Latest news with #theology
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
The Rev Zolile Mbali obituary
My friend the Rev Zolile Mbali, who has died aged 84, was an Anglican priest in the UK and in his native South Africa, from which he was forced to move in the early 1970s. Zoli was born in Johannesburg to a Xhosa father and a Sotho mother, Elizabeth (nee Makhoatle), a teacher. After his birth his mother took him to live on the family farm beyond Matatiele in the remote Drakensburg foothills of Transkei. He lived there until he was 10, combining herding with learning in isiXhosa and Sesotho. Sent to further his education in Afrikaans, he stayed with a clergyman uncle near Johannesburg, whose curate at the time was Desmond Tutu. As a teenager Zoli's formal education was interrupted by the need to support his family, and while working in harsh conditions on a railway tunnel, he contracted typhoid. In hospital he decided to study for the Anglican priesthood, attending St Bede's theological college in Mthatha and then Fort Hare University. Zoli moved to the UK in 1969 on a World Council of Churches scholarship to Oxford on Tutu's recommendation, studying theology at Queen's College, Oxford. There he met a British woman, Charlotte Lebon, a postgraduate student at St Hugh's College. Returning to South Africa in 1971, he was ordained in the Natal diocese and undertook parish work before becoming the first black chaplain at Grahamstown's white theological college in the Eastern Cape. The couple became engaged, but the apartheid ban on mixed relationships prevented Charlotte from joining Zoli, so in 1973 she moved to Gaborone in Botswana to be nearer to him. A year later he joined her in Botswana after being warned that the South African police were after him. Less than a month later he and Charlotte were married, in 1975. In Gaborone Zoli combined a post at Botswana Theological Extension Programme with ministry among refugees and rural communities. South Africa having refused to renew his passport, Zoli then became a refugee himself. With cross-border military raids putting the family at risk, he and Charlotte decided to return to the UK in 1981, by which time they had three daughters, Thandiwe, Ma-Jali and Mandisa. On his arrival Zoli was appointed vicar of All Saints' church in Preston-on-Tees in County Durham, before moving to parish ministry in Leicestershire in 1984, serving first as curate in the Leicester suburb of Knighton and then as vicar to four rural village churches known as 'the Langtons' near Market Harborough. His excoriating book, The Churches and Racism: A Black South African Perspective, published in 1987, was based on a PhD he had recently completed at the University of Leeds. From 1988 to 1992 Zoli worked as a pioneering diocesan community relations officer in Leicester, and he was made a canon of Leicester Cathedral in 1990. Once apartheid fell, he and his family went back to South Africa in 1993, settling in Durban, where Charlotte joined the staff of Natal University while Zoli ministered to parishioners stigmatised by HIV/Aids and Anglican students at the university. A gentle and courageous man with a great gift for storytelling, he retired from the ministry in 2003 and would later survive a serious criminal assault and several bouts of ill-health. In 2017 his daughters persuaded him to retire to the UK with Charlotte to be nearer their grandchildren. Suffering from dementia, he spent his last days in St Anselm's nursing home in Walmer, Kent. He is survived by Charlotte, their daughters and five grandchildren.
The Independent
26-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Jordan Peterson refuses to identify as a Christian in viral atheist debate
Canadian conservative philosopher Jordan Peterson repeatedly refused to identify as a Christian during a heated YouTube debate about theology that aired on Sunday, growing increasingly angry as a young atheist vlogger challenged him over his faith. Peterson, 62, was participating in an episode of Jubilee Media's series Surrounded, 'Jordan Peterson vs Twenty Atheists,' when the spat occurred. The show required the professor to sit at a desk in the center of a circle of would-be challengers who took turns arguing with him on subjects related to religion. Almost an hour into the session, Peterson was challenged by Danny, a philosophy graduate from the PhilTalk channel, who pushed him on his definition of Christian faith and whether or not the Virgin Mary can be considered a figure of worship. 'Why is that relevant?' Peterson asked him. 'Because you go to a Catholic church. I'm sure you've attended recently. You're interested in Catholicism, aren't you?' Danny responded. 'You're familiar with their doctrines?... How do they regard Mary?' 'Why are you asking me that?' Peterson asked. 'Because you're a Christian,' Danny responded. 'You say that. I haven't claimed that,' the public intellectual snapped back. 'What is this – Christians vs atheists?... You don't know where you are right now?' Danny scoffed. After Peterson had admonished the younger man for being a 'smarta**' and warned him he would terminate the debate if he kept up his tone, the latter gave him an ultimatum: 'Either you're a Christian or you're not–which one is it?' 'I could be either of them, but I don't have to tell you… it's private,' Peterson responded defensively. 'Am I not talking to a Christian?... I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You're probably in the wrong YouTube video,' Danny persisted, sensing victory. 'You're really quite something, you are,' Peterson seethed. 'Aren't I? But you're really quite nothing,' Danny hit back, drawing audible gasps from his fellow participants, some of whom covered their mouths in shock at the audacity of the insult. 'I'm done with him...' Peterson said, concluding the segment. A former psychology professor at the University of Toronto, Peterson became an unlikely favorite of the right a decade ago after speaking out on identity politics issues and against political correctness, but has since become as well known for his erratic and emotional media appearances as for his academic work. In a January 2025 interview with The Spectator, Peterson was asked if he called himself a 'Christian.' 'I would say in the deepest sense, yes. But I'm not a typical Christian because I'm striving for understanding above all. I suppose people might pillory me as agnostic, but that's not true because I don't believe that the proper relationship between this underlying unity and myself would be established as a consequence of intellectual conquest. I'm a new kind of Christian,' he answered.
New York Times
16-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
David Tracy, 86, Theologian Who Rejected Rome's Supremacy, Dies
The Rev. David Tracy, a leading liberal Catholic theologian who open-sourced his understanding of God, borrowing from Jews, Buddhists and great works of art and literature, and who rejected Rome as the sole authority on how to be a good Christian, died on April 29 in Chicago. He was 86. His death, in a hospital, was announced by the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for nearly 40 years. Mr. Tracy (he was almost never addressed as 'Father Tracy') was an ordained Catholic priest who lectured widely, wrote nine books and was recognized as one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the late 20th century. His best-known book, 'The Analogical Imagination' (1981), argued that man's knowledge of the divine proceeds through analogies. Christ is an analogue for God, he wrote, but great works of literature and art also revealed God's presence. 'Religion's closest cousin is not rigid logic but art,' he once said. His independence from Roman Catholicism's top-down authority was manifested early, in 1968, when he and more than 20 other faculty members at the Catholic University of America in Washington were tried before a religious tribunal for rejecting the Vatican's ban on birth control. He was acquitted, though he left the next year when he was recruited by the University of Chicago Divinity School. He remained there through his retirement in 2007. He also served on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, a prestigious Ph.D.-granting program at the university. The writer Saul Bellow, a fellow committee member, liked to say that its faculty was composed mostly of 'highly conservative secular Jews — and the only leftist is a Catholic priest.' Mr. Tracy had been a student in Rome during the Second Vatican Council, seen as a significant moment of modernization in the church. He had a lifelong allergy to the idea of a papal monopoly on how to practice Catholicism. 'It is easy to get uniformity in religion,' he told The New York Times Magazine in a 1986 profile headlined 'A Dissenting Voice.' 'All you have to do is to remove the mystery. But if you remove the mystery, you destroy religion at the same time.' His objections to church authority were not generally over politics, social justice or cultural issues, but over more arcane matters of doctrine. He was an intellectual maverick in an age when theologians were no longer read by the wider public, as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were in the mid-20th century. Mr. Tracy 'never was designed to be a popular writer,' a colleague at the University of Chicago, Martin E. Marty, told Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, in 2010. 'He influenced the influencers.' Mr. Tracy engaged in a three-year exchange of academic papers and discussions with Buddhist and Christian thinkers. He was one of the few Catholic priests elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1982. He also wrote an essay for a 2018 exhibition at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.' The curator, Andrew Bolton, called him 'the J.D. Salinger of the theological world.' The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, then the chairman of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame, said of Mr. Tracy in The Times in 1986, 'More than any other theologian, he really does understand modern philosophy, literature and language, and he can see connections nobody has seen before.' An early book of Mr. Tracy's, from 1975, 'Blessed Rage for Order' (its title is from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem), embraced the pluralism of religions rather than claim that there was one true faith. Christianity, he said in a 2019 interview for Commonweal, 'has been for me the decisive, definitive way' to salvation and revelation, 'but there are other ways.' 'It's not the case,' he added, 'that Jews and Muslims and Buddhists do not have a way either of salvation in monotheistic traditions, or of enlightenment in the more mystically inclined religions like Buddhism and Daoism.' To critics, Mr. Tracy and other progressive Catholics who rejected the authority of Rome had lost their faith. 'Tracy isn't developing doctrine, he's denying it,' Msgr. George A. Kelly, president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, told The Times in 1986. 'The issue is really Christ, and Pope John Paul II speaks for Him. That is fundamental. I think some of these theologians have lost the faith. If I followed David Tracy and others, the end would be that I wouldn't be a Catholic. In fact, I wouldn't be anything.' David William Tracy was born on Jan. 6, 1939, in Yonkers, N.Y., one of three sons of John and Eileen (Rossell) Tracy. His father was a union organizer. No immediate family members survive. At age 13, David felt 'a very intense call' to the priesthood, he later said, and entered Cathedral College, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the high school seminary of the Archdiocese of New York. He went on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1960, where the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962, had a profound and lasting impact on his views. Ordained a priest in 1963, he was appointed to a parish in Stamford, Conn., where he recruited his parishioner William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative magazine National Review, to be a lay lector at Mass. Mr. Tracy spent only a year as a parish priest before returning to Rome, where he earned a licentiate of sacred theology in 1964 and a doctorate of theology from the Gregorian, as it is known. Over the last 25 years of his life, he was consumed with writing a final work on the ineffability of God, which would roll together theology, philosophy, mathematics and cosmology. But 'the God book,' as his admirers called it, kept expanding, being rethought, and was never done. 'Over several years, I'd ask him how it's going, and he'd say, 'At least another year,'' said Stephen Okey, a theology professor at Saint Leo University in Florida, who wrote a book about Mr. Tracy. 'The project was growing like an avalanche. It got too big.'
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Spirituality at the edge — Sacrededge 2025
Meredith Lake and Rohan Salmond visit the Sacrededge festival in Queenscliff, Victoria, hearing stories of sacredness from people on the edges of traditional religion. Meredith and Rohan meet people from a range of backgrounds, including disability advocates, LGBTIQA+ people and folks exploring Christian theology in new ways and contexts. Greg Crowe is the minister of the Uniting Church in Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale. He's also the curator of the 2025 Sacred Edge festival. Lorna Hallahan is an associate professor in social work education at Flinders University. She's also interested in the intersection between theology and disability. Lorna has lived with a mobility impairment for over five decades. Bree-Arne Manley is an artist, musician and author of the book Hope, which tells her story of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Em Chandler is a professional storyteller with over a decade of experience, and a transgender woman. Kelly Woods, online faith community is called Sonderverse. She's also known as pastoralhare in online spaces.
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Thursday 15 May 2025
Meredith Lake and Rohan Salmond visit the Sacrededge festival in Queenscliff, Victoria, hearing stories of sacredness from people on the edges of traditional religion. Meredith and Rohan meet people from a range of backgrounds, including disability advocates, LGBTIQA+ people and folks exploring Christian theology in new ways and contexts. Greg Crowe is the minister of the Uniting Church in Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale. He's also the curator of the 2025 Sacred Edge festival. Lorna Hallahan is an associate professor in social work education at Flinders University. She's also interested in the intersection between theology and disability. Lorna has lived with a mobility impairment for over five decades. Bree-Arne Manley is an artist, musician and author of the book Hope, which tells her story of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Em Chandler is a professional storyteller with over a decade of experience, and a transgender woman. Kelly Woods (née Skilton), online faith community is called Sonderverse. She's also known as pastoralhare in online spaces. Special thanks?
