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 75

Some dreams come true

Forty years ago I had a dream.

I had just read a fat book called Theological Education by Extension by a guy called Ralph Winter. It described a means by which the church could rapidly expand its leadership. It had been tried by Presbyterians in Guatemala, and was beginning to be used in other places as well.

On 9 December 1971 the Diocesan Standing Committee of the Anglican Diocese of Namibia met, and I presented them with a proposal to use Theological Education by Extension (TEE) to train leaders for the church in Namibia. It would start with lay ministers — evangelists, teachers, pastors. Then it could go on to self-supporting deacons and priests as well, so that every parish in the largely rural diocese could have teams of priests, deacons, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

Somewhat to my surprise, this plan was accepted in principle by the Diocesan Standing Committee, and they asked me to be convener of an education-subcommittee to implement it.

We already had a diocesan library in Windhoek, which was being developed as a support centre for correspondence students, and something similar would need to be set up in Ovamboland, along the northern border with Angola, where most of the Anglicans in Namibia lived. The library was being developed by Toni Halberstadt, a teacher who had been kicked out of Ovamboland by the government, and John Witherow, an overseas volunteer who had been refused a permit to go and teach in Ovamboland.

The project did not get very far, since three months later, at the beginning of March 1972, Toni Halberstadt and I were deported from Namibia, along with the bishop (Colin Winter) and diocesan secretary (David de Beer).

On leaving Namibia I went straight to a meeting of the Department of Christian Education for the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, and there met Richard Kraft, who had established something similar, on a small scale, in Zululand, training self-supporting deacons and priests. I spend the next four months travelling round South Africe promoting the idea of TEE, until I was banned inn July 1972, and so was out of the loop for the next four years.

About 40 Anglican deacons were ordained in Ovamboland on Sunday 11 December 2011 (photo by Nancy Robson)

But last Sunday, almost exactly forty years after I had proposed this thing, there was an ordination of 40 deacons at Odibo in Ovamboland. Nancy Robson describes the scene:

The President and the Queen joined the procession to the church, probably well over 100 people in the procession.  The 40 to-be deacons and 2 already deacons to be priested were all part of the procession as were 2 Lutheran bishops, the bishop from Angola, our 2 retired bishops as well as our own bishop and the Arch.  Stoles for many of the ordinands were made by the sewing Project at the mission while some of clergy stoles had been made here previously.  A very colourful sight.

Having been deported from Namibia in 1972, and having only been back for one brief visit since, the realisation of that vision of forty years earlier had nothing to do with me. But I still found it interesting that it had come to pass, almost as I had envisaged it back then.

Deacons, bishops, Queen, Archbishop of Cape Town & President of Namibia (photo by Nancy Robson)

After my ban was lifted in 1976 I went to Zululand and worked with Peter Biyela and Theophilus Ngubane on the scheme that Richard Kraft had started, and thirty years ago, in 1981, I was again travelling the coutnry, this time for meetings of an Anglican Commission on the Diaconate. After much effort and expense we produced a report, which was rejected out of hand by the Anglican Provincial Synod, meeting in Port Elizabeth in 1982. Nevertheless, thirty years later, 40 deacons were ordained in Ovamboland.

I still have a dream.

Perhaps, after another 40 years, it will come true, and forty deacons will be ordained in the Orthodox Church in South Africa. The Orthodox Church doesn't do mass ordinations, so they would have to be ordained one at a time — perhaps one a day during the Nativity Fast. I won't be around to see it, of course, but I can still dream, can't I?

Notes and References

Winter, Ralph D. (ed) 1969. Theological Education by Extension. South Pasadena: William Carey Library.

A collection of essays giving the history of the

Theological Education by Extension movement, a report on

a workshop, and an extension seminary manual. .

 

Book review: Go, by John Clellon Holmes

Go by John Clellon Holmes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Go is generally regarded as the first novel of the Beat Generation, written between 1949 and 1951, and first published in 1952, nearly sixty years ago. I first read it when I was 20, fifty years ago, and rereading it after all that time is a rather strange experience.

It is set in the late 1940s, and that was another generation, a generation that I don't connect with. They are the people who came home from the war, whom I used to meet in bars around Durban, those boozy old men. In 1972 I used to go for lunch at the Grosvenor Hotel in Soldiers Way across the road from Durban station and sip my solitary beer and eat my 15c curry for lunch, and hear them talking about Smiler Small, who used to frequent the bar in Malvern, and I used to look at all the World War II memorabilia decorating the bar. It never occurred to me that those people, who frequented bars like that, were the Beat Generation, and yet they were. Jack Kerouac was the same age as my father-in-law, who occasionally used to go drinking at the Malvern Hotel.

Yet it was only ten years later, in 1960-61 that I was reading their books, envying their life, and wondering if had really happened the way John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac described it. But they are the generation I associate with alien things like Frank Sinatra, and males in suits and hats, and women wearing lipstick and nylon stockings, and people trying to get back on their feet after the war. So reading Go is very strange. It was only 20 years before 1970, yet 1970 is now forty years ago. And the Durban station is no longer there, and Soldiers Way is probably called something else, and if the Grosvenor Hotel is still there it too is probably called something else now.

But then I remember that I too was like that, even when longing to be like that and thinking it must be different somehow, and somehow more exciting. But it only sounded more exciting than the lives we lived in the 1960s. We too experienced that restless rushing around in the, rushing to Meadowlands to see Cyprian Moloi, or to Springs to see Noel Lebenya, travelling many miles to see if a friend was home, and finding that they were out, travelling many more liles to see another. Not as many boozy parties, and no one was writing a book, but perhaps our conversations were even more intelligent, even when we smoked pot, which was rare. And that was only fifteen years after it all happened in Holmes's book. Fifty years ago somehow seems quite close to the present, yet ten years earlier, when Holmes wrote, seems another world, another eon, another universe. In the sixties Holmes's world of New York seemed like some magic golden age, and looking back from now to the sixties, that seems like the real golden age. The times Holmes wrote about, I realise now, were different, not just because it was another generation, but another world and worldview.

And rereading it fifty years later, I see that Holmes actually tried to create the new vision that made us look back on his world with rose-tinted spectacles. What he longed for became part of our vision.

The essence of the book is summed up in the dream of one of the characters, Stofsky (a thinly-diguised version of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg). Stofsky dreams that he meets God, in a rather shabby dusty room, sitting on a very shabby throne, and God tells him to "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."

For us in the sixties, that was the starting point. It was a kind of presupposition. It was the presupposition with which I read Go the first time. And so it all seemed rather wonderful, transported out of its time and place into some kind of beautiful timeless realm. I could not imagine them as part of the same world as the suits and hats and nylon stockings.

But rereading it fifty years later, I see it in a very different perspective. Another of the characters in Go, Paul Hobbes (who represents Holmes himself) doesn't have dreams and visions like Stofsky, but gradually comes to realise that their values and their life of endless boozy partying are rather shallow. He thinks of his friends, including one who had died, and wonders if anyone had actually loved them. And it is in this seeting of lovelessness, hopelessness, selfishness and despair that God appears to Stofky in a dream and says "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."

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In America, the religious left is gaining ground

The 1980s saw the growth of the religious right in the USA, especially in Evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic circles. Now, it seems, the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way again.

The New Evangelicals – NYTimes.com:

These "new evangelicals" are quick to say (correctly) that all this is not new but consistent with tradition. Evangelical emphasis on individual moral responsibility made them, from the colonial era to World War I, politically anti-authoritarian and economically populist — anti-banker and anti-landlord. Before the Civil War, they created many of the associations that helped build the country and, in the North, were crucially important to the abolitionist movement. After the war, they fought for labor against robber-baron capitalism and supported William Jennings Bryan three times for president on a pro-worker, pro-farmer platform. Even the Fundamentals pamphlets, circulated between 1910 and 1915 as a conservative call to evangelicals, included a section on the benefits of socialism.

In South Africa, during the 1950s and 1960s, Evangelicals and Pentecostals tended to be apolitical, or so they said. They would quote Jesus as saying "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", and say religion and politics don't mix — thereby, as one American Evangelical writer put it, "siding in pious neutrality with the stronger."[1]

At that stage, then, Evangelicals and Pentecostals formed a passive religious right, rather than an activist one.

The rise of the charismatic renewal movement in the non-Pentecostasl churches in the late 1960s and 1970s muddied the waters.

These were the denominations that had been most critical of the apartheid policy in South Africa — Anglicans, Methodists, Roman Catholics and others. The two groups (or at least their leaders) had hitherto had very little to do with each other, but suddenly the charismatic renewal movement was bringing them together. At an ecumenical charismatic service in Durban's Roman Catholic Cathedral in 1975, a Full Gospel church choir sang, and the preacher was Justus du Plessis of the Apostolic Faith Mission, a Pentecostal denomination. The encounter had a tendency to politicise the Pentecostals, and pietise the non-Pentecostals.

In the 1970s the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Bill Burnett, went about preaching revival to the social activists, and social activism to the revivalists. In some ways it was an uncomfortable message for both.

Many people tried to analyse the charismatic renewal in South Africa in sociological terms — white insecurity in the face of political uncertain was one of them. These rather facile evalusations overlooked the fact that the charismatic renewal was a worldwide phenomenon, and it followed roughly the same trajectory in many other countries, so it could not really be explained by local factors.

One of the things that facilitated its rapid spread, and perhaps its equally rapid decline, was a technological innovation of the time that is now obsolete — the cassette tape recorder. A charismatic Anglican parish I was involved with in the early 1980s (St Stephen's, Lyttelton), recorded every service — not just the sermon, the whole thing. The tapes were duplicated after the service, and copies made and taken to sick people who hadn't been able to come to church. There was also a tape library containing recordings of charismatic preachers and teachers from all over country and over the world. People would borrow these tape to listen in their cars while sitting in traffic jams or on long journeys. They would listen to them and study them in hundreds of small groups, both denominational and ecumenical, all over the country. The speakers included people like Colin Urquhart from Britain, Derek Prince and Bob Mumford from America and many others. And this happened in dozens of other local parishes affected by the charismatic renewal.

And thus the message of the Religious Right in America also spread all over the world. Those who listened to the cassette tapes and read the books (many of which were what a friend of mine once called "Spiritual Westerns") were often quite undiscriminating about what they read and listened to. And this, I believe was one of the factors that led to the decline of the charismatic renewal in Southern Africa. A bunch of Neopentecostal denominations appeared, which in effect tried to distil the charismatic experience, divorced from the rest of the Christian faith. These never became as politically right-wing as some of their counterparts in America, but the result was the routinisation of charisma, and a generation grew up that confused worship with musical entertainment.

And in America, and elsewhere, some who have grown up with that somewhat truncated version of the Christian faith have now come to realise that there is something more. Some have called this the Emerging Church. It's not just about a New Left vision of politics (somewhat different from the "old" New Left of the 1960s), but involves a rediscovery of many aspects of the Christian faith that were obscured and neglected by the one-sided emphasis of the Neopentecostals, and the vision of the Religious Right that grew up in the Reagan-Thatcher era.

I was alerted to the article I quoted above in the Progressive Orthdox Group on Facebook, and one of the people who responded to it noted:

Lazar Puhalo: Our monastery has been working with a number of the "Emerging Church" Evangelicals. The group associated with the Monastery has begun to teach the Orthodox concept of Redemption, as opposed to the Atonement doctrine[2], and has also been part of an Evangelical group that has been examining the early Church Fathers. It is good to encourage them, but one wonders how they will react when they come into contact with some of the sqalid pettiness afoot in the Orthodox Church today, along with some of our more reactionary clergy. We can learn from these Emergent Evangelicals in many ways, just as they can learn a more solid theology from Orthodoxy. (Vladika Lazar)

So perhaps there is an enounter that is similar in some ways between charismatics on the one hand, and Evangeliscals and Pentecostals on the other, that took place in the 1970s.

I hope it bears more lasting fruit.

Warning! Any comments anyone makes on this post may be used in the book I am writing with John de Gruchy on the rise and fall of the charismatic renewal in Southern Africa.

______________

Notes and references

[1] Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway. Up to our steeples in politics.

[2] I think it might be more accurate to say that the "Atonement doctrine" is the penal substitution theory of the atonement, since the Orthodox concept of redemption is also an atonement doctrine, though this may just be a quibble about words.

A personal God

One of the major differences between Christianity and Buddhism, as I understand it, is that Christians believe in a personal God, whereas Buddhists don't even believe in personal human beings.

One of the most mysterious things about life is consciousness and recently some neuroscientists have come close to the Buddhist view that though we think we are conscious beings, there's actually nobody home. This is Your Brain on Buddha, by Erik Davis:

Ultimately, the kind of mindfulness practice that Nisker teaches can lead folks to personally realize one of the core insights of Buddhism: that the self we think we are, the self we coddle and trumpet and worry about, doesn't essentially exist. On this point, the vast majority of neuroscientists would agree, arguing that the solitary "I" is really a society of mind, or an emergent property, or an illusion fostered by some narrator module lodged in the left hemisphere. Nisker even jokingly suggests that neuroscientists set up little brain-imaging booths that would allow people to personally see the pictures of their own noodles at work. "Then we could believe it. There's nobody home."

If it is true that there's nobody home, then perhaps this photo "says it all" about the human condition.

What is it about this photograph that makes you feel uncomfortable?

In his principal philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre identified the power of the human gaze as one of existential affirmation; to stare into the face of another and not only recognize them as a person, but see them recognize you in return, was to Sartre a necessary interchange in the development of one's sense of individuality and self.

Perhaps this is why so many of us find the blank gaze in this photograph so psychologically unsettling. To find no recognition of separateness or personhood in the eyes of another is to have one's identity shaken and sense of control stripped away. It's part of what makes some of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who monsters so terrifying, and why the image up top might make you feel a little uneasy.

I don't have any problem with the notion that the consciousness arises from the multiplication of many simple neural circuits in the brain. That idea was suggested to me (in an unscientific way) by a book called A Subway Named Möbius which I read as a teenager more than fifty years ago.  The story is about an underground railway system in which, as it expands, the topology of the network becomes so complex that trains start disappearing into another dimension. The human brain is far more complex than any railway network, and so it is easy to see that as a kind analogy of consciousness, even though it is totally unscientific. Other science fiction stories have speculated about computers becoming conscious, and there is talk of artificial intelligence. Human technological developments suggest interpretations of human life, and so it is quite possible to ses, as an analogy for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that God has use all backed up on tape or some kind of super DVD, and that on the last day we'll all be rebooted into new and better hardware.

But whatever the neurological basis for consciousness, it doesn't answer the question whether there is an "I" that is conscious, not necessarily as as a spectator watching a performance, but in a sense arising from the performance. Buddhists and some neuroscientists believe that there's "nobody home", that if we find photos like the one above disturbing, it is because in the course of evolution we are hard-wired to recognise hostility and danger onn the one hand, and friendliness on the other, through facial expressions, and so find the lack of such signals disturbing — though of course there is not really anything there to be disturbed.

Long before Sartre, however, Christian theologians maintained that God is personal, and that human beings are personal, and that the relationship between God and man is a personal one.

So Orthodox philosophers like Christos Yannaras can say:

In everyday speech we tend to distort the meaning of the word 'person'. What we call 'person' or 'personal' designates rather more the individual. We have grown accustomed to regarding the terms 'person' and 'individual' as virtually synonymous, and we use the two indifferently to express the same thing. From one point of view, however, 'person' and 'individual' are opposite in meaning. The individual is the denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person, the attempt to define human existence using the objective properties of man's common nature, and quantitative comparisons and analogies. Chiefly in the field of sociology and politics the human being is frequently identified with the idea of numerical individuality. Sometimes this rationalistic process of leveling out is considered progress, since it helps

to make the organization of society more efficient.

And later goes on to say

In man's sin, in his failure to be what he is called to be, the Church sees an affirmation of the truth of the person: that personhood is affirmed even in man's capacity to say no even to life and existence itself, to say no to God, although relationship and communion with Him are all that makes existence into a hypostasis of life. In man's sin, the Church sees the tragic adventure of human freedom, which is human morality in its real, ontological truth. She sees human morality in sin (actual deviation) and in deification (the natural sequel and consequence of human morality within the Church). There are no abstract theoretical principles or conventional legal 'axioms' in the ethics of the Church, no impersonal imperatives. The foundation of this ethic is the human person; and person means constant risk, freedom from all objectification, and the dynamics of death and resurrection.

In some ways one can find many similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, but just as one thinks one is getting to the core of the similarities, some kind of identity, even, the two jump apart, like the north poles of two magnets when brought together.

Chronicle in stone — book review

Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eleven years ago I was in Albania, and after being taken on a tour of the capital, Tirana, by a university student, Theofania, we sat down at a pavement cafe to rest and have something to drink. Theofania said that a man at the next table was Ismail Kadare, one of Albania's most famous writers. One of my recurring daydreams has been how nice it would be to sit at cafe tables having literary discussions, especially with famous authors. Tirana is a small enough town that one can see people doing that, even if one does not have the temerity to join in. In the course of our tour we also passed Albania's most famous film star, riding a bicycle.

I'd never heard of Ismail Kadare before, but having set eyes on him, if not actually having spoken to him, I was curious about his books, and when I found one in a bookshop, The file on H, I read it and enjoyed it. Not many bookshops stock his books, so when I saw Chronicle in stone, I bought it, and enjoyed it even more than The file on H.

It is set in the town of Gjirokaster in southern Albania, which is the town where Kadare grew up, so it is probably semi-autobiographical, and I have no doubt that Kadare must have witnessed scenes similar to those he describes in the book. It is set during the Second World War, when Gjirokaster was successively occupied by Italians, Greeks and Germans, with several changes as the tide of war ebbed and flowed.

It is seen through the eyes of a child, possibly a somewhat older child than Kadare would have been at the time. Though the age of the narrator is never stated, it seems to be about 6-10, whereas Kadare would have been about 2-3 years younger than that at the time. It is a child's-eye view, yet an adult recollection of a child's-eye view, with adult powers of description. But it looks at the the adult world through a child's eyes, remembering people for particular characteristics or foibles that would impress a child. Apart from the other children, most of the adults belong to the grandparents' generation, and so much of the information about the world comes to the narrator through his grandparents and their friends and relatives, aunts and great aunts who pop in to visit and gossip. There is the grandfather who lies on his divan each day, reading books in Turkish. There is the old woman who comments on each piece of news that it is the end of the world.

The nearest comparison I can think of is the "William" books by Richmal Crompton, which is also a fictional representation of a child's experience of war, but the viewpoint is different and the culture is different. Crompton's books reflect adult amusement at children's interpretations of the adult world, and so they are more detached from the characters. Kadare gets more into the skin of the child, and articulates it from the child's point of view. Another difference is that though Richman Crompton's books reflect fear of invasion, the invasion never took place, and the country was not occupied. The war was closer in Albania, the bombing more devastating, and, towards the end, with three different resistance movements, it also became a civil war. There is humour, but there is also tragedy and sadness.

I enjoyed the book partly because it it portrays Albanian culture, and having been to the country, it helped me to understand more of the people and the way they lived and thought.

There is also a sense in which the city itself is the main character in the novel. Occupying armies come and go, the inhabitants flee as refugees and return, but the city remains almost as a sentient being. Even in translation, Kadare's descriptions are lyrical.

I'd never have read his books if we had not, by chance, being sitting at a table next to him at a cafe. I'd probably still not have heard of him but for that chance. But, having discovered his books, I'll be reading more in future.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin proverb meaning "who will guard the guardians?" or "who will watch the watchdogs?"

And I was reminded of it when reading the latest offering of GetReligion, a website that is a self-appointed guardian of religious reporting in the news media. Their premiss is a reasonable one. Secular journalists who are asked to cover stories that have a religious element often get it wrong. So the writers at GetReligion analyse stories that appear in the media, and show where they got them wrong.

But one of their recent stories, Marian Mission to Moscow and the New York Times | GetReligion makes me wonder if they haven't fallen victim to the very disease that they are claiming to be able to diagnose.

For a start there is the misleading title.

Marian is a distinctively Roman Catholic term, and so on going to the site I expected to read about a row over a Roman Catholic missionary group going to Russia to proselytise. There have been quite a number of stories about that kind of thing in the past.

But this was something different, briefly, and as far as I could see, accurately summarised as follows:

A religious relic — the belt of the Virgin Mary — has been brought from the Vatopedi Monastery on Mt Athos in Greece to Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral by the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation. In the week that it was on display over a half million Russians lined up to gaze upon and perhaps kiss the glass case that enclosed the camel-hair jewel-encrusted relic. At times the queue stretched almost three miles with tens of thousands waiting in sub-zero temperatures. The faithful believe the relic was given by Mary the Mother of God to St Thomas before her Assumption. It is reputed to have miraculous powers and has helped women to conceive. The Itar-Tass and Novostiwire services provide a quick summary of events.

The article praises some Western news sources for reasonably accurate reporting, but goes on to criticise the way the New York Times presented the story.

The Telegraph and Washington Post played this straight and focused on the religious angle, giving the pilgrims who braved the cold to stand in line to venerate the relic a sympathetic hearing. The New York Times took a different line offering faithful voices and fortune tellers and enclosing the whole in a box marked hysteria. It also sought the secular angle and gave us Vladimir Putin. But it neglected to explain why we needed to hear from Putin or of the political significance of the relic's mission to Moscow.

But the bottom line for me was the snarky attitude. Instead of standing outside of its culture and attempting to report faithfully and fairly on what was going on in Moscow, it stood squarely within the jaded and hip mindset of Manhattan. What we got from the New York Times was a travelog with attitude.

That's fine, as far as it goes. The problem here is that the article is set within the context of a moralistic sermon on how journalists ought to be able to stand outside their own culture and report things objectively and to the point.

And in that final paragraph there are some anomalies.

The writer, George Conger, has already told us that

A modern journalist employs Thucydides' methodology and is expected to stand outside his own political system, culture and religion, to criticize his own society and to pursue the truth. Even Robert Fisk, the doyenne of ideological journalists will state that the reporter's job is to tell it like it is: "My job is to report what I have seen."

Now who's being "snarky"?

Obviously Conger doesn't like Robert Fisk, but Conger doesn't stand far enough outside his own political system, culture and religion to tell us why he doesn't like Fisk, or what Fisk has to do with this particular story in the first place. And what on earth is a doyenne?

So it seems that Conger is doing the very things that he is criticising the New York Times for doing.

Conger was also introduced to the GetReligion team as someone who could provide a more international perspective for a site that was heavily biased towards a US audience. Well, the story is outside the US, but the perspective, though it may not be hip Manhattan, is not far away from Manhattan geographically. Perhaps it's a little farther culturally, but not much. It certainly doesn't cross any oceans.

It won't take many more stories like these to stop me following GetReligion on Twitter. If they really want a more international perspective, they could do worse than recruit Bishop Nick Baines, whose comments on the Brit media are often perceptive; he generally does a much better job at doing what GetReligion claims to be all about. He also has a much wider and more international perspective than most of the  GetReligion writers seem to have

 

Black Tuesday

Yesterday was "Black Tuesday", when we were asked (by whom?) to wear black as a protest against the Protection of State Information Bill that was passed by parliament yesterday.

I didn't wear black (though I suppose I could have gone round in  a cassock all day, which would probably not have counted, as few might recognise it as a protest). Not that I altogether approve of the Protection of State Information Act, but I think that those who are calling for protests against it too often overstate their case.

Cobus van Wyngaard has written a throughtful blog post about it at Was #blacktuesday dalk te maklik? | die ander kant, and if you don't read Afrikaans, Pierre de Vos makes some similar points in this piece Who can we trust? – Constitutionally Speaking.

Cobus makes the point (I hope I'm summarising it correctly) that we too easily assume that national sovereignty is everything, but that all too often those in political power in particular countries are themselves manipulated by transnational economic forces. I recently wrote about an instance of this in Notes from underground: Greek mythology. Cobus notes that the Protection of State Information Act will make it easier for politicians to conceal the ways in which they are beholden to these economic forces.

One of the things that concerns me, however, is that Black Tuesday may itself be a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

We hear a great deal about how the Protection of State Information Bill was a threat to "media freedom". And that is because the media never tire of telling us this, because their own self-interest is at stake. So the media are getting their collective knickers in a knot about it.

But what do they do with their freedom — the freedom they have enjoyed since 1994?

Last Sunday I read two newspapers, The Sunday Independent and City Press, and most of the "news" was scandal stories about celebrities, including the political news, which treats politicians as celebrities. It was all about who's in an who's out, and who's plotting against whom, mostly in the ruling party, but occasionally in other parties as well. The impression is created that politicians are solely absorbed by jockeying for position, and stabbing each other in the back. It is entirely about personalities, and there is little or nothing about policies.

Now it may well be like that, and it may be that that is the main concern of the senior members of the ruling party — that are mainly concerned with who is plotting against them, or whose downfall would be most likely to benefit them personally. If that is true, what a sad contrast it makes to the concerns of the ANC between its unbanning in 1990 and its coming to power in 1994. Then it was all about participation, transparency and openness. Glasnost and perestroika, as they said in Russia in those days. We don't hear much about glasnost and perestroika today.

But I think it is also true that the media plug these stories because they believe that there is most profit in them, and that this is what their readers want to read. Entertainment is the name of the game, and the politicians are not there to run the country for the benefit of the citizens who elect them; as far as the media are concerned, their main purpose is to provide entertainment for their readers so that the media can increase their profits by selling stories about political celebs.

In other words, the media are subject to precisely the same economic forces as those that hold the politicians in thrall, and the media are no more trustworthy than the politicians. Bishop Nick Baines gives some more examples of this trend here, but also gives some examples of the good and honest journalism that is needed.

So I wonder whose idea Black Tuesday was, and, as always, cui bono? — who benefits?

The church that meets in Christina's house

Every second Sunday we go to Mamelodi for the Hours and Readers Service (Obednitsa). We used to meet in a school classroom, but they put the rent up, so now we meet in Christina Mothapo's house, which is rather small and cramped.Christina is our oldest member, 85 years old, and today her great grandson, Vincent Allies, was with us as well, and read part of the service.

Vincent Allies reading the Hours, with his great grandmother Christina next to him

Afterwards we went to another room to pray for Christina's youngest son, Kleinboy, who has been ill for a long time. We are only a few (and if there were any more we would find it difficult to fit into the cramped livingroom), but it only really needs two or three.

We read the Third and Sixth Hours, and then the Readers Service (Obednitsa, Typika), which is basically the Divine Liturgy with the priest's and deacon's parts omitted, so it can be done where there is no priest. Some have suggested that we do Matins, but that is a very much more complicated service for a small isolated congregation.

Afterwards we took a photo of everyone outside the house.

The Church that meets in Christina's house

Basil d'Oliveira and the fall of apartheid

The death of Basil d'Oliveira, one of the greatest South African cricketers who never played for South Africa, calls to mind one of the ironies in the history of the struggle against apartheid.

His obituary (which is well worth reading in full) describes an incident that gained a great deal of publicity Basil D'Oliveira obituary | Sport | The Guardian:

Though Basil D'Oliveira, who has died aged 80 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was one of the greatest cricketers ever to come out of South Africa, he will be best remembered for the dramatic role he played in helping to defy apartheid in sport. As a mixed-race – in South African terms, "coloured" – player of exceptional ability in his native Cape Town, he was denied the chance to play for the country of his birth by the racial segregation of the apartheid regime. When he went to play in England and became a Test player there, his eventual selection for the 1968-69 England tour to South Africa so offended the warped sensibilities of John Vorster's government that it refused to allow him to play, and the tour was cancelled. As a result, South Africa was exiled from international cricket until the fall of apartheid in 1994.

There is a minor inaccuracy there, in that South Africa returned to international cricket in 1992, and participated in the cricket world cup that year, on the understanding that the team would be selected on merit and not on race.

The irony is that Vorster's banning of the MCC cricket tour was the top news story on the weekend of 21-22 September 1968, and thus upstaged the Message to the people of South Africa, which had been publicly released on Friday 20 September.

The Message to the people of South Africa had been produced by a group of theologians, supported by the South African Council of Churches and the Christian Institute, and damned apartheid as not merely a heresy, but a pseudogospel. It was released that weekend in the hope that it would stimulate debate among all South African Christians on whether any Christian could support an ideology like apartheaid, which was not merely unChristian, but antiChristian.

A summary of the "Message" appeared as a paid advertisement in some of the Sunday papers, but the main news story was the cancellation of the cricket tour, and the news of the "Message" was relegated to the inside pages. The timing could not have been worse. Far more publicity was given to Vorster's denunciation of the "Message" a week or two later than to the message itself, and by that time most people had thrown away their copy of the newspaper with the summary of the "Message" and so could no longer see what it said, and so the debate got off to a shaky start.

None of this was Basil d'Oliveira's fault, of course, and he was probably quite unaware of it at the time. He was basically Vorster's political football, and it enabled Vorster to kick the Message into touch.

You can read the Message to the people of South Africa here.

At last — a good vampire story

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

I've read quite a number of vampire novels, but found none to compare with Bram Stoker's Dracula. I've read Dracula several times, but all the others were disappointing.

I suppose I might have enjoyed 'Salem's lot by Stephen King if I had not aleady read Dracula several times; it might then have come to me as something fresh and exciting. As it was, it seemed entirely predictable.

I read Interview with the vampire by Anne Rice because someone had told me about it, and forced myself to stick it out to the end, boring as it was, just to be able to say I had actually read it, and did not dismiss it as not worth reading just from prejudice.

The historian is the first vampire book I have read that seems to be a fitting sequel to Dracula. Not only is it a fitting sequel, I think it surpasses the original.

Perhaps I should digress from the books for a moment to describe an interesting event that took place at the University of South Africa nearly 20 years ago. Some people came and delivered a lecture on Dracula. They were from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula in Romania, and for them Dracula, as in Bram Stoker's novel, was a new and exciting discovery. With the fall of the Communist Party regime a few years before, Romania had a sudden influx of tourists and journalists looking for Dracula's castle. At first Romanians had no idea what they were talking about, because Dracula had only been published in Romanian in 1990. The Ministry of Tourism set up a group to research this, and they decided that it was a tourist gold mine, and so they renovated an old castle and renamed it "Dracula's Castle", and turned it into a kind of vampire Disneyland to cash in on the tourist trade.

Their historical investigations did not turn up an original for Stoker's Count Dracula (Stoker's story was rather set in Styria, in Austria), but they did turn up a rather bloodthirsty ruler, a Prince of Wallachia (one of the three provinces of Romania, the others being Transylvania and Modldavia) whose epithet was Vlad the Impaler, and who appeared to enjoy impaling invading enemies and his own subjects on stakes. His enemies included the invading Ottoman Turks, and the neighbouring Kingdom of Hungary, and he seemed to be the the historical figure who came closest to being a model for Bram Stoker's arch-villain.

Elizabeth Kostova builds on this, and unambiguously links Dracula the vampire to the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, with three generations of historians investigating the legends by doing research in various libraries. To say more about the plot might be a spoiler, but I can say something about the way the plot is constructed.

After a hundred or so pages I became curious about the author and her background, because, in spite of the book being set in at least three different historical periods (the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1970s) in several different countries, I spotted no glaring anachronisms. In addition, there were references to several different periods of medieval history, and again, the settings seemed authentic.

The Wikipedia article on Elizabeth Kostova notes that a very high price was paid for it

Publishers Weekly explained the high price as a bidding war between firms believing that they might have the next Da Vinci Code within their grasp. One vice-president and associate publisher said "Given the success of The Da Vinci Code, everybody around town knows how popular the combination of thriller and history can be and what a phenomenon it can become.

That was very interesting, because one outstanding feature of The da Vinci code was its bad history and worse plot, made worse still by Dan Brown's spurious claims that the historical background was accurate. It is a claim that Elizabeth Kostova could justifiably have made, but, with more modesty than Dan Brown, didn't.

I spotted just one, very minor, anachronism — a character referred to his having grown up in Cumbria twenty years before Cumbria became an official county name — before that a person would be more likely to have said "Cumberland", or "Westmorland", or possibly "The Lake District". There may be others, of course, but if there were they weren't so glaringly obvious as to be distracting, like the errors in The da Vinci code. The descriptions of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 seem to be pretty accurate, and are also informative.

Descriptions of life in Orthodox monasteries are also fairly accurate, as are those of of some folk-religion customs, such as fire-walking.

Bram Stoker manages to avoid this difficulty when writing about contemporary England, though his knowledge of the geography and folk-religion of the Balkans was derived entirely from books, and was sketchy, to say the least. But his story holds up in spite of that, and in spite of the plot flaws it remains a good read. Kostova manages to get in all three — a combination of history cum thriller cum horror story that comes off well. She uses some of Stoker's techniques — telling the story through letters written by the characters, and also uses some of the conventions that Stoker established for vampire folklore — that vampires are afraid of crosses and garlic, for example. One of the things I do have some doubts about though, is that Kostova seems to invest Turkish worry-beads with a religious signficance analogous to Western rosaries, and therefore good for scaring of vampires. Greeks also use worry beads, but they seem to be purely secular, and quite different from the Orthodox prayer ropes that are closer to Western rosaries.

As an Orthodox Christian, this was one of the things that I found a bit unsatisfactory — the main characters in the story were agnostic, yet the seemed to put great reliance on religious symbols like crosses for warding off vampires. This strikes me as being purely superstitious.

On the other hand, it probably does reflect the attitudes of many nominal Orthodox in Balkan countries, especially those that were deliberately secularised after several decates of atheistic communist rule.

But those are minor quibbles, and don't detract from enjoyment of the book, which is a very good read indeed.

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