Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 79

More on biscuits and cookies

At one point in a discussion of the different understanding of "biscuit" and "cookie" between Americans and other speakers of English an American asked me what I'd call an Oreo.

I'd never seen an Oreo, but vaguely recalled seeing a picture of one on a packet in a supermarket. We we decided to check, and bought a packet of Oreos (they are labelled cookies). And, for purposes of comparison, we bought a box of Bakers assorted biscuits. The Oreos cost R14.49 for 175g, and the Bakers biscuits cost R15.99 for 200g.

Oreo cookes and Bakers biscuits

Among the biscuits in the assorted packet were chocolate creams.

Here they are together:

Oreo on the left, Bakers chocolate cream on the right

And to me, both of them are biscuits, not cookies.

We tried the taste test.

The taste was pretty much identical, though the texture was slightly different. The Oreo was a little harder and more brittle. Most members of the family prefered the Bakers chocolate cream, which is why we  probably won't buy Oreos in future.

Chocolate cookies

Since both the examples so far have been of chocolate biscuits, here is a picture of some chocolate cookies.

Unlike "biscuit", which is used in the sense just described in just about all English-speaking countries, "cookie" might be peculiarly South African, and it probably came into South African English from Afrikaans "koekie", meaning "little cake". And that in turn probably came from the Dutch "koekje".

An American once told me that what we called "cookies" they would call "cupcakes", but I wonder what they are called in other English-speaking countries.

There are many varieties of cookies and biscuits, not just chocolate ones, though some shops have taken to calling cookies "muffins".

And yes, what Americans call biscuits we call scones, but I don't have a picture of any right now.

 

Childhood memories: apartheid biscuits

Apartheid biscuits

When I was at school they used to give us what we called "apartheid biscuits" for afternoon tea.

They were about 3 inches in diameter, two biscuits with jam in between, and one of the biscuits was covered with icing, chocolate on one half, and vanilla on the other – hence the name we gave them.

I've never seen or tasted one since I left school, more than fifty years ago now, but we were discussing such things on an Internet forum on English usage, and the fact that Americans call biscuits "cookies", so that our biscuits are their cookies, and our cookies are their cup cakes, and their biscuits are our scones.

In the course of the discussion I mentioned apartheid biscuits, and described them, and someone found a picture of them somewhere on the web. I very much doubt that the bakers called them by our schoolboy name, so if I went into a bakery I wouldn't know what to ask for.

 

Old SAMS web pages

Zuze Banda, of the Missiology Department at the University of  South Africa, asked me what had happened to the old web pages of the Southern African Missiological Society (SAMS), as he wanted to use some of their resources.

I'm posting part of my reply here in case other people also want to make use of those resources.

The old SAMS web site was hosted on Geocities, and closed when Yahoo! took over Geocities and then closed it down in October 2009.

The good news is that some people stepped in to save some of the good stuff that was on Geocities, and so you can now find the old SAMS web site in THREE different places on the Web. Unfortunately none of them can be updated, but the material there has been preserved. And anyway, I stopped updating it when the new SAMS web site started.

So you can find the old SAMS web site, and at least some of its resources here:

http://www.oocities.org/missionalia/index.html

and here:

http://www.reocities.com/missionalia/index.html

and here

http://sh1.webring.com/people/bm/missionalia/index.html

The old SAMS web pages contained some articles from past issues of Missionalia, the journal of the Southern African Missiological Society, and also some information about African Independent Churches, African Initiated Churches, African Instituted Churches and African Indigenous Churches (collectively referred to as AICs). There are also various other missional resources.

You can also see this information, and information about other missiological resources, on the Missiology page on this blog.

Go forth: stories of mission and resurrection in Albania (book review)

Go Forth: Stories of Missions and Resurrection in Albania by Luke A. Veronis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Father Luke Veronis, from Pennsylvania in the USA, was a missionary in Albania for a little over ten years, from 1994-2004, and this is the story of his experience in that time. He was married to Faith, who joined him there and their three older children also lived there.

Since the Second World War Albania had been ruled by the communist dictator Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hodja), who in 1967 decided that Albania was to the the world's first officially atheist country, with no religion at all being allowed. So for 24 years, until 1991, no religion was allowed. Every church, jammi and tekke was closed, and either demolished or converted to secular uses.

In 1991 religious freedom was restored, but the Orthodox Church was in a bad way. Most of the clergy had been killed or imprisoned. Bishop Anastasios Yannoulatos was sent there to try to reestablish the life of the church. There could not have been a better choice; he was the most outstanding Orthodox missiologist of the 20th century.

Father Luke Veronis and his son Paul

Luke Veronis met Bishop Anastasios when on a short-term mission trip to Kenya, and this sparked his missionary vocation. He returned to America, where he studied missiology, and then returned a second time to East Africa for a longer stint. Over the next few years he led several short-term mission teams to East Africa while studying theology at Holy Chross Seminary in Brookline, Massachusetts.

After he had been in Albania for a while, Luke Veronis returned to America, where he married Faith and was ordained as a deacon, and together they returned to Albania, where he was later ordained priest by Archbishop Anastasios.

During their time in Albania there were two huge upheavals. The first was in 1997, when most of the people in the country lost all their savings in the collapse of a pyramid scheme, in which many, unused to the capitalist system, had unwisely invested their life savings. The scheme was publicly endorsed by some prominent government leaders. When the scheme collapsed there was widespread chaos and looting, and people broke into military arsenals and stole guns. Hundreds were killed in the enusing fighting, not a few by bullets fired into the air by exuberant rioters.

The second upheaval was the influx of over a million refugees from Kosovo, who fled after the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Father Luke describes the church's ministry to the refugees, and how some close personal relationships were forged with them, which continued even after they had returned, or had moved on to other countries.

The Orthodox Cathedral in Titana, the capital of Albania

This book is is not a formal treatise on mission or mission history, but a kind of expanded missionary journal, with a description of Fr Luke's work, and impressions of it, and reflection on the nature of mission and the motivation of missionaries. In that sense it is more inspirational than informational, and more missional than missiological. That also, in a sense, makes me the wrong person to review the book, because part of Father Luke's story is also part of my story, since he arranged for me to go to Albania to lecture on missiology to students of the seminary at Shen Vlash, where he was the Dean, and I also met Archbishop Anastasios, and several of the people he mentions in the book.

Archbishop Anastasios asked Fr Luke to concentrate his ministry especially among the youth, and so he was dean of the seminary at Shen Vlash, which had about 60-70 students for a three year course of study. He also met students at the universoty, and had a weekly celebration of the Divine Liturgy at the university, and there were also study groups.  When we were in Albania we went to some of these. There were also summer camps for young people and students, and in the book Father Luke notes that a number of those who had participated in thes groups were now judges in Albania.

Father Luke Veronis at a study group with students of the University of Tirana, on the university campus

The book also gives some personal glimpses of Archbishop Anastasios, which are also very useful, and one can see something of what drives him. The outstanding thing seems to be the heart of the Gospel, the good newsd of the love of God, and Archbishop Anastasios himself comes across as someone filled with the love of God and the desire to share that love with others.

Many know Archbishop Anastasios as a missiologist, but his writings and actions are filled with a missional spirit. Father Luke gives an example from a conference of Orthodox theological schools in 2001:

When one theologian tried to say that the authentic type of Orthodox missions was simply to stay where we are and shine a light so that others come to us, Archbishop Anastasios warned him that "we are in danger of creating spiritual ghettos only for ourselves and no one else. This has nothing to do with the 'apostolic, catholic' spirit of our forebears. If our theology is authentic and sincere, then it must spur us on toward missions. Orthodox theology and missiology are not separate. Our theology motivates us for mission."

Father Luke also describes some of the difficulties and personal opposition faced by Archbishop Anastasios, and in some ways they are obstacles to Orthodox mission everywhere. When Archbishop Athanasios first went to Albania in 1991 he was regarded with hostility by the Albanian government, because he was Greek. Albanian nationalists in America spoke against him at every opportunity. On the other hand, Greek nationalists criticised him for not being Greek enough, and for re-establishing an Albanian Church rather than a Greek one.

A Romanian metropolitan tried to establish a diocese for the Vlach-speaking people, and a Greek metropolitan claimed that parts of southern Albania fell under his jurisdiction.

But Archbishop Anastasios said that where people spoke Greek (as they did in the south of Albania) they could have Greek services, where they spoke Albanian, they would have Albanian services, and where the people were Vlach, they too could have services in their own language. He inisted that there was only one Orthodox Church in Albania:

Do you think the forest is more beautiful if there is only one kind of tree? All the various trees must grow freely under the rays of the sun. The key to proper development is love and freedom…

Father Luke and his son Paul visiting Luljeta, who had been bedridden for 7 years, in Tirana Hospital

Father Luke describes some of the ways in which evangelism takes place. One of the seminarians, Daniel, who is from a Muslim background, visited Luljeta, a woman who had been in hospital for seven years with muscular dystrophy, who was also from a Muslim background. Eventually she came to faith in Christ and Father Luke baptised her, and visited her regularly in hospital to take her Holy Communion. In her hospital room, she bears witness to Christ among her non-Christian friends who come to visit her.

Father Luke Veronis

As I said, I am probably not the best person to review this book, because one reason I enjoyed reading it was that I knew some of the people and places mentioned in it. It was good to be reminded of them again.

I was also reminded of some other things, not mentioned in the book, but which help to illuminate some of the things in the book.

Just before we went to Albania we were in Athens, and there was a mission conference at which Father Luke read a paper on Orthodox mission and its problems at then end of the 20th century: complacency, nationalism, ethnocentrism and triumphalism.

In the questions and discussion that followed his paper one person remarked that Father Luke was wrong to describe the work in Albania as mission. It was pastoral work, he said, since mission was among people who had not known Orthodoxy. Father Luke responded that in a country in which 60% of the people regarded themselves as Muslim, it was definitely a mission situation. He might have added that that in the atheist period, which lasted 24 years, no one, and especially not children born during that time, would have known Orthodoxy, and even in the 20 years that preceded it, all religion was suppressed and restricted.

The outlook of the questioner represents one of the biggest problems of Orthodox mission. Even in countries where religion is not forcibly suppressed, as it was in Albania before 1991, there is a problem of nominal Christians who see Orthodoxy as part of an ethnic heritage. There is, in a sense, the need to evangelise the baptised. In Albania, it was easier, since most weere not baptised.

As a missiologist, I would also like to see another kind of book, a book that tells the full story, or at least more of the story, of the resurrection of Christianity in Albania. Father Luke's book is, inevitably, the story as seen through one person's eyes. It gives an important part of the story, but one always wants to know more. I hope someone will write that book too.

The kinds of questions that I hope such a book might answer are:

What did Archbishop Anastasios do in his first three months in Albania?
How did he establish the seminary? When did it start?
Who were the first students? The first teachers?
Where did the first students come from, and how were they recruited?
What did the students do subsequently, and where are they now?
How were monasteries re-established? When, and where did the monastics come from?
Where did the money to establish the seminary and similar places come from?
What motivated people to give money for them?

Those are just a few of the questions.

In some ways the situation in Albania from 1991 to 2011 was unique. Chrsitianity was both very old and very new. Things that worked in Albania will not necessarily work in other places, yet there are still important lessons to be learned — lessons that will be lost if more of the history is not recorded now.

View all my reviews

Medicine and marketing

See if you can persuade your family doctor to display a sign like this  in their surgery.

Hat-tip to Pharmalot blog and PharMedout.org.

Holy Unmercenaries, pray for us!

Last day of the fast

The Dormition Fast ends today, with tomorrow being the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos.

In spite of its being one of the shorter fasts, lasting only a fortnight, it always somehow seems more onerous than the Nativity Fast or even Great Lent. Perhaps that is because the other fasts are longer and so one is better prepared, and in the case of Great Lent there are a fast-free week and a cheesefare week to remind one to gear up for it. With the Dormition Fast, however, we find we have a lot of stuff we can't eat till after the fast, and so we tend to eat a lot of bread and things like that.

Today we went to Mamelodi for the Hours and Readers Service with our old ladies, and on the way stopped at the Spar Supermarket here in Kilner Park. One of the things they have taken to doing is selling Sunday lunches for R30.00 apiece (about $4.50 US — less than half of the price the local Casbah Roadhouse charges for something similar). So for the last day of the fast we splurged on the vegetables…

Sunday lunch from the local Spar

Pumpkin, roast potatoes, spinach, and green beans and mash.

And very delicious it was too.

And tomorrow I'll have my Dormition Egg for breakfast — a stolen pagan spring fertility symbol, I'm told.

Summer reading

When I heard that the theme of this month's synchroblog was "Summer reading" I thought I'd have nothing to say. I really have no idea what people mean when they speak of "Summer reading" and how it differs from reading at any other time of the year.

I thought about it a bit, and then realised that I have the means to find out.

For some years now I've been recording the books I read (and re-read) in a database program and so I could get it to spit out the books I had read for the last few summers and see what distinguished them from books that I read during the rest of the year.

And then it occurred to me that one notable difference is that many of the books that I read at the height of summer were Christmas presents. So for me, at least, "Summer reading" means reading books people gave me for Christmas.

So here's the result.

It shows the books I was reading in the fortnight or so after Christmas for the last few years, and so it is a pretty good cross-section of my "summer reading".

2010-11

30-Dec-2010

Grisham, John. 2010. The confession. London:

Century.

A man has been sentenced to death for murder as a result

of a forced confession. Meanwhile the real murderer is

thinking of confessing — or is he?

27-Dec-2010

Kellerman, Jonathan. 2008. The butcher's theatre.

London: Headline.

28-Dec-2010

McCarthy, Cormac. 2009. The road. London: Picador.

An end of the world dystopia; a man and a boy wander

through a ravaged wilderness. .

4-Jan-2011

Moss, Sarah. 2009. Cold Earth. London: Granta.

A group of archaeologists are digging in a remote part

of Greenland when they lose their internet connection

after hearing stories of an epidemic in several parts of

the world. .

1-Jan-2011

Robinson, Peter. 2007 [1989] A necessary end.

London: Pan.

A demonstration in Eastvale turns nasty, and several

demonstrators and police are injured, and one policeman

is killed. Inspector Alan Banks handles the murder

investigation, but is joined by Superintendent Burgess

from London because of the political aspects of the

case, but Burgess sees Reds under every bed, and is

particularly suspicious of the occupants of Maggies

farm, a house on the moors. .

2009-10

25-Dec-2009

Hale, Georgie. 2001. Without consent. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

31-Dec-2009

Nesbo, Jo. 2008. Nemesis. London: Vintage.

Oslo detective Harry Hole. .

5-Jan-2009

Green, Michael Cawood. 2008. For the sake of silence.

Roggebaai: Umuzi.

Novel based on Mariannhill Monastery — a fictionalised

biography of its founder, Fr Franz Pfanner. .

Jan-2009

James, P.D. 2008. The private patient. London: Faber

& Faber.

8-Jan-2009

King, Stephen. 2008. Just after sunset. London:

Hodder & Stoughton.

A collection of short stories by Stephen King. Best:

"The things they left behind", about office knick-knacks

left behind when the World Trade Center towers

collapsed, and "N", about a psychiatric patient with

obsessive-compulsive disorder, trying to keep dangerous

beings from breaking into the world in a thin place. .

2008-09

28-Dec-2008

McLaren, Brian D. 2004. A generous orthodoxy. Grand

Rapids: Zondervan.

27-Dec-2008

Rickman, Phil. 2008. The fabric of sin. London:

Quercus.

Merrily Watkins is asked to bless or exorcise the Master

House at Garway, which has been bought by the Duchy of

Cornwall; the builders who are restoring it fear to work

there, because they believe it is haunted. The house and

the nearby church were built by Templars, and the house

is also involved in a family feud, .

2007-08

27-Dec-2007

Tinniswood, Adrian. 2004. By permission of heaven: the story

of the great fire of London. London: Pimlico.

Description of the great fire of London in 1666.

6-Jan-2008

Turok, Ben. 2003. Nothing but the truth: behind the ANC's

struggle politics. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

2-Jan-2008

Walters, Minette. 2007. The chameleon's shadow.

London: Macmillan.

Lieutenant Charles Acland is injured and disfigured by a

roadside bomb in Iraq and is found unfit for army

service. He wants nothing to do with his ex-fiancee

Jennifer Morley, and lives as a recluse in London. When

he gets involved in a bar brawl he attracts the

attention of the police, who come to suspect him of

involvement in a series of murders and assaults. He is

befriended by the girlfriend of the landlady of the pub,

a gay weightlifting doctor called Jackson. .

2006-07

1-Jan-2007

28 July 1998

Hands, John. 1992. Perestroika Christi. London:

Grafton.

Conspiracy by the Vatican and the KGB to take over the

Russian Orthodox Church.

5 January 2007

Hoeg, Peter. 2005. Miss Smilla's feeling for snow.

London: Vintage.

A young boy falls off a roof to his death. A neighbour,

Smilla believes that it was not an accident — the shape

of his footprints in the snow suggest that he was

running from something, but the police are not

interested in further investigation, so she decides to

investigate herself.

3 January 2007

le Carr‚, John. 2006. The mission song. London:

Hodder & Stoughton.

Bruno Salvador, half Irish and half Congolese, is an

interpreter who is asked to interpret for a meeting

between some shady warlords and some even more shady

businessmen.

7 January 2007

Villa-Vicencio, Charles. 1988. Trapped in apartheid.

Maryknoll: Orbis.

Villa-Vicencio examines the "English-speaking churches"

in South Africa (Anglican, Congregational, Methodist,

Presbyterian) at the end of the apartheid era, and

describes their response to apartheid as protest without

resistance.

Not all of those were Christmas presents, of course, and couple of them were library books. And some were Christmas presents to other members of the family that I also read. Some of our bookshops have a summer sale in January, where they sell remainders and things like that, some of them books that have been on the shelves and have not sold well, but many are books I have never seen before, or editions that I have never seen before.

As can be seen from the list, quite a lot of them are whodunits. We find whodunits are good for bed-time reading, and also for the quiet days between Christmas and the end of the school holidays.

___

This blog post is part of a synchroblog, where different bloggers post something on the same general topic on the same day.

Links to the other posts will be posted here when they become available.

 

 

Do you use the tag clouds on this blog?

If you look in the sidebar on the right, you'll see a Tag Cloud and a Category Cloud. They show the frequency of keywords used to describe different posts, and they are supposed to make it easier for people to find posts on a topic that interests them. If you click on one of the words in the cloud, you should see a list of relevant posts.

A recent discussion in the alt.usage.english newsgroup made me wonder if anyone ever uses these things. Some people seem to find them annoying.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

Most pointless invention of the 21st century

Tag clouds….

Is there anyone on earth whose experience has in any way been enriched by these

jumbled clusters of words in assorted sizes and orientations?…

Do they in fact *have* an intended purpose, or do they exist only to fill up

otherwise empty page or screen space?…

Do they follow any laws of organization whatsoever?…is it even possible to

speak of a tag cloud being "put together wrong"?…

The author of that goes on to say that the Wiki article says they were popularized by Flickr, which later dropped them and apologized to the web-community.

So, how useful do you find tag clouds?

View This Poll

The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and now Libya

One of the the things that struck me most forcefully about the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, which started just about 20 years ago, was that "The West" showed no sign of wanting to halt the conflict, but rather seemed to have a stake in fanning the flames even further. This was patently obvious through all the spin; in fact it was the spin that made it obvious. The barrage of propaganda we were subjected to, concocted by Western spin-doctors, was clearly calculated to facilitate conflict.

Hat-tip to Neil Clark for drawing attention to this article, which points out that this is still going on.

The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington's On-Going Collusion with Terrorists:

The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.

The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were "perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike," the pattern in western media was "that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not."4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly exaggerated: a French journalist "uncovered only four women willing to back up the story."

Mamelodi church meeting

Yesterday we had a meeting of our congregation in Mamelodi. A few months ago we moved out of the classroom where we used to meet, because the school board put the rent up. We started meeting in a house, but most houses in Mamelodi are small, and there is not much room.

So we met in one of the bigger houses to discuss what to do.

Mamelodi church meeting

We began with a requiem for the people who had died over the last few years. They died, but were not replaced, so the congregation is diminishing, and getting older.

We discussed this, and some of the young people said that the services are boring in a house or in a classroom. It's different in a church, they said, where you can see the ikons, and something is happening. But in a classroom or a sitting room in a house with only two ikons, it is not the same.

It sounds as though the idea of the house church has limitations.

Mamelodi church meeting 30 July 2011

So this mroning we met again for the Sunday service, the Hours and the Readers Service, in a smaller house, the house of the oldest member, Christina Mothapo, who is 85, and finds it difficult to walk far now. And there were six of us, only one of us under 60.

Perhaps inspired by the meeting yesterday, the singing was pretty good. It reflected the Epistle reading, "Now may the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

It did indeed seem that we were singing "with one mouth".

But when the last of us is buried, that will be the end of the church.

Unless there is a miracle.