Report commenting on the implications of Apartheid legislation for the Protestant Church in South Africa R and on racial discrimination within the Church - includes recommendations to Church authorities for the social integration of Africans, and explains Christian doctrine with regard to basic human rights.
Reveals that in the years immediately after the National Party's victory in 1948, the Catholic Church adopted an essential conciliatory approach. This was an attempt to mollify the secular power, which openly espoused the Roomse-gevaar mentality of the Dutch Reformed Churches. Examines the crucial decade after 1948, during which the Church moved from appeasement to resistance, and analyzes the motivations and forces which finally drove the Church to make the choice it did--a choice which has served to define and determine its future development in South Africa.
This book examines the shifting moral and spiritual lives of white Afrikaners in South Africa after apartheid. The end of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial and spatial segregation sparked wide-reaching social change as social, cultural, spatial and racial boundaries were transgressed and transformed. This book investigates how Afrikaners have mediated the country’s shifting boundaries within the realm of religion. For instance, one in every three Afrikaners used these new freedoms to leave the traditional Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), often for an entirely new religious affiliation within the Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, or New Religious Movements such as Wiccan neopaganism. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape area, the book investigates what spiritual life after racial totalitarianism means for the members of the ethnic group that constructed and maintained that very totalitarianism. Ultimately, the book asks how these new Afrikaner religious practices contribute to social solidarity and integration in a persistently segregated society, and what they can tell us about racial relations in the country today. This book will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, social and cultural anthropology and African studies.
No more heartrending yet hopeful case study in Christian ethics exists than in the story of South African apartheid and its recent decisive transformation. John de Gruchy's authoritative and newly updated account of Christian complicity with and then resistance to one of the world's most notoriously repressive regimes holds indispensable lessons and "dangerous memories" for all concerned about evil, justice, and racial reconciliation.
Annotation Explains why the Christian churches were among the first to publicly protest apartheid, and how they provided international support for the struggle against it. Pratt, the first coordinator of the Taskforce on the Churches and Corporate Responsibility--one of Canada's leading anti-apartheid advocates for nearly 20 years--picks up where her previous book, "Investment in Oppression" (1973) left off, and continues through the end of apartheid. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
An examination of the role played by civil society in the legitimisation of South Africa's apartheid regime and its racial policy. This book focuses on the interaction of dominant groups within the Dutch Reformed Church and the South African state over the development of race policy within the broader context of state-civil society relations. This allows a theoretical examination and typology of the variety of state-civil society relations. Additionally, the particular case study demonstrates that civil society's existence in and authoritarian situations can deter the establishment of democracy when components of civil society identify themselves with exclusive, ethnic interests.
A Guide to Navigate Evangelical Feminism In a society where gender roles are a hot-button topic, the church is not immune to the controversy. In fact, the church has wrestled with varying degrees of evangelical feminism for decades. As evangelical feminism has crept into the church, time-trusted resources like Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood help remind Christians of what the Bible has to say. In this edition of the award-winning best seller, more than 20 influential men and women such as John Piper, Wayne Grudem, D. A. Carson, and Elisabeth Elliot offer thought-provoking essays responding to the challenge egalitarianism poses to life in the church and in the home. Covering topics like role distinctions in the church, how biblical manhood and womanhood should work out in practice, and women in the history of the church, this helpful resource will help readers learn to orient their beliefs with God's unchanging word in an ever-changing culture.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of 'emotions', that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are 'useless' in materialising God's blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.