How would you fill those blanks in? My good friend Sarah Bessey [slash i read her blog and she once tweetered me] has literally just released her latest book, ‘Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith’ which you can buy over here [and probably should!] Today Sarah is hosting a synchroblog where she invited close personal friends [slash anyone who stumbled upon her blog] to write a post based on the above title.So [...]
LET'S LEARN FROM THIS GUY A couple of different people shared this story with me this last week and it was so powerful that i really wanted to try and capture the heart of it in a blog post so it would stick around for longer. You have likely seen this iconic Olympic photograph before and wondered, like myself and so many others, what is going through the white guy's mind and possibly questioned his [...]
i really enjoyed reading this book by John Perkins recently. Despite being about his experiences in Americaland i found that so much of it resonated with the present conversations happening in South Africa. The passage i posted on Why Do You Live Where You Live? gave much food for thought and there are some other pieces i would love to share, but as always, you will do much better if you just make some effort [...]
i love to read. i was challenged a couple of years ago by the idea of diversifying the voices that i invited to speak into my life. For me that related mostly to books as i don’t tend to find the time slash bandwidth to do much podcast listening, but it would apply to both. […]
i am loving this book tbV pickedup for me at The Warehouse by John Perkins. So much of it resonates with where my heart is for South Africa and, although he is using Americaland examples, so many of the truths still completely apply. WILL I HOLD THEIR DREAM The well-known Martin Luther King Jnr "I have a dream" speech was the dream of the black person in Americaland. But to be honest, it could only [...]
i have just started reading a book called 'With Justice for All' by John Perkins, who was very much involved in the American Civil Rights movement and who i got to listen to at a CCDA conference when we were in Americaland. This first passage, although speaking about his country, resonated with much of what we see, feel and experience in South Africa. His definition of poverty is one i wish all of those who [...]
i am busy reading this book, that my friend Steve Graybill sent to me while we were in Americaland [after i asked for one of the books he had recently read that was worth reading] and it has been such an interesting read. Steve was the one who recommended 'The Lemon Tree' and 'Blood Brothers' which i gave a glimpse of over here, as i was trying to understand the Palestinian/Israeli crisis a little bit [...]
This is a hard but necessary passage to share from Steve Biko's 'I Write What I Like' which you should totally get hold of and read in its entirety. Hard, because it is true. Not true that the black man is inferior, but that the idea of the black man being inferior has been so deeply entrenched in so many of us, that it is an extremely hard and horrible thing to admit to when [...]
Another passage from the chapter titled 'Some African Cultural Concepts': 'Yet it is difficult to kill the African heritage. There remains, in spite of the superficial cultural similarities between the detribalised and the Westerner, a number of cultural characteristics that mark out the detribalised as an African. I am not here making a case for separation on the basis of cultural differences. I am sufficiently proud to believe that under a normal situation, Africans can [...]
i am still slowly making my way through Steve Biko's 'I write what I like' and here is a passage that i marked a while ago from Chapter 8: Some African Cultural Concepts: One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man [by which i think he is referring to people as opposed to individual - brett] . Ours has always been a Man-centered society. Westerners have on [...]